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.’
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 ra
ther 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, fo
r 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?’
Death and Mr. Pickwick Page 62