Death and Mr. Pickwick (82 page)

‘I have been developing the concept over some period, and I added details as they occurred to me. It is all work in progress. It is still work in progress. That is my way – there is finality when I etch a steel plate, and fluidity before.'

‘If you will forgive me, it seems the whole thing is rather fluid. How many drawings have you done?'

‘When the weather improves I shall travel and make more drawings, but there are enough here to get things moving. I am not at all worried by the absence of a definite plan. I know approximately how the work will proceed. Let me show you the drawings for the second number.'

Seymour pushed forward a sequence of four sketches. In the first, Boz saw Mr Pickwick's hat blown by the wind, which, Seymour explained, brought Mr Pickwick into contact with a farmer, the farmer's family and a servant, all sitting in a stationary vehicle. Having received an invitation to visit the farmer in the countryside, Mr Pickwick became obliged to drive a chaise and the incident of the dropped whip occurred. In the third picture, the chaise ran away, en route to a crash, while the final picture showed Mr Pickwick and his companions in the farmer's kitchen, attended by servants, one of whom knelt on the floor at Mr Pickwick's feet, polishing the great man's boots.

‘I know
exactly
where this spot is,' said Boz, pointing to the scene concerning the dropped whip. ‘It's near Cobham.'

‘You are right,' said Seymour. ‘I went there from the Bull.'

Before the afternoon came to an end, there were preliminary sketches shown of a cricket match, and of the fat ogler courting an old maid in an arbour, and the picture that Chapman had seen, of the drunken poet hallucinating in bed, and then occurred a general exchange of ideas concerning the direction of the work. This included Seymour bringing forth a rough sketch of the Sancho Panza-like character he envisaged.

 

*

IT IS APPROPRIATE TO MENTION
here a foible of Mr Inbelicate's.

I have said that he urged me to study
Don Quixote
. He also had an enduring fascination with a story by Jorge Luis Borges, ‘Pierre Menard, Author of the
Quixote
', which concerns a man who reproduces, word for word, a fragment of that great work of literature – not as an exercise in copying but as a creative act of supreme audacity, with the author having never read the original. Mr Inbelicate said to me once that, if a work, ‘Inscriptino, Author of the
Pickwick
' were to be written – ‘Assuming you had infinite time, Scripty' – then he would choose, as the fragment for me to create, not the text of the work itself, but its prospectus, which was small and self-contained.

The prospectus, I should explain, was a public announcement, to attract buyers and stockists, which Chapman and Hall asked Boz to write before starting work on the first monthly number. It was published in three places, with minor differences: as an inserted leaf in the
Domestic Magazine
, as an advertisement in the
Athenaeum
magazine and on the inside back wrapper of the
Library of Fiction.

‘One might almost believe reproducing the prospectus could be done,' he said, before bursting into laughter at the project's absurdity. This was one summer evening, on the porch, when he, Mary and I had consumed a lot of sangria. He even mused upon the possibility of my undergoing hypnotic regression to see whether I could visit 1836 as preparation for the task. Before long, we were laughing about recruiting an army of regressors to serve our wider purposes, including those who had lived previous lives as dogs, horses, cats, rats and flies.

Here follows part of that prospectus:

The PICKWICK CLUB, so renowned in the annals of Huggin Lane, and so closely entwined with the thousand interesting associations connected with Lothbury and Cateaton Street, was founded in the year one thousand eight hundred and twenty-two by Mr Samuel Pickwick – the great traveller, whose fondness for the useful arts prompted his celebrated journey to Birmingham in the depth of winter; and whose taste for the beauties of nature even led him to penetrate to the very borders of Wales in the height of summer.

     This remarkable man would appear to have infused a considerable portion of his restless and inquiring spirit into the breasts of the other members of the club, and to have awakened in their minds the insatiable thirst for travel which so eminently characterised his own. The whole surface of Middlesex, a part of Surrey, a portion of Essex, and several square miles of Kent were in their turns examined and reported on. In a rapid steamer, they smoothly navigated the placid Thames; and in an open boat they fearlessly crossed the turbid Medway. High-roads and by-roads, towns and villages, public conveyances and their passengers, first-rate inns and roadside public houses, races, fairs, regattas, elections, meetings, market days – all the scenes that can possibly occur to enliven a country place and at which different traits of character may be observed and recognised, were alike visited and beheld by the ardent Pickwick and his enthusiastic followers.

At the top of this prospectus was announced the title of the work in full:
The Posthumous Papers of the Pickwick Club containing a faithful record of the Perambulations, Perils, Travels, Adventures and Sporting Transactions of the Corresponding Members.

Undoubtedly this title would succumb to the abbreviating tendencies of the London public, and become known as
The Posthumous Papers of the Pickwick Club
, and then, perhaps, just as
The Pickwick Papers
. That it might become
Pickwick
, as though a friendly thing known to all, was of course inconceivable.

 

*

CHARLES WHITEHEAD HAD ASKED SEYMOUR
to produce two pictures for ‘The Tuggs's at Ramsgate' and so the artist sat down at his desk to draw. He leant back and read the text about Mr Tuggs, with his body of very considerable thickness, sitting with his family on Ramsgate sands, watching the bathers. A mischievous idea came.

That evening he called at the residence of Ebenezer Landells, who would do the woodcutting for the story's illustrations. The door opened, and a bony-faced man in his late twenties, with bushy hair and a suggestion of a moustache, greeted Seymour.

Over a glass of wine, artist told woodcutter about the
Pickwick
project. The artist sketched, verbally, how the project would develop, including its parallel to
Don Quixote
, with the eventual addition of Mr Pickwick's servant. Then he took out the drawings for ‘The Tuggs's at Ramsgate'.

‘Why you crafty soul,' said Landells, looking at the fat man. ‘That's
you
in the picture, on the beach.'

‘It is,' said Seymour. He told of how Boz had asked him to redraw the position of the doctor's arm in the scene set at the Bull. ‘I cannot deny that irked me a bit. I have thought about it several times since. So I decided to intrude myself into his work, the way he intruded himself into mine. There I am – Mr Tuggs.'

 

*

IT WAS A COLD, CLEAR
Thursday afternoon, 18 February 1836, a coat-collar-raising day, as Boz crossed the forecourt of Furnival's Inn and climbed the stairs to his lodgings, to his desk, to a pile of blank paper, to the inkwell and to the goosequill.

Fred had lit the fire and then, thankfully, gone out, so there was the opportunity to concentrate on the work, alone and without interruption. That afternoon, the opening page of the Pickwick Club's papers would enter the world – there could be no more delay. He sat and picked up Seymour's first drawing and looked hard at the features of the principal character.

Spectacles. Spectacles made a man studious and scholarly – or appear so. Mr Pickwick was on a mission to observe, but did he really
see
?

Bald. So Mr Pickwick's phrenological organ of benevolence, above the hairline and in the middle of the head, was not concealed. He could be cantankerous, but there should be a warmth, a twinkle in the eye behind the spectacles.

An overweight, short-sighted, scholarly man – like the subject of Boswell's
Life of Johnson
. The very similarity of ‘Boswell' to ‘Boz' pushed that work to the fore of the mind. Scrofula had tainted Johnson's sight; and vague stirrings of Johnson's childhood came to Boz, as a possible youth for Seymour's man. Johnson's poor eyesight meant that he rarely joined in sports. His huge frame was ill-adapted for running or riding. Though there was one sporting activity he
did
like: a garter was tied around the young Johnson, and a boy, whom he paid to pull his weight, made Johnson slide upon the ice. There was Samuel Johnson, on a winter's day, enjoying the simple wordless pleasure of his hippopotamus frame sliding, crying out with glee! Seymour had shown Boz a drawing of men hunting on ice, and falling in. So there might be a sliding scene somewhere down the road.

But not yet.

A bachelor. Such men have strong opinions, different from the usual run of society. Smollett's Matthew Bramble was the sort.

There was the pose of Mr Pickwick, standing on the chair at the meeting of his club. The hand under the coat-tails – Boz knew
exactly
what that signified. You'd see it in the public houses in the Haymarket, where the sods went. There was, in Seymour's manner, definitely something which suggested the artist would be at home in that company.

But an opening was needed.

He smiled.

In Genesis, the creation of light preceded the creation of the sun. Boz rose from his chair and stirred the fire. He sat again.

*   *   *

Joseph Smiggers calmed the meeting down. Opposite him was the Pickwick Club secretary, who by the light of the chandelier's gas, aided by candles from the table, sat with a quill behind his ear, holding the scientific paper by Mr Pickwick on the Hampstead Ponds and sticklebacks. Shortly, the secretary would take the quill and make his notes on the meeting. These notes would eventually be handed to the editor of the club's papers.

*   *   *

Boz dipped his own quill into the black ink, and began.

‘The first ray of light which illumines the gloom…'

*   *   *

Within the club sat the substantial bulk of Seymour's ageing Lothario – whom Boz decided to call Tracy Tupman, after the tupping of ewes. He would describe this corpulence first, as an overture to the description of Mr Pickwick, a man of even greater girth.

Then – he reconsidered.

With the
picture
there of Mr Pickwick, readers could see for themselves exactly how fat the founder of the club was. Why mar sentences with repetition of an idea? He relied therefore upon Seymour's picture to convey the weight of Mr Pickwick.

After a little thought, he named the would-be poet Augustus Snodgrass; he had heard the name Snodgrass before, in Chatham. And Augustus, the name of his young brother, seemed grand enough for a poet. So Augustus Snodgrass it was. The young brother had once been nicknamed ‘Shrimp', and by mental association, the surname of Winkle occurred to him for the sportsman, Nathaniel Winkle. The pair were shrimp and winkle.

How would the meeting proceed?

A couple of years before, he had written a story in which there was a committee meeting and the members attacked a man's honour, fairness and impartiality, but – as they made clear – without implying the
slightest
personal disrespect. Seymour had some inkling of this double-dealing too, in the principle of ‘accommodation' he had mentioned, and in his work for
The Squib Annual
which he had brought out of the carpet bag, concerning a duel between politicians – this had played on the idea of insulting someone only in a ‘parliamentary sense', but with no personal opprobrium attached. Perhaps, in the Pickwick Club, there could be insults in a ‘Pickwickian sense'.

He thought too of how the reporters known as liners expanded their accounts of meetings, with parentheses noting cheers, hear hears, and so forth, in order to earn more money. This was not so different from his own need to fill the space of a monthly number.

He wrote: ‘He (Mr Pickwick) would not deny that he was influenced by human passions and human feelings (cheers) – possibly by human weaknesses – (loud cries of “No”); but this he would say, that if ever the fire of self-importance broke out in his bosom, the desire to benefit the human race in preference effectually quenched it.'

In the evening, Boz wrote to Chapman and Hall: ‘
Pickwick
is at length begun in all his might and glory. The first chapter will be ready tomorrow.' He signed the letter ‘in Pickwickian haste'.

Thus the word ‘Pickwickian' left the schemes of Seymour and Boz, and entered the wider world.

*   *   *

In the Whitefriars district of London, a little way down the narrow lane of Lombard Street, the noise of steam-driven machinery was heard at all hours, even through the night, on every day of the week except Sunday. This was the sound of legal documents. This was the sound of parliamentary reports. This was the very sound indeed of printed matter of all kinds issuing from the presses of Bradbury and Evans.

With a slow proud gait, and a quick suspicious eye, the tall and imposing figure of William Bradbury, joint owner, would do the rounds of the printing hall in the hour after daylight broke, beside the great steam cylinder press – of the largest size, and of the very latest design – and among the twenty machines of smaller dimensions. Bradbury was a man of strong cheeks and jutting jaw, who had once been heard to remark, to a terrified ink merchant who attempted to pass off a cartload of eighteen-penny ink at a price of two shillings: ‘There's a
brad
in the name Bradbury, and that's a type of nail, and I'm as hard and sharp as one.'