*
An hour before opening time, a knock came at the Northumberland Arms public house in Pentonville. The landlord did not respond. He continued sitting in the rear, smoking his early-morning cigar. The knock came again, and then a voice: ‘Mr Mitton! Mr Mitton!’
‘Can’t a man have a few moments to himself?’ he muttered. He stood behind the bar, and made a strange up-and-down motion on the floor, as though doing an exercise. Then, taking his time, he proceeded to the bolt. Two men were on the doorstep, both of whom had officialdom lurking in the sockets of their eyes, and were distinguished mainly by shape of nose: the one in front having a larger, bonier affair which undoubtedly marked him out for seniority, while the one behind bore a thinner, prettier organ which surely betrayed inexperience.
‘You are Mr Mitton?’ said the bearer of the bigger nose.
‘I am.’
‘Thomas Dean. Excise officer. We have a warrant to search this house. We have reason to believe there is an unlicensed still on the premises.’
‘You have reason to believe?’
‘You do know the meaning of “warrant”?’
‘It means you won’t take my word that there is nothing here.’
He admitted the men, and they poked their noses in cupboards and back rooms, but no evidence of a still was found.
‘I must have hidden it very well, mustn’t I,’ said Mitton. ‘Who put you up to this? Let’s have a look at that warrant.’
Dean took the document from his pocket, and Mitton looked it over. Then he said, ‘I suppose this is of no further use to you as you have searched every inch of my house. I shall keep this to remind me of you.’
‘That is the property of the Excise Office.’
‘Oh is it?’ He smiled, folded the paper, and tucked it in his waistcoat pocket.
There was a nod of understanding between the two officers. Suddenly they pounced, restraining Mitton’s arms, pushing him back against the counter of the bar, until one arm broke free and Mitton groped for a weapon of any kind whatsoever. He found a pewter pot – and crashed it down upon Excise Officer Dean’s head.
‘You are a fool if you think this is the end of the incident,’ said Dean, rubbing his crown. ‘That could have killed me!’
‘I am keeping that warrant,’ said Mitton. He flourished the paper as a trophy, evading the snatch of the junior. ‘Now get out!’
In the case of Rex v. Mitton, it was conceded that the defendant had no right to keep possession of the warrant, and that the officers certainly had the right to use necessary force to obtain said warrant. The question was whether, by pushing the defendant against the bar, the excise officers had used more force than was necessary.
That night, in the Northumberland Arms, a cheerful Mr Mitton gave each customer a drink of spirit gratis, and hence the outcome of the court case may be guessed with considerable likelihood of accuracy. Some said that the spirit came from a supply under the floorboards, and it was definitely poured to the accompaniment of a wink and a broad smile. And when Mitton decided he would smoke his early-evening cigar, he lit it with a blazing document which had been held in the coals of the fire – a document which looked suspiciously like a search warrant.
*
So Boz conceived of a widow, left alone in the world when her husband, an excise officer, received a fatal blow upon the head with a pewter pot. How was she to survive? The solution was obvious: lodgers.
He needed a name for this widow. Mrs Bordel was amusing, but was soon modified into Mrs Bardell. Thus, Mrs Bardell placed a notice in her window: ‘Apartments furnished for a single gentleman. Enquire within.’
The notice was seen by a certain Mr Samuel Pickwick, address unknown, who did enquire within, and shortly afterwards took up residence in Mrs Bardell’s apartment in Goswell Street, on the desirable, well-lit, first-floor front, away from the damp of the basement and the draught of the attic.
There were many details to be resolved, but Boz could certainly conceive of Mr Pickwick writing innocent letters to Mrs Bardell, letters whose contents would be distorted in a court of law, as Follett attempted with those of Melbourne to Caroline Norton.
Boz imagined Mr Pickwick sitting in Garraway’s Coffee House, ’Change Alley, and thought of circumstances which could lead to a letter to Mrs Bardell.
*
Garraway’s was renowned for its sandwiches, whose butter was always spread to the edge of the crust and beyond. These sandwiches were consumed as men read newspapers or perused albums of prints, or after they had come downstairs from the saleroom on the first floor, having signed a contract to purchase a stack of timber or an elegant town house.
One lunchtime, Mr Pickwick happened to be in Garraway’s eating such a sandwich, accompanied by a tankard of punch on the side. Whether the sandwich was filled with beef or chicken or cheese is unknown, but it was probably not pork, for suddenly a particular craving to eat a well-cooked pork chop entered Mr Pickwick’s brain. And though his eyes were directed towards a notice stuck upon the window announcing the sale of a country villa, all he saw was the chop and the sauce, the beautiful tomato sauce, not loose like some sauces, but reduced to just the consistency that Mr Pickwick liked, and with just enough ginger to suit his palate. True, he suffered pains in his joints after eating such a chop, which may have been causally related to the presence of the ginger, but in his opinion it was a price worth paying. At that moment, in his mind he could picture the chop, and his head lolled back in anticipation – a chop an inch thick, if not a little more, smothered with a ladleload of that excellent sauce. The person who possessed a special genius in preparing a chop according to these requirements was none other than Mr Pickwick’s landlady, Mrs Bardell.
Mrs Bardell always cooked the chop just right, on a clean gridiron over cinders, never to be besmirched by coal smoke. Indeed, she kept cinders aside in a special box – ‘Mr Pickwick’s embers’ she called them – for perfect chops. Her skill in chop-cooking had been obtained by considerable practice and deep researches into the properties of heat, for she turned the chop just the number of times to achieve the optimum between overdone and underdone, and turned with tongs, not with a fork which, as she said, just lets the juices escape. The resulting chop was neither leathery, nor greasy, and so delicious that Mr Pickwick would eat until only the bone was left. Then he heard the trumpet of the elephant from the nearby menagerie and the thought of the beast’s raised trunk broke his reverie, and turned his mind back to the practicalities of securing the chop.
For one requirement of this perfection was that the fire with cinders must be made up at least three-quarters of an hour before cooking, and so Mrs Bardell must be notified. Thus, as he pushed the last remnant of the sandwich into his mouth and drained the punch, he wrote to his landlady: ‘Garraway’s, twelve o’clock. – Dear Mrs B. – Chops and Tomata sauce. Yours, PICKWICK.’ He paid a boy to deliver it to Goswell Street.
*
If someone like Follett got his hands on that note, thought Boz, what might he do? How might the meaning be twisted?
He imagined the speech to the jury: ‘And now, gentlemen, but one word more. Certain letters have passed between these parties. They are covert, sly, underhanded communications – letters that were evidently intended at the time, by Pickwick, to mislead and delude any third parties into whose hands they might fall. Let me read the first: “Garraway’s, twelve o’clock. – Dear Mrs B. – Chops and Tomata sauce. Yours, PICKWICK.” Gentlemen, what does this mean? Chops and Tomata sauce. Yours, Pickwick! Chops! Gracious heavens! And tomata sauce! Gentlemen, is the happiness of a sensitive and confiding female to be trifled away by such shallow artifices as these?’
Boz smiled. Yet how could a man like Mr Pickwick be involved in a breach-of-promise suit? It is inconceivable that Mr Pickwick would wish to marry any woman. He was removed from such desires. In any case, Mr Pickwick would be on the move, and what could the pleasures of the hearth mean to him, unless it was the hearth of a public hous
e?
Boz imagined Mr Pickwick at his lodgings, thinking about hiring Sam Weller as his manservant.
*
Mr Pickwick was nervous, filling the morning with fidgets, poking the sea-coal in the scuttle for no reason, turning an old goblet on the mantelpiece round so its more gilded side showed, and then turning it back again, so the well-worn side was on display. He raised the subject most tentatively to his landlady, using words about two people living together, and the costs of doing so, and looking Mrs Bardell in the eye as he spoke, forgetting to mention, in his nervousness, that the two people were himself and a manservant, not himself and a prospective Mrs Pickwick.
*
It was true that Mr Pickwick did not specifically ask Mrs Bardell to marry him; but the question in a court of law would be: could Mr Pickwick’s conduct and words lead a reasonable person to conclude that he was indeed proposing marriage? And a reasonable person, listening at the door, might very well conclude that such a proposal was made. Here was the means of suing Mr Pickwick for breach of promise.
Boz thought of Seymour. He knew what Seymour had been – the look of the artist screamed sod. If Mr Pickwick was anything like Seymour, he would seek some kind of a relationship with another man. Though he might seek to hide it behind the veil of employment.
*
Boz knew he had to change the legal personnel of the court. Lord Chief Justice Tindall was too learned and too sound in his judgement, his character too mild, too even. The judge in Mr Pickwick’s case should be altogether different. This judge would take the case because Lord Chief Justice Tindall was indisposed.
It was, of course, inevitable that Mr Pickwick would lose the case. Then he would turn on Mrs Bardell’s lawyers.
‘Not one farthing of costs or damages do you ever get from me,’ Mr Pickwick would tell them to their faces.
Now if Mr Pickwick had lived in his own property, or possessed land, or had an income from labour, then payment could be enforced; but Mr Pickwick was retired, and he lived in rented accommodation. He had substantial wealth in financial assets, but this being England, no one had bothered to enact a law to seize those. So, being a debtor who refused to pay, there was but one fate for Mr Pickwick, as he himself would realise: ‘Not one farthing do you get from me,’ he would tell Mrs Bardell’s lawyers, ‘if I spend the rest of my existence in a debtors’ prison.’ All the pleasures of life on the road, all the freedom, he would willingly forsake not to let scoundrels triumph. Mr Pickwick may be a fool, but hidden within was a spirit to stir a British heart.
All this would come later. For now, The Posthumous Papers of the Pickwick Club had to survive in the marketplace.
*
Some people – a small some – had bought Pickwick thus far. But the green wrapper, with the fat man in the punt, did at least draw eyes down to booksellers’ counters; just as the etchings of the Pickwickians, when they were separated from the letterpress and displayed, drew eyes up to the panes of booksellers’ windows. The black and white pictures suggested the amusement lying ahead.
A few thought to themselves: this slim green pamphlet might be worth trying. It was not obvious exactly what it was, and that was itself of interest.
Pickwick was bought by a man who had an earring and by a man with a luxuriant moustache and by a man who catalogued butterflies and by a man who had bought shark’s fins at the wharf to make soup and by a man with a beard who carried a radical newspaper who attended agitated assemblies and by a man in a scruffy coat, who wrote short pieces for magazines and by a man wheeling a barrow of exotic shrubs he would sell at his nursery.
One of these had a brother who was a respectable alderman; the cousin of another was a priest; another played whist with a banker; the buyer of radical literature had a friend in the Whigs; the nurseryman knew a doctor and several lawyers; the man with the moustache had a friend in the senior ranks of the cavalry; the scruffy man knew several editors.
There was also a little middle-aged hawker called Knox, recognisable on the city streets by his plaid jacket, though his pinched cheeks, pointed chin and combed red side whiskers were never conducive to anonymity. Entering Chapman and Hall’s office shortly after the pictures of the first number of Pickwick were splashed in the window on the Strand, he said to Hall: ‘I tell you – that Pickwick Club – I’ve been looking at it. It gives me a good feeling.’
Hall passed him a copy.
‘It’s nice to pick up,’ said Knox. ‘It’s so light. You’d want to take it home.’
Knox took a bundle of copies, and began selling Pickwick in the streets around Chelsea. His attempts with the first three issues were unsuccessful, with only a handful of copies sold, and Hall was surprised when he returned for a fourth attempt.
‘I told you – I have a feeling about it,’ he said. ‘My father allus said to me, “Perserv-ere. Perserv-ere.” So I perservere when everyone says give up – I perservere because everyone says give up. I am going to try around Whitechapel.’
So Knox stood outside the Black Bull, holding up a Pickwick and calling out: ‘Thirty-two posthumous pages and two posthumous pictures for just twelve posthumous pennies which is a bargain, I’d say. Buy it to get rid of me! Buy it to shut me up!’
Whenever his patter attracted a man waiting for a coach to East Anglia – someone who could be induced to hold the number and to look at the pictures – Knox would touch the fellow gently on the shoulder, and such warmth and friendliness would flower from his enchanted fingers, he often secured a sale. He was even more effective with ladies. ‘I’m worse than a barrel-organ player,’ he would say, to put a woman in the mood to buy, ‘even they only ask a penny to move on!’
He sold every copy of the fourth number.
*
Back in the Strand, Thomas Naylor Morton knocked at Chapman and Hall’s office.
‘What is it, Mr Morton?’ said Chapman.
‘I thought you should know this, sir. Yesterday ten people called in, all with the same question. They wanted to know whether we had any copies of the first three numbers of Pickwick.’
‘That is encouraging, at least,’ said Hall, as he and Chapman gave the slightest nod to each other, reflecting that encouragement.
‘That was yesterday,’ said Morton. ‘Today twenty people have asked the same question – in just two hours.’
*
The green pamphlets began to appear on coffee tables in homes and in the establishments where men drank. Those who saw the banker, the doctor or the cavalryman laughing heartily at the pamphlet’s contents thought that if these men, of some standing, bought Pickwick, it was probably worthy of a look. They bought a copy themselves. One such buyer was a talkative bootblack, whose profession brought him into contact with people of all classes.
There were fewer men who worked as bootblacks on the London streets these days, for many people used servants to black their boots, or did it themselves. But there was still a demand, for London mud had to be resisted. Bending over at his box near St James’s Church in Clerkenwell, rubbing away at a topboot in the afternoon sun, was a cheerful, trim and muscular fellow, with hair poking out from his rolled-up shirtsleeves; and, as he came complete with a great furry, bear-like head, he seemed the very brother-to-a-brush, as he often said himself. He conveyed the impression – whether it was true or not – that he cleaned boots for the sheer love of doing so. He chattered endlessly to entertain customers as he worked on their footwear, and sometimes, for his efforts, he received a generous gratuity.
Along came a pretty young woman whom he had not shone before. ‘I ’ope you can feel the brush through the leather,’ he said, and she blushed saying she could, and he made little circles as he worked his way up and around the boot, removing the mud. The soft brush, to lay on the blacking, was to be applied next; and as he uncorked a bottle of Day and Martin’s, he wafted it slightly towards her, for some customers said they found the smell stimulating, and this woman, by a sparkle in her eyes and an enthusiastic sniff, see
med to as well. He spread the blacking on the brush with a sponge tied to a stick, and when he recorked, he laid the stick in a V-shaped notch which he had slashed in the cork. This was then followed by a medium-hard brush, for polishing. ‘Now then,’ he said, after the brushing was done, ‘’ow would you like ’em laced?’
‘I thought there was only one way,’ she said.
‘I know twenty-two methods of lacin’ shoes and ’alf as many different knots. Just laced!’
‘Go on, then,’ she said, with a smile. ‘Show me some.’
‘I’ll show you one way today, and every time you come I’ll show you another. I’ll show you a way of lacin’ very quickly in case you need to scarper somewhere.’ This he proceeded to do, to the delight of the woman, and he finished off by tying a knot with one hand – and for a moment he placed his other hand on her calf, through her skirt.
His next customer was a nervous youth with a perfect side-parting in his hair and a perfectly laundered collar and shirt cuffs.
‘You’re lookin’ smart today,’ said the bootblack.
‘I am going for a new position in an hour,’ said the youth.
‘You ain’t from London are you, lad?’
‘No, sir. From Wales.’
‘First time in the city?’
‘It is.’
‘Where are you livin’?’
‘I am staying with my aunt near St George’s Fields.’
‘You just try crossing St George’s Fields in a rainstorm! You’ll be up to your ankles in mud!’
‘Mud seems to be everywhere in London.’
‘It is, but it varies. Near surgeons and barbers, the mud’s redder; near the ditches of Lambeth, it’s green and slimy; near Fleet Market, rotten vegetables and bones get mixed in. I bet Welsh mud is nothin’ like London mud. I’d go so far as to say there is nothin’ like London mud in the world. ’Alf of it’s made by ’orses and dogs and people – but added to that is whatever else. And it all gets stirred up by the ’orses, dogs and people that laid it down in the first place. Do you know what I am puttin’ on your shoes?’
Death and Mr. Pickwick Page 73