Serials to Graphic Novels
Page 6
Many artists applied for Seymour’s position: John Leech, who gained fame as an illustrator and later provided engravings for Dickens’s A Christmas Carol (1843); Thackeray, whose growing acclaim as a writer enabled him to illustrate his own fiction, most notably Vanity Fair (1848); Robert Buss, who become a painter of humorous and historical subjects and memorialized Dickens in Dickens’s Dream (ca. 1875), an unfinished painting that now hangs in the Dickens House Museum; and Hablot Knight Browne, a young aspiring illustrator known by the pseudonym Phiz. Buss provided two illustrations for the third number of Pickwick Papers, but Chapman and Hall quickly dismissed him. Dickens took a lead role in selecting Browne, who, not yet twenty-one, was impressionable, self-effacing, and inexperienced. Phiz, who illustrated Parts 4–20 of Pickwick, helped launch Dickens to literary stardom and went on to become Dickens’s major illustrator.
A “Desultory” Format Made Profitable and More Respectable
William Harrison Ainsworth—who had aspirations to be a three-volume novelist of Sir Walter Scott’s stature—believed Dickens “was making a grave mistake in writing fiction in this popular form, the loose-covered serial; a form hitherto reserved only for low trash” (A. N. Wilson 19). Jane R. Cohen concurs that in the 1830s, “The only respectable method of publication, as Dickens’s friends were quick to remind him, was the traditional three-volume novel” (42). When Dickens wrote The Pickwick Papers, serialization, also known as piecemeal publishing, was a cheap form of publication designed for the middle and working classes.17 Installments came out independently or as parts published within leading monthly and weekly periodicals. Prior to Dickens’s success with Pickwick, serialization was not exclusively a vehicle for “low trash” (A. N. Wilson 19). Late eighteenth- and early nineteenth-century publishers used part issues to print ballad sheets, the Bible, and previously published popular books like John Bunyan’s Pilgrim’s Progress (1678, 1684). However, newly released fiction published serially was generally thought to have little literary merit.
In his preface to the first edition of The Pickwick Papers (1837) published by Chapman and Hall, Dickens recognizes serialization’s low reputation, admitting: “while the different incidents were linked together by a chain of interest strong enough to prevent their appearing unconnected or impossible, the general design should be so simple as to sustain no injury from this detached and desultory form of publication, extending over no fewer than twenty months” (P, Oxf. xxxiv). In the preface to the 1847 Cheap Edition of Pickwick, Dickens offers an even harsher assessment of Pickwick’s structure: “experience and study afterward taught me something, and I could perhaps wish now that these chapters were strung together on a stronger thread of general interest, still, what they are they were designed to be” (P, Books, Inc. xvi).
Dickens made this comment at the peak of his career. Two years after he wrote the preface to the Cheap Edition of Pickwick, Dickens launched David Copperfield (1850), the work he referred to as his “favourite child.”18 Critic Harry Stone carries this same term, “desultory,” into his analysis of Pickwick, noting in the opening line of Dickens’ Working Notes for His Novels (1987): “Very early in his career, soon after launching his novel writing with the desultory Pickwick Papers, Dickens demonstrated that he was profoundly concerned with the overall design of his books” (xi). Stone goes on to contrast the improvised nature of Pickwick to the superior structure of David Copperfield and Our Mutual Friend, works that show Dickens to be “the story-weaver at his loom” (OMF, Penguin 893), as Dickens refers to himself in the postscript to Our Mutual Friend. Nonetheless, even the harshest critics recognize that Pickwick became a novel even if it was not “designed to be.” In The Victorians, A. N. Wilson contends that “Few famous novels can have had more desultory origins” (18), but he acknowledges that Pickwick is a “famous novel” even if it is a “rambling picaresque” (19).
When Dickens changed the format to thirty-two pages of letterpress with two illustrations per month, “At a single stroke something permanent and novel-like (Chesterton called Pickwick ‘something nobler than a novel’) was created out of something ephemeral and episodic” (Patten, CDP 65). Robert Patten’s simile “novel-like” captures Pickwick’s quasi status as a serial cum novel that reached readers all across England and abroad. Although it is easy to excerpt chapters from Pickwick, the episodes are not entirely disconnected despite Dickens’s avowal in his preface to the first edition that he “gradually abandoned” the idea of the Pickwick Club as a structuring principle (P, Oxf. xxxiv). While the adventures are diverse, the book has a sustained “chain of interest” (xxxiv) since we can read it as a written record of the various proceedings of the club that Pickwick himself is editing. Dickens does not declare the club’s disbanding until the final chapter of the novel when Pickwick retires to Dulwich and tells his fellow Pickwickians: “‘The Pickwick Club exists no longer’” (714). In the novel’s final paragraph, we learn that Mr. Pickwick is “employing his leisure hours in arranging the memoranda which he afterwards presented to the secretary of the once famous club” (718). “By the end of Pickwick’s run,” Patten observes, “people in Edinburgh or Glasgow, or even in a remote hamlet like the one where Mary Russell Mitford was virtually imprisoned, were reading Pickwick at the same time as people in London. The lag between the city and the country was eliminated, and Pickwick parts—more, I suspect, even than Scott’s or Byron’s new works—achieved an instant island-wide circulation” (CDP 66–67). “The reputations of both author and artist were made by Pickwick” (Muir 91) owing to its quick rise to fame and “island-wide” distribution. “It became topical matter,” notes Patten, “almost like news; people asked themselves, ‘What were the Pickwickians doing last month?’ and hastened to their booksellers to find out” (CDP 67).
A Confluence of Factors
How did Pickwick assume the status of daily news? Its success grew out of Victorian commodity culture, new printing technologies, growth of the middle class, serialization, a climbing literacy rate, an increase in population (especially in urban areas), self-improvement movements, increased wages that augmented buying power, the growth of leisure time accompanying the Industrial Revolution, and the appeal of reading pictures. The confluence of these factors in the late 1830s shaped Pickwick and the arc of the Victorian illustrated book.
Pickwick became a highly marketable commodity even though it originally seemed destined to be “a ready-made, copper-bottomed recipe for failure” (Muir 89). Chapman and Hall produced 1,000 copies of the first print run; only 400 copies sold, despite detailed and well-placed advertisements. After barely surviving a recession in the book trade, Chapman and Hall boldly continued the serial despite Seymour’s death and Pickwick’s initially poor sales. However, Chapman and Hall dramatically reduced the print run for part 2 from 1,000 to 500 copies. Surprisingly, sales quickly skyrocketed. By the tenth installment, so many Victorians were clamoring to know what the Pickwickians were doing that Browne had to make duplicate copies of the steel-faced copper plates to allow for the massive print runs: one set of plates could not withstand deterioration caused by so many reprintings. In February 1837, 14,000 copies sold, followed by 20,000 copies in May 1837, 29,000 copies in October 1837, and almost 40,000 copies by the publication of the final double number, issued in November 1837. From serial sales alone, Chapman and Hall made a profit of £14,000 (Patten, CDP 68), huge by Victorian standards. “Profitablity,” as Jane R. Cohen advances, “made the once despised form respectable” (5) as a means for publishing newly released adult fiction. Eager to capitalize on and repeat Pickwick’s financial success, savvy publishers and editors determined to recreate the formula exactly.19
The Pickwick Papers took off in the 1830s, a decade of burgeoning production and consumption. Pickwick appealed to a mass audience ranging from the barely literate, who could “read” the pictures and listen to friends recite the adventures to them, to highly educated ladies and gentlemen of the upper reaches.20 Often quoted is authoress Mar
y Mitford’s recognition of Pickwick’s wide appeal in a letter dated 30 June 1837 to a Miss Jephson in Castle Martyr, Ireland:
So you never heard of the “Pickwick Papers!” Well! They publish a number once a month and print 25,000…. All the boys and girls talk his fun—the boys in the streets; and yet those who are of the highest taste like it the most. Sir Benjamin Brodie takes it to read in his carriage between patient and patient; and Lord Denman studies “Pickwick” on the bench whilst the jury are deliberating. Do take some means to borrow the “Pickwick Papers.” (L’Estrange 3: 78)
Mr. Samuel Pickwick likely endeared himself to Mitford’s described audience—ranging from boys in the London streets, a prominent surgeon, and the Lord Chief Justice—because he is a very human character. Pickwick engages in activities of daily Victorian life—playing cards, attending a gentleman’s club, dining with friends, making social calls, drinking too much on occasion, and getting into scrapes. Despite having a generous heart, Mr. Pickwick is fallible and not above the law—Pickwick lands in London’s Fleet Prison when he refuses to pay damages to his landlady, Mrs. Bardell, who wins a breach of promise suit.21 Samuel Pickwick, nonetheless, succeeds as a small-time merchant and retires comfortably. Realizing the Victorian middle-class dream of financial independence, Samuel Pickwick, in essence, validates the entrepreneurial myth of the self-made man central to “the Victorian frame of mind.”22
Pickwick, as Dickens conceived it, is both nostalgic and modern, a combination that likely stimulated the unbridled success of the serial and products related to it. This was an age of transportation, increasing mobility, and industrialization. People were traveling for job advancement (for example, to India in service of the East India Company), to settle in new homelands (most commonly in the United States, Canada, New Zealand, and Australia), and increasingly for pleasure. The popularity of travel literature alone drew countless fans eager to follow the Pickwickians on their city and country adventures.23 Dickens produced The Pickwick Papers between 1836 and 1837, but he set the serial in 1827. By about the time publication of the serial ended, steam engines had replaced stagecoaches for transportation of people and the post (in 1838), and London had a bustling railway terminal, Euston Station.
With sentimentality, Dickens looks back upon a sleepier decade prior to the advent of the railway and its associated railway mania, which was growing in England during the years Dickens was producing this very serial. In Pickwick, Dickens takes his readers along the coaching routes that John Palmer established when he became Comptroller General of the Mails in 1786. Monthly installments carry us from London’s massive General Post Office, St. Martin’s-le-Grand, to old London coaching inns across the English countryside to visit, for example, Georgian Bath where Nathaniel Winkle courts Arabella Alam and the country towns of Eatanwell, Dingley Dell, and Dulwich, where Mr. Pickwick takes a house in the final number. Reflecting on the charms that Pickwick offered its original readers, Arthur Locker notes in an 1870 article entitled “Charles Dickens” published in The Graphic: “to us oldsters Pickwick, quite independent of its fun, recalls the England and the London of our youth, and thus conjures up a host of delightful recollections” (452). In the illustrations, we also glimpse the rapidly disappearing provincial landscapes of an England from Dickens’s youth. For example, Browne’s “Mr. Pickwick Among the Ruins of the Chaise” is a comical example of Victorian drag racing—Mr. Pickwick climbs out of an overturned chaise, having failed to overtake his friends in another chaise—but the plate offers its urban viewers a verdant country landscape with a secluded lane, gnarly trees, postboys, and horses.
Dickens was sentimental about England’s rural past, but Samuel Pickwick settles into a home in Dulwich filled with the advantages of Victorian commodity culture. Dickens devotes a paragraph to:
The lawn in front, the garden behind, the miniature conservatory, the dining-room, the drawing-room, the bed-rooms, the smoking-room, and above all the study with its pictures and easy chairs, and odd cabinets, and queer tables, and books out of number, … and then the curtains, and the carpets, and the chairs, and the sofas! Everything was so beautiful. (P, Oxf. 716)
In “Archives of the Interior: Exhibitions of Domesticity in The Pickwick Papers,” Leslie Simon describes this final setting as Pickwick’s move into the “frontiers of his own domestic space” (33) and a “deliberate retreat into bourgeois domesticity” (33). How fitting that Samuel Pickwick comes to express himself through the purchase of material things since The Pickwick Papers found its way into middle-class Victorian homes resembling the very one Mr. Pickwick inhabits.
The monthly numbers themselves promoted commodity culture. Each installment included an ample advertising supplement. “The Pickwick Advertiser,” which Andy Williams describes as “a paratextual supplement that consisted of page upon page of advertisements for all manner of commodities” (319), anticipates the catalogue of the Great Exhibition. In “Advertising and Fiction in The Pickwick Papers,” Williams correlates the material objects included in each month’s advertiser (for example, reclining chairs, Macassar oil, and a wide range of optical products) with the contents of each monthly number and concludes, “the Dickensian serial is thoroughly entangled with the commodity culture of Victorian Britain” (332).24 The manufacture of Pickwick-inspired merchandise further stimulated Pickwick’s popularity. Victorians who bought The Pickwick Papers in serial and volume form also purchased a host of products inspired by it or bearing the imprint of its illustrations. Pickwick-inspired household items, clothing, and confections sprang up everywhere. Popular Toby Jugs called Philpots25 bore the faces of Tracy Tupman, Nathaniel Winkle, Augustus Snodgrass, and Samuel Pickwick as Browne drew them, and manufacturers cast these same characters as salt and pepper shakers. Browne’s illustrations also adorned china plates showing Mr. Pickwick in his various antics. Drapers produced curtains called Pickwick chintzes for middle-class Victorian homes. Tailors fashioned gentlemen’s breeches as described by Dickens and given life by Browne to imitate the style of Sam Weller, Mr. Pickwick’s Cockney servant, often dubbed his Sancho Panza.26 Pickwick pastries and sugar candies in the shape of Joe the fat boy lined the shelves of London bakeries and confectionaries.27
In a preglobal age, Pickwick went viral. A German translation appeared in 1837, and in Germany, The Pickwick Papers was the most popular Dickens novel throughout the nineteenth century. French and Danish translations of Pickwick appeared in 1838, and Polish and Italian versions in 1840.28 Pickwick joke books, bootleg copies of the book, and parodies appeared in England and other countries (for example, Deutsche Pickwickier and Berliner Pickwickier are two popular nineteenth-century German imitations). The effects of Pickwick on trade lasted well into the twentieth century. In 1899, Joseph Grego published “extra plates” and numerous paraphernalia from stage adaptations of Pickwick in a volume entitled Pictorial Pickwickiana. Adams and Ridgways created a Pickwick line of fine bone English china that was popular at the turn of the twentieth century. In their line of Dickens figurines, Royal Doulton produced character jugs and miniature figures of Alfred Jingle, Sam Weller, Joe the fat boy, Mrs. Bardell, and Mr. Pickwick from 1922 into the 1980s29—further testimony to the sustaining force of Pickwick mania.
The caricature-style illustrations for Pickwick are foremost theatrical, paving the way for stage adaptations that appeared even before the serial’s conclusion. In his 1837 production entitled The Pickwick Club; or, The Age We Live In! (City of London), Edward Stirling30 relied heavily on the original book illustrations to determine costume and setting; for certain scenes, he even evoked specific plates—for example, the script directs the reader to Phiz’s “The Middle-Aged Lady in the Double-Bedded Room” for the bedroom farce scene where Pickwick peeps through the curtains to find himself in a strange woman’s bedroom. Two other popular adaptations, William Thomas Moncrieff’s Sam Weller; or the Pickwickians that appeared at the Strand in 1837 and W. L. Rede’s Peregrinations of Pickwick staged at the Adelphi in 1837, l
ikewise drew upon the illustrations, though less directly. Pickwick mania, unlike today’s profitable merchandizing by Pixar and Disney, “was spontaneous, and the market tapped by Chapman and Hall—a new market, a new class of people altogether—had partially defined itself by its response to Dickens” (A. N. Wilson 19). This new class of buyers who attended play versions of Pickwick also bought popular prints called “extra plates” designed by various artists, often without the approval of Dickens or Chapman and Hall; one such artist named Thomas Onwhyn sometimes signed his plates Samuel Weller, bringing a fictional character to life.
The commodity culture that supported Pickwick in the 1830s depended upon a series of major innovations in printing31 that helped the serial’s popularity to spiral.32 In 1800, Lord Stanhope’s iron printing press came into use. In 1803, the manufacturing firm of Gamble and Donkin created a prototype for a paper-making machine, which allowed for continuous production of paper; paper size increased with this new papermaking process, a move which, in turn, decreased taxes on paper since the government charged according to the number of sheets and not the exact number of printed pages generated by each sheet. Friedrich Koenig’s steam-powered cylindrical printing press, patented in 1811, revolutionized printing; it yielded six times as many copies per hour as a hand press (900 versus 150 copies).33 By 1816, Koenig’s double cylinder steam-operated printing press made it possible to manufacture great amounts of paper inexpensively. In turn, cheaper and faster production enabled publishers to print longer works.34