Death and Mr. Pickwick (83 page)

His partner, Frederick Evans, would at the very same time be seen patrolling the composing room, where groups of eight compositors worked back to back. Evans was a similar type, in form and face, to Seymour's portrayal of Mr Pickwick, except for the presence of unruly locks – at least, he wore spectacles and had a belly that pushed out his waistcoat afar. He had once been heard to comment to a compositor prior to the latter's dismissal for theft of a ream of double crowns: ‘These eyes may be weak, but they have
precisely
the right amount of glass placed in front to see rather well.'

Together, they were known as B&E, and, given the choice, most men would prefer to be in the company of E rather than B, for B rarely smiled, while E was often to be seen laughing and stroking his hair next to the foreman of the composing room, Charles Hicks, who merits attention in his own right.

Hicks was an always-affable man, with an ear for the latest joke, and a mouth for telling it, and a bending, thigh-slapping enjoyment of anything which enlivened the day. He clearly cared about the men who worked under him – he kept an eye on the health of the compositor in the corner with an incessant cough, he gently advised a man in his thirties when it was time to get spectacles like Mr Evans, and he didn't mind when any fellow took an occasional swig from a bottle in between loosening letters, and levering them up, with the bodkin-cum-awl that was a compositor's faithful companion.

The month of March was still young, and Hicks had just received from Mr Evans the manuscript pages for the first instalment of
The Posthumous Papers of the Pickwick Club.
He sat at his desk, cast a look at the wandering ink, then picked up a pair of scissors and began cutting up the manuscript into takes. Hicks was scrupulously fair about the quantity given to each compositor – a line in metal was coins in a compositor's pocket – and he wielded the scissors to make certain all his men received a decent amount.

Soon the compositors took lead type from the rows of cases, their fingers moving with extraordinary rapidity, to form words, and then a line, and then a line under the line, and before long, a page of the Pickwick Club's papers was done. Eight Pickwickian pages were then set in a rectangular forme, which held the type together, and arranged in such a crafty way that, when folded, and the edges cut, the correct order for reading was established. Three of these formes made the monthly part's twenty-four pages and they were laid, one at a time, on a press, and a first proof made. A reader examined, compositors corrected, and eventually thin-paper proofs were gathered by Hicks, while the pages of the manuscript, being of no further use, were gathered and thrown into a barrel of waste paper, ready for a rag merchant to collect. Usually, Hicks then sent off the proofs to the author, for his corrections – except that there was a problem with this particular set of proofs.

It was eighteen lines too long.

Though of a friendly and fun-loving manner, Hicks could display peremptoriness and iron will when required.

He wrote a note to Boz.

‘This is too much, by eighteen lines. We either slice away at your words or we paste in another leaf and you provide more letterpress – enough to fill the rest of the leaf, or about a page and a half of type. But what we are
not
doing is leaving pages with white fat on. Which is it to be?' He handed it to the printer's devil, a reliable lad with a mop of brown hair and alert brown eyes, along with the proofs, for immediate delivery to the author.

*   *   *

Cutting his words was unconscionable. No, the page and a half must be filled. He considered that material in the next number might be shifted forward.

Seymour intended that, in the second number, the Corresponding Society would witness a military display, in which soldiers' parade-ground skills in horsemanship and firearms would stand in contrast to the utter incompetence of Mr Pickwick and his companions. This would develop into the scene of Mr Pickwick chasing his hat – the wind would send the hat rolling towards the vehicle of a farmer who had taken his family to watch the display.

But as there was only a page and a half, it would be impossible to develop this episode in such limited space. If he attempted it, an ugly guillotine would descend in the middle of events. It was not the way to launch the publication.

So he looked through the other material provided by Seymour.

There was a sketch, and accompanying notes, concerning the poetical companion and hallucinations brought on by drink. The notes mentioned
The Nightmare
by Fuseli and a book Seymour had illustrated,
The Odd Volume
, which was among the items brought in the carpet bag. Turning to this book, Boz found a comic drawing of a man in bed, apparently a poet, his arms flailing in the middle of an agonising dream. On the bed was an amusing depiction of a horse, dressed as a beau, carrying a cane under one leg, and placing a hoof upon the sleeper's chest. Boz looked at the verse accompanying the picture. One stanza reflected the nightmare's visit to the poet:

I fly to the bed where the weary head

Of the poet its rest must seek

And with false dreams of fame I kindle the flame

Of joy on his pallid cheek.

Then came a stanza on the dreams of a murderer:

My vigil I keep by the murderer's sleep

When dreams round his senses spin

And I ride on his breast and trouble his rest

In the shape of his deadliest sin.

And one on the dreams of a madman:

I come from my rest in the death owl's nest

Where she screams in fear and pain

And my wings gleam bright in the wild moonlight

As it whirls round the madman's brain.

The various elements – a drunken man lying in bed, disturbing visions, murder, madness – all suggested to Boz one thing and one thing alone: the tragic death of J. S. Grimaldi.

For several years he had wanted to write about the dying clown. Moreover, the first number would appear at Easter – when pantomimes were performed.

Writing about the clown gripped like a compulsion. There was not space to put the whole story in the first number, but there could be a prologue. Mr Pickwick could meet a new character, a man who intends to recount the dismal tale of a drunken clown's death. His introductory remarks would complete the first number, and the story itself would commence the second.

He
should
consult Seymour, he knew he truly should, but an emergency was an emergency. It would take time to contact the artist. Hicks wanted letterpress straight away. What if Seymour were not at home? What if he were impossible to contact? What if he said no?

Boz assumed it was impossible to contact Seymour.

The hallucinations of the poet became the hellish visions of the clown on his deathbed. Close enough to Seymour's ideas. When the story was told, he could return to Seymour's scheme.

He conceived of a dismal fellow, exactly the sort to tell the dismal tale, someone associated with the acting profession – like the man he had seen loitering around the stage door when he and Potter went to watch productions at the Catherine Street Theatre. A strolling player, who would tell ‘The Stroller's Tale
'
. A thin, sallow man, with an exceedingly long face, whose lugubrious demeanour was perfect for roles when there was nothing light and breezy – the heavy business, when the dismal man would merely learn the lines and voice them on stage as himself, without any acting. This man he called Dismal Jemmy. This man would look at the clown, and go behind the laugh. He would perhaps be a friend of the stranger who rescued Mr Pickwick from the cabman and the mob at the Golden Cross. That was it. The friendship could be plausible, by making the stranger a strolling actor himself. Boz had already given the stranger the stuttering speech of Charles Mathews' Mr Cosmogony as his natural, everyday speech, so again it was not implausible to associate the stranger with the stage.

Boz thought of the poverty-stricken clown's stomach, under the costume, hideously bloated by malnutrition. Like a terrible Luciferian joke, a starving man would appear to be a glutton.

Now it was impossible to stop writing about the dismal man and the dying clown.

He placed the clown in a bedstead that turned up in the day, just like the bookseller in the turn-up bed in Hampstead Road, who claimed the beloved volumes by Smollett and Fielding. The bed's canopy he transmuted in his imagination into a proscenium arch, a perfect setting for the clown's final show.

Now, the clown hallucinated, and was wandering through a maze of dark, low-arched rooms, in which eyes as numerous as stars, but much larger than pinpricks, protruded and glowed. The air and walls were flying alive and crawling alive, for Boz wrote: ‘There were insects, too, hideous crawling things with eyes that stared upon him, and filled the very air around, glistening horribly amidst the thick darkness of the place.' Boz had dreamt of such horrors in the past. Thus the dying clown dreamt of them too, the shining multifaceted eyes, and the scratch of the thin clawed legs. And Boz glimpsed too Combe and Rowlandson's wan clown from
The English Dance of Death
, now on all fours in the darkness.

He considered the clown's poor suffering wife. He recalled walking past a chandler's shop – ahead, on a street corner, was a thin woman in a thin, indeed threadbare, shawl who held a wailing child. She sang a ballad in a voice as insubstantial as her shawl, and an unshaven man laughed and said shut your trap and walked on. She sat on a doorstep. Tears started to come, and the child wailed louder. This was the type of woman he had in mind for the clown's wife, a woman holding a tiny child and suffering the clown's violent abuse.

Before long, the story was driven to its tragic conclusion. Once set up in type, Seymour's objections would be of no consequence at all.

*   *   *

When the proofs for the first number arrived in Seymour's parlour, he read them by the late-morning light of the French doors, and to the accompaniment of a bacon sandwich, and everything was
almost
to his complete satisfaction – admittedly, he was annoyed that Boz had described Mr Pickwick with a portmanteau when the drawing had shown a carpet bag – but then he came to the last page and a half of letterpress.

‘You look troubled,' said his wife, who had just stepped back from winding the mantelpiece clock.

‘An extra leaf has been inserted,' said Seymour. ‘It doesn't stop at page twenty-four, but goes on to page twenty-six.'

‘Perhaps they have made a mistake in numbering.'

‘This has been deliberately inserted.'

‘That's peculiar.'

‘The writer has introduced a new character. Someone called Dismal Jemmy. This is nothing to do with me, Jane.'

‘Why would he do such a thing?'

‘This Dismal Jemmy is going to tell a tale. It looks like it will be appearing at the start of the next number. I haven't authorised
any
of this. I am going to see Chapman and Hall. This has to be stopped. It's a blatant attempt to throw the publication off course.'

*   *   *

‘He had no right!'

‘Mr Seymour,' said Chapman, in the circumstances of the office at the Strand, ‘this is merely a temporary interruption.'

‘A birth pang, Mr Seymour,' said Hall. ‘Please put yourself in Boz's shoes. You will understand the great difficulty in judging the precise amount of letterpress.'

‘Especially in the first number,' added Chapman, ‘with no previous experience. Trust us, from the second number onwards—'

‘Do you think I cannot
read
? He has already decided how the second number will begin –
with his story
!' said Seymour, his chest heaving, his face florid. ‘Have they started printing?'

‘I expect very soon,' said Hall, ‘if not—'

‘Send a messenger to Bradbury and Evans,' said Seymour, leaning over the desk. ‘You have to stop the presses.'

‘I have absolutely no intention of doing that,' said Hall. ‘Are you with me, Edward?'

‘I am. Bradbury and Evans work to a schedule. We cannot willy-nilly—'

‘Then
I
shall stop the presses,' said Seymour.

‘Bradbury and Evans work to
our
requirements,' said Chapman, standing up. ‘Now kindly sit down, Mr Seymour, and calm yourself—'

‘I am warning you,' said Seymour.

‘Warning us!' Hall stood up, to be beside Chapman. ‘Is that a threat, sir?'

Seymour's eyes wandered across the desk, avoiding Chapman and Hall. Then, muttering, he walked out of the office.

‘What do you think he'll do?' said Chapman, resuming his seat.

‘He could go to Bradbury and Evans, but they wouldn't listen to him.'

‘Hicks might.'

‘Even if Hicks did – do you know, Edward, now that Seymour has threatened us, even if Hicks stopped the presses, I'd demand he start them rolling again.'

‘We must play this carefully, William. It is not wise to alienate Seymour. Think of the sales of
Figaro
.'

‘I do believe he looked at our inkwell. He was going to hurl it at us.'

‘For a man who insists upon facts and figures, you are being
very
speculative.'

‘Seymour has to prove his worth to Chapman and Hall. He hasn't yet.'

*   *   *

‘Mr Hicks is busy, Mr Seymour,' said the printer's devil.

‘It is urgent I speak to him.' He gave the devil a shilling.

‘Mind you, he's always busy. Come with me.'

The devil took Seymour to Hicks, who stood talking idly and hands on hips at a bench, where a man with a squashed nose and a startlingly red fringe applied a line of gum with a brush to the margin of a page of printed matter. The page was ready to receive
Pickwick
's additional leaf.