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’r
e 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.’
‘You are letting this lead you into wild thoughts.’
‘The more I think about it – I think that’s exactly what he did. I know he did!’
‘Go and see Chapman and Hall. The drawing of the clown has to be done. But do it on the condition that, in future, Boz will always have to ask you about material he wants to insert. Please, Robert, that is the solution. The sooner the clown is drawn, the sooner you are rid of this problem.’
He did not respond, but just sat with a brooding look. She placed pencil and paper in front of him on the desk. ‘I shall sit with you while you do it.’ When he still did not move, she said: ‘À Beckett got his just deserts when he treated you so badly, and this Boz will too. Please, Robert.’
So he began the picture of the dying clown. He drew the dismal man on one side of the deathbed, and on the other side, the clown’s wife, carrying a child. He drew the canopy of the clown’s bed like a proscenium arch, with the spotted sleeve of a clown’s shirt dangling from the top. ‘I drew Wetherell in a clown’s shirt like this,’ he said, in a low, unenthusiastic voice.
‘So you did, Robert. There was such a demand for that issue. I remember you said the printing presses worked round the clock.’
‘Everything I did for Figaro was just the prelude to humiliation. It is as though Boz has deliberately chosen this scene as a reminder of à Beckett. And now I think about it – I wonder whether the two know each other?’
‘Please, just keep drawing, Robert.’
‘How long before Boz calls me a mechanical dolt with a pencil?’ Above the clown’s mantelpiece he drew a pinned-up print of a pantomime scene, showing a clown goose-stepping on stage. ‘I drew a scene like this for The Book of Christmas.’
‘I recall. And it was excellent.’
‘Hervey – another man who let me down.’
He drew the three-cornered table in the clown’s hovel. Its triangular surface was not as the tiny pointed spittoon on the floor of his first Pickwick picture, leading the eye towards Mr Pickwick, but a vicious object of geometry in the foreground. There was no pleasing circularity with this piece of furniture; nor the stability of a rectangular table; it was a thing of sharp points, of which one pointed violently towards himself.
‘It is done,’ he said. He put down his pencil.
*
The aroma of a herring, suspended from a string and cooking over a candle, drifted from the stage to the fourth row of the theatre where Boz was in the audience. He had naturally been intrigued by the subject of the production, of a poor strolling player who, to scrape a living, composed verses to advertise Warren’s Blacking. The scene was of a squalid garret, where the strolling player, dressed in black trousers with holes and a threadbare dressing gown, sat at a table cooking the herring. The candle he used was stuck into a blacking bottle, and the gibbet-like frame on which the fish swung was supported by a similar receptacle. The player turned the herring, and found his poetic muse:
A man who oft had heard the jest
That real black diamonds were the best
Once thought he’d found those gems of light
So wondrous, rich and grand
But seized a pair of boots made bright
With Warren’s Blacking, 30 Strand!
Boz pondered. Until now, the man with Mr Cosmogony’s stuttering speech, the strolling actor who had rescued Mr Pickwick from the wrath of the cabman, had simply been referred to as ‘the stranger’. But the name of the character in this play could serve very well in Pickwick. It might be called piracy; but on the other hand, the stranger in Pickwick was an actor and a scoundrel – he would certainly steal the name of a part he played as an alias.
Thus the name of Mr Jingle was added to the roll call of characters in Pickwick. How this player might boast about his romantic conquests! ‘Ladies of the green room – many achievements! – sowed wild oats! – “O keep on, sir!” Ha ha ha!’
Soon, Boz’s own romantic life would be extended. With the emolument from Pickwick, his marriage could be brought forward. In a few days, he and his fiancée Catherine would be married at St Luke’s, Chelsea, and a short honeymoon in Kent would follow, while the first number
of Pickwick was on the streets.
*
‘A LETTER IS USUALLY READ, FOR the first time, as a whole,’ said Mr Inbelicate. ‘It may live in the brain afterwards, in searing parts, and the branding iron reheated with additional views. The pain may be felt in silence, alone; it may be uttered aloud, in company.’
*
WHEN SEYMOUR RETURNED FROM A meeting with McLean, his wife passed him a letter. It was from Boz, written after the honeymoon.
My Dear Sir
I had intended to write you, to say how much gratified I feel by the pains you have bestowed on our mutual friend Mr Pickwick, and how much the result of your labours has surpassed my expectations.
‘Surpassed his expectations. So he expected me to draw badly.’
I am happy to be able to congratulate you, the publishers, and myself on the success of the undertaking, which appears to have been most complete.
I have now, another reason for troubling you. It is this. I am extremely anxious about ‘The Stroller’s Tale’ – the more especially as many literary friends, on whose judgement I place great reliance, think it will create considerable sensation. I have seen your design for an etching to accompany it. I think it extremely good, but still, it is not quite my idea; and as I feel so very solicitous to have it as complete as possible, I shall feel personally obliged if you will make another drawing.
‘Not content to impose this story on me, he now wants me to do the drawing again! And who are these literary friends?’
It will give me great pleasure to see you, as well as the drawing, when it is completed. With this view, I have asked Chapman and Hall to take a glass of grog with me on Sunday evening (the only night I am disengaged), when I hope you will be able to look in.
‘He invites Chapman and Hall to ensure the drawing is completed according to his requirements, and he hopes that I shall be there.’
The alteration I want I will endeavour to explain. I think the woman should be younger – the ‘dismal man’ decidedly should, and he should be less miserable in appearance.
Death and Mr. Pickwick Page 64