Death and Mr. Pickwick (128 page)

And Mr Pickwick was no longer alone. Being beyond the desire of man for woman, who but Sam, loyal Sam, could satisfy Mr Pickwick's needs? ‘Vot 'ud become of you vithout me?' said Sam. ‘You should alvays have somebody by you as understands you, to keep you up and make you comfortable.' When winter came he and Sam would talk happily in the evenings, as Mary, the pretty housekeeper, brought in their steaming drinks on a tray.

Once, Mr Pickwick had been a clubbable fellow; but he had no need of clubs now he had Sam. Once, he had dreamt of fame and of earning the respect of the scientific world, with his work on small fish and the sources of ponds, but now small fish and the sources of ponds were as unimportant to him as they are to most men. Once, he had travelled, but now his travels were over. Samuel Pickwick and Samuel Weller had settled down.

There were, though, the pleasures of Dulwich Picture Gallery. Sometimes Mr Pickwick would cross the road from his house, walk between the elms and take the path to this extraordinary house of pictures – extraordinary because there was a mausoleum at its heart, holding the bodies of the gallery's founders in sarcophagi. Mr Pickwick did not trouble himself with that particular exhibit, but he delighted in Aelbert Cuyp's painting
Herdsmen with Cows
: the two herdsmen in the foreground, one lying, one standing, and then the two cows nearby, one also lying, one also standing, and then more distant herdsmen and cows to one side, and then, beyond, the mountains, mist and green fields. This was the travelling that Mr Pickwick did these days. He would smile upon the young artists copying the cows, before wandering to
The Triumph of David
by Poussin. It was always unsettling to see Goliath's great head on a stake, but Mr Pickwick looked at the two men preceding, blowing upon ancient horns, and chuckled. He then turned to the
Portrait of Joshua Reynolds
: the satisfied expression, and the circular spectacles, might have reminded him of himself, and he reflected the portrait. So he continued, throughout the gallery: trotting, as though summoned, to a Reynolds, or gazing nostalgically and then licking his lips before another Poussin, or a Brouwer.

Close to Mr Pickwick stood a man of about thirty, talking to a student of the time he painted a scene from Tasso. This made no impact upon Mr Pickwick, but he did look up with a start when the man spoke about another gallery he had visited, about ten miles from Bath. The motion of Mr Pickwick was so abrupt that it stopped the man in the middle of his conversation. The two exchanged a puzzled look, which resolved itself into a smile on both sides. Then they continued as they had been before.

*   *   *

I waited several minutes, and the clouds indeed shifted, and the brass plate caught the sun. It was just unfortunate that, at the very same moment, there came a shrill railway whistle from Dulwich Station which introduced an element of distraction. So I moved on.

It is said by residents of the village that Mr Pickwick used to enjoy, on a summer's evening, sitting on a seat beneath the old sycamore near Dulwich College. This has become known as Mr Pickwick's Tree – even though the tree is not mentioned in
The Pickwick Papers
at all. Now the tree has decayed, and will have to come down. I sat beside it for a few minutes, to pay my respects. Then I visited the Greyhound – where I heard two men talking of the great shame that the very tree under which Mr Pickwick sat will be felled. ‘Terrible,' said one, ‘when something historic like that goes.'

*   *   *

1914: I took the king's shilling. Those of us who fought carried
Pickwick
in our kitbags to the barracks and the trenches. Those of us who were wounded read it in the field hospitals. It was the one book, apart from the Bible, that saw service in the Great War.
Pickwick
was the piece of England that an Englishman carried with him into battle.

And when the conflict was over,
Pickwick
helped to raise the next generation. I passed the shop window where, among dolls and rocking horses, was the Pickwick Chair and Toy Table for the nursery. The chair was carved and painted like a seated Mr Pickwick, his arms and hands being the chair arms, as though a chair were becoming animated. Pockets for storing toys hung down at each side, resembling Mr Pickwick's coat.

But in New York, in March 1919, I witnessed the backlash. I was in the rows of a packed hall of prohibitionists. A wiry and smartly dressed woman in a black cloche stood on the podium.

‘When I see a man in shabby and threadbare clothing,' she said, in a voice of unwavering certainty, ‘nine times out of ten it is because drink has brought him to rags. It is as though liquor is an acid that seeps out of the joints of the sodden man and eats away at his clothing, at the knees and at the elbows. We know this. Yet it is not only alcohol itself that is degrading and should be prohibited. The glorification of drink should be expunged from our literature. With this in mind, let me turn to
The Pickwick Papers.

‘
The Pickwick Papers
is a work that reeks of the alehouse and filthy inns. It is a work that must be swept from our bookshops and our libraries. It is a work in which the author goes out of his way to make attractive the drinking of alcohol. It is a work against which I intend to fight!

‘When the young man of today reads about Mr Pickwick's brandy-and-ale-soaked adventures he wants to buy himself a pewter mug and sit before a roaring open fire at some wayside tavern and drink himself into insensibility. He thinks it very smart to be an itinerant rumhound like Mr Pickwick and his companions Snodgrass, Tupman and Winkle, and that intoxicated beast Sam Weller. The Pickwick Club guzzles on, as though drink has no effect but the convivial. It is as though Mr Pickwick and his crew have filters in their throats to do away with all that is bad in drink. We know the terrible unfiltered truth!

‘Liquor will soon be driven out of this country. Let us start to drive it from our literature. Alcoholised literature must go – and
Pickwick
must go first!'

The crowd stood as one to applaud, and cries of ‘Hear hear!' came from every corner of the hall. I pulled up my collar, and returned to England.

*   *   *

It was 1921, and as my motor car approached Ipswich I saw smoke from the railways, from the gasworks, and from a multitude of tall chimneys on this busy side of the town. It made me think that the smoke of modern falsehood had to be blown away before the true Pickwickian town could be revealed.

Eventually, buildings became older, and streets narrower. I parked my car, and soon I found myself walking towards the ivied facade of the Great White Horse tavern.

It struck me that, except in a Pickwickian sense, it could not be considered Great. There were mildewed pillars on either side of the doorway. As for the statue of the horse itself, above the entrance, it seemed too small, and as it lifted its dirty alabaster leg, the creature's gesture had a quality of the stubbed cigarette rather than a noble depiction by Stubbs.

George II stayed here, so did Louis XVIII of France, and so too did Nelson and Lady Hamilton. All these people, no matter how distinguished, have no importance whatsoever compared to the imaginary man who was once a guest. Who would visit Ipswich
without
seeing the inn where Mr Pickwick spent the night? And this was the case wherever Mr Pickwick visited.

Mr Pickwick stayed at the Great White Horse because Dickens stayed at the Great White Horse. The circumstances of the latter's visit are worth recounting.

*   *   *

‘Do you think I do not know the room I am in?' said Dickens to the proprietor of the Great White Horse, William Brooks, who had been summoned to the reception desk to resolve the dispute. ‘I am in room ten. In your pigeonholes, my key is the second left, top row. Your desk clerk disputes this plain fact, and refuses to give me my key.'

William Brooks had a dry, white face, the white displayed especially in flakes distributed across his forehead and nose. He looked over his spectacles. ‘My clerk is correct. Room ten has been taken by a gentleman of the law.'

‘Impossible. My portmanteau was in that room. I was led to understand it was your best room.'

Brooks reached up to a pigeonhole. ‘This is your key. Your luggage has been moved.'

‘By what right?'

‘By my right. You are lucky to have a room at all, with so many people here for the election.'

‘I suppose this gentleman of the law offered you a higher price.'

‘Do you want the room I am offering, or not? It's that, or the key to the street.'

Dickens took the key held up by Brooks – as he walked away, he heard Brooks whisper ‘Damn reporters!' followed by a low-pitched laugh from the clerk. He soon entered a cold and pokey room situated over stabling, with a cracked chamber pot under the bed and a stuffed weasel on a wall. The strap around his portmanteau had been fastened on a different notch.

It was late that night when Dickens returned to the Great White Horse. He pushed through election agents at the entrance, and voters seeking favours and pledges, and waited at the unmanned desk to order a sandwich. After ten minutes no one had come, and when the clerk eventually appeared he said that it was impossible to make sandwiches that night as the cook had just left, and even if the cook had been present, all the meat and cheese had, in all likelihood, been used up. So Dickens resigned himself to bed and an empty stomach. He stamped up the stairs. He faced two doors on a poorly lit triangular landing. He should have paid closer attention to which door was his, but he was in such a mood, a mood which also took away the thought of unlocking with a key, and he simply turned the handle of the first door.

The door opened, and a woman shrieked. In the darkness, he could just make out her form, sitting up in bed, clutching the covers to her breast. She screamed at the intruder to get out; Dickens apologised, adding that one door looked very much like another, and left.

The next morning, a middle-aged woman knocked on Mr Brooks's office. She told of a man who had come to peep on her, and perhaps intended worse. Surely, she said, it was a proprietor's first responsibility to protect the virtue of ladies who stayed in his rooms. Otherwise, Mr Brooks was not worthy to call himself a decent proprietor. She had kept her door closed, and it was not unusual to expect protection from the monstrous intentions of young men on the premises. That her door was unlocked was true; but she always kept her door unlocked for fear of fire. She demanded action.

When Dickens returned to the Great White Horse that evening and requested his key, the desk clerk said that he had instructions to summon Mr Brooks, and could not issue the key until he had done so. In exasperation, Dickens stood at the desk, and when Brooks appeared, he subjected Dickens to questioning, within earshot of every election agent and voter passing through.

‘So you admit you entered this lady's room last night?'

‘I have told you – it was a mistake.'

‘Was it?'

‘My key, sir.'

‘I don't like your tone.'

‘Nothing happened!'

‘If I hear one more word about you, you'll be out, in a pig's whisper.'

‘The key!'

‘And you wondered why I would let the room to a gentleman of the law. Because he's respectable, that's why!'

‘Will you or will you not give me the key?'

Brooks passed it over, to the accompaniment of a grudging look. He said to his clerk, in the loudest possible voice: ‘Any more trouble with him, and you fetch me straight away. If I'm not available – send for the authorities.'

Over eighteen months later, the readers of
The Pickwick Papers
learnt of how Mr Pickwick, lost in the corridors of the Great White Horse, inadvertently entered the room of a lady with yellow curl-papers in her hair. Dickens described the Great White Horse thus: ‘Never were such labyrinths of uncarpeted passages, such clusters of mouldy, badly lighted rooms, such huge numbers of small dens for eating or sleeping in, beneath any one roof as are collected together between the four walls of the Great White Horse at Ipswich', which sold ‘the worst possible port wine at the highest possible price for the good of the house'. There were mentions of ‘a large, badly furnished apartment, with a dirty grate, in which a small fire was making a wretched attempt to be cheerful, but was fast sinking beneath the dispiriting influence of the place', and a dinner at which ‘after the lapse of an hour, a bit of fish and a steak were served up to travellers'.

The number was brought to the attention of Mr Brooks, whose fury was unbounded. Flakes of skin sloughed off his hand as he thumped the desk. The offending passages must be excised, damages must be paid, and a public apology must be printed in the next number of
Pickwick
. Mr Brooks summoned a lawyer – the very gentleman of the law who had taken Dickens's room – who set about drafting a letter to Chapman and Hall.

Yet Mr Brooks also noticed a peculiar phenomenon, which began on the very day of publication of the offending number of
Pickwick
: every room in the entire tavern became occupied. Under special circumstances, such as at the election Dickens had reported on, this was likely, but not otherwise. Furthermore, correspondence arrived every day, asking for accommodation – and a fair proportion of the letters merely requested a room at the earliest time one was available, as the precise date did not matter. The eating dens too were full to capacity at every meal, and there was an especially high demand for the port wine.

‘I believe,' said Mr Brooks to the desk clerk, ‘we could increase our rates by ten per cent. Perhaps twenty per cent!' He chuckled away – and that was a rare sight indeed! ‘I believe,' he said, ‘we could sell the worst bottle of black strap at the price of the finest port from Lisbon!' He further expressed his belief that repairs and renovations, long postponed, would soon be within the Great White Horse's means. ‘Though perhaps – perhaps – it would be in our interest to delay them further. We should think about what our customers come here to see!'