Death and Mr. Pickwick

  Then the reader placed the number down on his chest, closed his eyes, and rested his head on the chair and watched Mr Pickwick and his companions again with the mind’s eye, imagining as best as the memory would allow the actions of the characters, and saying in his own internal voice the things they said. Mr Pickwick was changing from Seymour’s original conception. The gullible fool had become the child, the uncorrupted babe, the innocent kitten, reborn in an old man’s body. Who would not want to wrap protective arms around this pure soul? Who would not want Mr Pickwick to thrive, to remain innocent, despite the world’s tainting seeds?

  And when the reader had relived certain parts and reread others, there were more advertisements, then the green wrapper was closed. He might then read aloud to his family. But if he felt tired, he would go to roost and have a good night’s sleep and read Pickwick to them the next night.

  And every month, the accumulated width of green pamphlets on his shelf became a little wider and he could look upon the progress of the green with satisfaction and anticipation and pride. Pickwick stretched out ahead like one’s own path through life; and who knows what would happen within it next? Other books, finished books, had a sense of the graveyard about them, precisely because they were completed, and once read, were over. But this – this Pickwick – was alive, and read in the middle of its creation. The thrill was extraordinary. When people talked about the characters, it was as though they were gossiping about their neighbours, colleagues and friends. And it would always be asked: what will Sam Weller do next month?

  How many thousands of copies of Pickwick were shifted just because of Sam? The public spouted his sayings like Shakespeare. Soon, it seemed that everyone was talking like Sam Weller, not only in the echoing of his Sam Vale-inspired comparisons, but in crushing their grammar, twisting their words, and winding the way they spoke, to make it interesting upon the ear.

  The previously mentioned bootblack who knew twenty-two ways of lacing shoes and half as many knots, repeated Sam’s sayings with a special professional pride. When a shine was finished, it was appropriate to say to a customer: ‘There; now we look compact and comfortable, as the father said ven ’e cut his little boy’s ’ead off to cure ’im o’squintin’.’ While when he drank his last draught in a public house, and prepared to go home to his bed, he remarked: ‘There’s really nothing so refreshing as sleep, sir, as the servant girl said afore she drank an egg-cup full of laudanum.’ Often, there was no need to complete the phrase – after the uttering of the first half of the comparison it would be completed by another person, or met with a rhythmic noise, to indicate that the listener of course knew how to finish the sentence without the necessity of doing so, and both would laugh together. And if a person had not heard one of these bizarre phrases before, and asked ‘Where did you hear that?’ the answer would be: ‘In Pickwick.’ So the phrases themselves sent the public towards the green-wrappered numbers, and further stoked the demand.

  ‘The greatest fortune-teller in ’istory couldn’t predict what Sam Weller will say next,’ said the bootblack to the Welsh boy who had obtained employment and been a regular customer ever since the day he heard of Day and Martin. ‘And that’s the thing – you ’ave to find out.’

  ‘That’s true,’ said the boy.

  ‘No – “That’s what I call a self-evident proposition – as the dogs’ meat man said when the ’ousemaid told ’im ’e warn’t a gen’l’man.”’

  ‘I used that the other day, I did!’

  ‘Well what about this: “I should never ’ave taken a shine to you – as the bootblack said when ’e chased the boy who stole ’is brush.”’

  ‘I don’t remember Sam saying that.’

  ‘’E didn’t say it. I say it. I’ve been tryin’ to come up with some of my own.’

  ‘Give us another then.’

  He thought a moment. ‘Can’t you be ’appy with just the one – as the surgeon said when ’e sawed off the boy’s right leg.’

  ‘Give us a third, go on.’

  He thought again. ‘I’ve only got the two – as the same surgeon said, when the boy got gangrene, and off came the left leg as well.’

  ‘With a bit more practice, you’ll be as good as Boz.’

  ‘Do you think so?’

  ‘You should write them down, and sell them to a paper or a magazine or someone.’

  ‘Do you think I could?’

  ‘I’m sure of it.’

  The bootblack nodded, and said: ‘You might well be right, lad.’

  In another part of London, another lad, a butcher’s boy, stood turning a handle and stuffing meat into a pig’s intestines, to make sausages of a uniform length. As he did so, he naturally chatted to the master butcher about Sam Weller’s account of the steam-powered sausage machine in Pickwick, in which a man committed suicide by mincing himself up and converting his body into sausages, and whose trouser buttons had been found among the meat.

  The master butcher said: ‘Everyone thinks Pickwick’s just a tale, but some of it’s based on fact.’ He drew closer to the boy, and stared into his eyes. ‘I know about something a bit like that sausage incident,’ he whispered. ‘There was this friend of mine, who knew an apprentice to a butcher near Dalston Lane. Sometimes, just as they were closing, the apprentice heard the butcher speak in some foreign language to a customer, and they laughed the sort of laugh when something is up.

  ‘Then one day, the butcher wasn’t around, and this foreign man comes in with a sack. And he says, in his funny accent, “Your master will like this.” “What is it, pork?” said the apprentice. The man gave a funny laugh. “Oh yes, pork!” he said.

  ‘Well the apprentice took it to the back. He had been warned by his master never to open any sacks of meat. “And I’ll know if the knots have been undone,” said the butcher, “because it’s a special butcher’s knot which only master butchers know.”

  ‘So the sack sat there, and the apprentice was struck with curiosity, and without bothering with the knot, he slit the sack with a knife – and out dropped a human arm, severed at the shoulder.’

  ‘No!’ gasped the apprentice, and he stopped stuffing sausages.

  ‘They came and took the butcher away. And for all I know they hanged him. But everyone always said that his pies were the best for miles around. So you be careful what you eat. Pickwick’s a warning.’

  A widow in her fifties had meanwhile come into the butcher’s and overheard some of the tale. She whispered to the boy. ‘I heard something like that story years ago. Your master’s spinning a yarn.’

  ‘It sounded true enough to me.’

  ‘I am sure it would sound true enough to Mr Pickwick,’ she said. ‘That reminds me – I saw you the other day reading Pickwick as you walked along, with your tray on your shoulder.’

  ‘I couldn’t stand someone who didn’t like Pickwick,’ said the boy.

  ‘Who doesn’t like Pickwick?’ she said.

  ‘Well, if someone didn’t, I wouldn’t speak to them. They’d be a dried-out sausage casing.’

  ‘Well you’ll have to speak to me because I do like it. And I shall have half a pound of those sausages you’re making.’ She smiled. ‘As long as they don’t contain trouser buttons.’

  After work, the butcher’s boy went to a public house and, as usual, noticed many drinkers reading Pickwick. He heard two men at the bar talking about Sam Weller:

  ‘I have come across people who have some of Sam in ’em.’

  ‘I know a fellow on a market stall who has his hat at an angle who reminds me of Sam a bit.’

  ‘Yus, but it still ain’t Sam. Just a part of him. There’s a groom I know who has a lot to say for himself – but it’s still only part of Sam.’

  Then the butcher’s boy looked towards another area of the room, a corner lit by a sconce, where he observed a middle-aged man bent forward, who had a Pickwick open on the table, and also a Morning Advertiser spread across his lap – and a hand was suspiciously concealed underneath i
ts pages. As the man examined Pickwick, there was the faintest movement of the paper up and down. The boy’s hearing was sharp, and even amongst the general noise in the inn he could hear the faint rustle of the pages. The man was wallowing in the antics of the fat, huggable well-cushioned characters.

  Suddenly the man raised his head. His eyes were large, moist and rather fishlike. He caught the stare of the butcher’s boy, who grinned, and the man’s hand flew up from its hidden cove. He stood, and returned the ’Tiser to the bar, depositing it under the sign asking customers not to monopolise papers for more than five minutes. He screwed on his hat and walked out, to the great amusement of the butcher’s boy.

  But newspapers are transient; and some sophisticated men, who knew the world and its ways, dismissed Pickwick as transient too – at best, it was a fashion: Pickwick would be in favour for a single season; then, like last year’s shawls from Paris, it would disappear and never be spoken of again.

  ‘The phenomenon of the fashionable literary work is like some rare species of chrysanthemum,’ said a weary-eyed man, dangling an ivory cigar holder which was carved in the design of a dragon. He sat among the upholstery within the boudoir-like annexe of his faro club, joined by two companions. All three had suffered losses that night, and would smoke or drink until they believed the tide of luck had changed. ‘It usually blooms in November. That is of course a time when gardens are mostly dead. It has its season, and shrivels completely.’

  ‘You are entirely missing the point,’ said the thin lips belonging to another cigar, one as holderless as the smoker’s head was hairless. ‘Pickwick refreshes itself every month. The latest number is the latest fashion.’

  ‘A friend of mine,’ said a man who opened a snuffbox with a naked woman depicted kneeling within, ‘broke down in church at the mere thought of Pickwick. He had to be escorted out – marched down the aisle, stuffing a handkerchief into his mouth, tears of laughter rolling down his face. He spent the rest of the service in the churchyard, completely ashamed, but he just couldn’t help himself.’ After supplying his nostrils he added: ‘And that’s not all. Did you hear about the Court of Aldermen and Pickwick?’

  *

  In the richly decorated apartment in which the London Court of Aldermen convened, it was noted that apologies for absence had been received from an unusually large proportion of the twenty-six members on the day of the new Pickwick, including the representatives for the wards of Candlewick, Cordwainer and Vintry, and the double ward of Cripplegate Within and Cripplegate Without. All these members had strong records of attendance. In the case of one missing representative, for Bridge Ward Without, some members recalled a comment he had made at the end of the previous session, to the effect that he would sooner get a churchyard cough than be at the next meeting, as Pickwick was due out that day. The consensus soon formed that the other missing representatives were absent for similar motives. One particularly corpulent member – though none could be said to be starved – then made a proposal: ‘I move that we now adjourn for an hour to enable members to read the new number of The Pickwick Papers.’

  The motion was carried unanimously.

  *

  If, for a moment, one imagined the skeleton of Boz, bent over the table – as though Holbein had drawn his portrait, or a comedic anatomist had staged a prank in a parlour – the quill held by living bones, the phalanges of the other hand grasping the temple of the skull, then – if that can be imagined – imagine too the joints scraping at each other, at the shoulder and the elbow, as motion commenced in the sockets, and the inked quill began its path across the paper. Then imagine the flayed muscles added – twitching, as an idea which started in the head communicated itself to the entire body, emerging at the stripped mouth and the fibred fingers. Now apply skin – flexing and stretching – and then clothes – creasing and folding – as he considers an idea: he laughs aloud at his own ingenuity. He can see the gaiters’ leather wrinkle as Mr Pickwick walks, hear the milk punch spill down Mr Pickwick’s throat. Boz was the reporter of the chatter of his own brain.

  The words accumulate on the page slowly at first, but once under way the writing seemed steam-driven – Boz resembling nothing so much as one of Seymour’s automata adapted for penmanship. His hand traversed the page like a human engine, unstoppable until fatigue broke him down. For Seymour’s disappearance had taken off the brake.

  This is writing that dares! Who knows what will happen in the monthly part? Not even Boz, at least not precisely. From the chapter to the paragraph to the sentence to the word, little was determined in advance. And just as there are soldiers who are cowards in civilian life, and show true courage under fire, so some new power became released in Boz by the demands of the monthly number. The very constraints of the work brought forth his genius. He had to write, it had to be done, it could not be thought about too much, it could not be revised once written. Let others heed Horace’s advice in Ars Poetica to keep a book nine years in the study before presenting it to the world, to remove the folly of hastily composed writing. Boz must do now, with no chance of correction. Who had attempted this before, except crazed prophets and mad poets? Twenty entire slips, a fifth of the monthly requirement, could emerge from a single steam-powered session.

  When the monthly number was done, in the quiet moments after the quill was laid down, Boz would look forward to the writing again, as a way of meeting Mr Pickwick, of seeing the smile of that innocent bonny baby of a man. A glowing, lovely, beaming thing was Mr Pickwick – as though Boz had put the sun on the page. And if other characters were standing near Mr Pickwick, they felt the warmth too. So when Boz wrote the last word of a number, he felt a certain regret, like the end of a pleasant night in the inn. The slight sadness was diminished by the thought that acquaintance would be renewed, and soon. The feelings of his readers were not dissimilar.

  *

  At the beginning of December 1836, the editor of The Examiner received a small, thin package which contained a twopenny book of songs from an entertainment called The Village Coquettes, to be performed at the St James’s Theatre, along with a free pass to the opening night. When he saw the libretto was by Boz, he sent the package to the magazine’s drama critic.

  At that opening night, the rumour spread among the rows and boxes that Boz himself was in the audience. The desire to see the mysterious man responsible for Pickwick was so profound that, as soon as the cast had taken the audience’s applause, a shout began – ‘Boz! Boz! Boz!’

  The shout was soon taken up throughout the auditorium. Just when it seemed the noise could grow no louder, the miracle happened – Boz did indeed step on stage. He bowed, and smiled to the audience with extreme confidence.

  In response, the applause dampened, to merely polite levels. Boz in the flesh was not great enough. Surely this could not be the fellow behind Mr Pickwick – he was too thin. This could not be Sam Weller’s creator – there wasn’t enough bare-faced cheek.

  ‘I don’t believe that man is Boz at all,’ said a woman in the third row. ‘It’s an actor they have hired.’

  ‘It’s a hoax by someone from the audience who’s got up on stage, that’s what it is,’ said her husband.

  ‘How can we know whether it is Boz or not?’ said a man in the row behind, leaning forward. ‘No one knows what he looks like.’

  ‘The whole idea is vulgar anyway,’ said that man’s wife. ‘To turn oneself into a performer, receiving applause, like the actors – no, it shouldn’t be done.’

  *

  Boz imagined the weather at Christmas: he wrote of a rough cold night, with wind bringing the snow drifting across the fields in a thick, white cloud; and for this he drew upon his childhood, when a snowstorm came on the night of Christmas Eve. He remembered that people woke shivering, and that the water was frozen in the jugs and handbasins. He drew too upon the descriptions of Christmas in the works of Washington Irving, and thought of benevolent old country families and the way they celebrated the season. There was also a
song he had written, which he inserted in the number, called ‘A Christmas Carol’ – with a minor distortion of the metre, it could fit to the tune of ‘Old King Cole’:

  But my song I troll out, for Christmas stout,

  The hearty, the true, and the bold;

  A bumper I drain, and with might and main

  Give three cheers for this Christmas old.

  His description appeared in the Pickwick published on the last day of the year – but as fate would have it, that Christmas ushered in a great white storm across the country, with snow reaching depths of five feet, and in some parts fifteen feet. The mail coaches could not run, and postmen struggled through the snow with their bags, their hats frozen to their coat collars. The coincidence that the ice and snow of the physical world accorded with the ice and snow of the Pickwickian world had an extraordinary effect: never did the population feel closer to Boz. It seemed that Christmas should always be snowy, and the hearts of the public were warmed by a letterpress coal fire, beside which the Pickwickians drank hot sweet wassail, as much as the bodies of the public were warmed by the real coal fire in their hearths.

  Boz also decided that the Pickwickians would hear a Christmas story by the fireside, and for this, as with the weather, his pen returned to childhood.

  *

  He was a boy in the cavern below St Mary’s Church as the goblins came leaping from the depths like grasshoppers, springing over their own ranks, bounding off the chalk walls, a swarm of grinning lips, lolling tongues and conical hats. The points and buckles of their medieval shoes scratched his cheek as they jumped past or used his shoulder as a stepping stone, and they grinned close to his nose for the sheer fun of fear. But they did not want him that night. Their prey lay beyond.