Death and Mr. Pickwick (85 page)

And sing oh, the storm is now gone down,

The ship is in the bay;

The captain and the sailors all

Are roving far away.

Some drinkers clapped along, notably one old pipe-sucker, whose hearing had been affected by cannon shot. The brother and sister bowed, as low as possible, to the different sides of the inn. There was such pride and delight on their father's face; but then there was pride and delight on the faces of the performers, particularly the boy. There were calls for an encore from the pipe-sucker.

Back at the Red Lion, there was a discussion among the customers at the bar concerning an incident of the previous night: a brawl had broken out involving a member of the garrison – which was not unusual – but a bayonet had been drawn, and a barmaid received a superficial wound. This matter was of no interest at all to the landlord's son, who stood staring out of the window, biting a pigeon pie in one hand, when not biting a leg of a chicken in the other. He was James Budden, a huge strawberry-cheeked boy, and a local curiosity – because, though not yet thirteen years of age, he had achieved some twenty stone in weight.

James Budden had taken so little notice of the recruits it was as though they were soldiers made of perfectly transparent glass. It was a different matter when he caught sight of two pretty girls walking down the street in the wake of the men. He asked himself which girl he preferred. When he looked at the girl nearest to the window, he sank his teeth into the chicken, and chewed it slowly, contemplatively, and swallowed; when he looked at the other girl, he moved the pigeon pie upwards, bit off a section of crust, and shifted it with his tongue around his mouth. If the prettiness of a female was reflected in the savour she gave to the food, he favoured the girl associated with the chicken.

He continued in this way, alternating between pigeon and chicken until, with a piece of pie crust still sitting on his tongue, a sudden drowsiness – and it was sudden – descended. Two men drinking at a nearby table smirked as they watched a torpor overcome the fat boy, and his eyes closed.

‘He stuffs himself so much, there's no room for air in his lungs,' said one, to the great amusement of his companion. ‘He's suffocating himself from within.'

‘He's just worn out from carrying so much flesh, that's what it is,' replied the other.

‘Brrr,' said a fellow at the next table, who made the sound appropriate to a shudder, pulling on his jacket-fronts. ‘Look at him. Asleep standing up. I don't even like to think of it, let alone see it. It's proper monstrous.'

The boy's lip had now dropped, so pieces of pie crust were exposed to all and sundry upon the street, like a mouthful of ancient ruins, with the odd piece of half-eaten herb suggestive of ivy. An extraordinarily loud snore issued from the boy, and – more extraordinary still – he then proved he could snore louder. This was followed by a sudden silence, as though he had sleepwalked off a cliff. Then he grunted into life again, like a sleeping pig, and one whose blissful lake of swill and eminent mound of acorns were revealed as nothing but a famishing dream.

His father had approached the boy from behind, and delivered a kick to a leg which made the thigh shake, and would have echoed, if flesh could produce a noise.

‘James – James – damn you, boy, wake up,' said his father with another boot. After more of this paternal kindness, the boy was roused from his slumbers and peace was restored to the Red Lion's tap.

James Budden finished the crust that still lay upon his tongue, and as he swallowed the rest of the pie became aware of the singing from the direction of the Mitre. The shanties had not aroused his curiosity before, but the evidence of his senses took a while to form associations in his brain, and only now did he link music to parties, and parties to edibles.

He stepped outside and bloated a little way towards the source of the sound, though for a moment his sense of purpose was distracted by a housewife carrying meat on a skewer. His face shook too when, after a few more steps, he noticed – and coming in his direction – the one person in Chatham who disturbed James Budden's composure. This was the stable lad from the inn at the end of the brook. If Budden was fat, then this boy was
enormous
. If such a lad ever mounted a horse, he would break the creature's back. The two scowled at each other, both waddling, and their fat arms chafed and rippled as they passed.

Budden now stared into the window of the Mitre at the boy and girl singing on the table. He rested his chins upon the ledge and peered right in. To the boy on the table, a horrible image of a huge head without a body came to mind, as though Budden were decapitated and served upon a platter. The next moment Budden was overcome by sleepiness again, and he fell into a doze with his mouth pressing against the glass. The landlord, Mr Tribe, went out and shook the boy awake, and a small stray dog began barking at the boy's heels, apparently keen to help with the process of reanimation.

As Boz looked at Seymour's drawing, he recalled James Budden asleep at the Mitre's window – a boy who grew larger without care, a boy who attained a simple bliss by the absorption of sustenance.

Then Boz approached a mirror on the wall, and distended his cheeks in recollection of the Chatham curiosity. He applied a little saliva to his finger, and smeared it in one or two places, so that when the light caught his features, there was a suggestion of grease – though whether from the flaky pastry of a pie, or produced naturally, oozing from the pores, or both, was a matter for conjecture.

*   *   *

‘This is no good,' said Hicks, holding up a printed illustration. ‘The steel's bad. Hard on top, soft as butter underneath.'

In the illustration
Mr Pickwick Addresses the Club
, the back of the club secretary's chair had printed like a ghost and Seymour's delicate cross-hatching of the men's jackets had collapsed, losing all detail. This, and the three other pictures for the first number, looked like misty aquatints rather than sharp, well-defined etchings. After barely fifty copies printed, the lines of Mr Pickwick and his companions were vanishing.

Hicks summoned the printer's devil. ‘You're going to have to tell Seymour to re-etch the plates. And give him these to do it.' He passed the boy a hessian sack containing a quantity of blank steel plates.

*   *   *

‘The guv'nor said these'll do the job for sure,' said the devil, as he passed over the sack of steel.

‘This is much too heavy,' said Seymour. He undid the drawstring and looked inside at the stack of plates tied together with cord, with felt between the layers to protect the surfaces. ‘There must be ten plates here. Why so many? Is he implying that I am going to foul-bite them like a novice?'

‘Probably he's thinking you could use 'em for the second number as well, sir.'

‘There are two drawings on each steel plate, so even if that were so, I would require only four.'

‘Probably he just gathered up some plates and shoved them in the sack without thinking, sir.'

‘No, these are carefully packed. Why give them to me at all? Does he think I can't buy steel myself?'

*   *   *

A certain Mr Aked, who bore responsibilities for binding at Bradbury and Evans, gave the impression, by a frequent clenching of the jaw, of suffering a setback in life which had left him bitter. He always came to the printer's with a greasy sack on his shoulder, carrying in his hand a stick armed with a spike, which he employed in turning over dust heaps on his way, in the hope of finding something of value to be resold – and if he
did
enter the works in a happy mood, it was a sure indication that he had found a cache of fatty bones or twisted metal, which also caused an irregularly shaped bulge in his sack.

His first duty was to wash his hands, and when that was done, he seated himself at a stool, and took a needle from a little box. That he used a spike in the streets, and a smaller spike in the form of a needle at work, was seen by some as an indication of his deepest nature.

With Mr Aked having assumed his customary position on the stool, Hicks brought over a cartload of letterpress, illustrations and wrappers.

‘New publication here, Mr Aked,' said Hicks.

Aked lifted a green wrapper, for
The Posthumous Papers of the Pickwick Club
, and inspected it, not with a single glance, but by moving his nose, which simultaneously moved his eyes.

‘They've had a thousand copies printed,' said Hicks, ‘but only four hundred to be sewn into wrappers, until they see how it goes. Four drawings in the front on heavier paper, three gatherings of four leaves, and an extra leaf pasted on to the back.'

‘Any hurry?'

‘Not particularly.'

‘I'll do 'em tonight before I go home.'

So, before he left, Aked sharpened his needle on a piece of sharkskin, gathered a wrapper, pictures and words, and stabbed thrice by the side of the spine to sew all the material together. He repeated this process until four hundred were done, then he raised his mysteriously bulging sack, and his spiked stick, and prepared for the potentially more rewarding task of probing dust heaps.

*   *   *

On 31 March 1836, in Paternoster Row, a crowd of young men carrying shoulder bags gathered outside a magazine wholesaler in the early morning. It was the end of the month – known in the trade as Magazine Day, because of the simultaneous publication of so many periodicals.

‘D'yer read that physician's diary in
Blacks
?' said one slouching fellow, leaning beside a drainpipe.

‘Not me, but my wife can't get enough of it,' replied an associate, who tapped the ashes out of his tobacco pipe.

‘My wife as well – she says it's got too many horrors to put down. Spread on a bit too thick for me.'

‘Oh well,' said his friend. ‘Good Friday tomorrow.'

‘Lamb then on Sunday. They're opening.'

The horde of shoulder-bagged young men poured through the entrance and crammed inside. All the sounds that shoes can make upon a floor or that coins can make upon a counter were unleashed, along with incessant shouts for publications to fill bags.

‘Two
Gents
, two
Blacks
, three
New Months
, three
Mets
,' demanded the previously slouched young man, the moment he reached the counter.

‘One
Fraser
, two
Blacks
,' said his pipe-tapping associate.

No magazine was called by its full name in Paternoster Row on the last day of a month, and such abbreviations for the
Gentleman's Magazine
, the
New Monthly Magazine
, the
Metropolitan Magazine
,
Fraser's Magazine
,
Blackwood's Magazine
and over two hundred other publications were shouted simultaneously without a minute's pause, until by the end of the day, four hundred thousand publications had left the Row.

But few, if any, of the young men with shoulder bags shouted for
Picks.

*   *   *

Edward Holmes delivered his latest piece of music criticism to
The Atlas
, and walked towards the desk usually occupied by the reviewer. He placed a copy of
The Posthumous Papers of the Pickwick Club
on top of the pile of publications for review, and walked on.

Three days later the first review duly appeared in
The Atlas
.

The Posthumous Papers of the Pickwick Club,
it said, was ‘a strange publication' in which the reviewer had ‘in vain endeavoured to discover its purpose'. It noted that: ‘The cuts are better than the letterpress but the whole affair is excessively dull.' And: ‘It ostensibly professes to be very funny.' And finally: ‘The wit of the writer has no wider range than through that melancholy region of exhausted comicality.'

 

*

‘THE FIRST NUMBER CANNOT BE
said to have been greeted with universal acclaim,' said Mr Inbelicate. He read aloud a damning review: ‘“Yet another example of a journalist trying, with but scant success, to prove himself a novelist.”'

There was one glimmer of hope he pointed out to me. It was rare for
The Times
in those days to notice a work of fiction. Yet, on 7 April, a small extract from the Pickwick Club's papers appeared, concerning the cabman's remarkable forty-two-year-old horse.

‘But it was probably because there was an inch at the bottom of a column to fill,' said Mr Inbelicate.

 

*

‘“DID IT EVER STRIKE YOU,”
said the dismal man, “on such a morning as this, that drowning would be happiness and peace?”'

Seymour's tension and rage, as he held the proofs of the second number, communicated a shiver to the paper, as though palsy were the cause. His five-year-old son came to stare, and even touched his father's arm, and asked whether it was sickness that made the hand move. Seymour, as calmly as he could, asked the boy to fetch his mother. The artist had just learnt that Boz was not finished with Dismal Jemmy – when Mr Pickwick stood on Rochester Bridge, admiring the view across the Medway, he was suddenly tapped on the shoulder by the narrator of the dying clown's tale. As Seymour read on, it was clear that Boz planned additional interventions, because Dismal Jemmy asked for Mr Pickwick's likely route, so that he could send another story for inclusion in the club's transactions.

‘The utter
gall
of the man!' he said to Jane. ‘He got away with it once, so he thinks he can get away with it again! He shall
not
!'

Jane endeavoured to calm her husband, putting her arms around his shoulders, but he would have no comfort.

‘It's like à Beckett, using
Figaro
to promote his plays,' he said, rising and brushing her away. ‘This man thinks he can use
Pickwick
to show off his stories. Do you know what's going to happen? If he ever writes too much again, back will come this dismal character, with a story to rescue him. Do you know, Jane – I am wondering whether he deliberately wrote too much, just to bring about this situation.'