Death and Mr. Pickwick

by Stephen Jarvis

  ‘So this is how everyone sees me,’ said the judge. ‘Short. Tired. Fat. Stupid. And deaf.’

  ‘I do not include myself among the everyone, sir.’

  ‘So everyone else does see me like that!’

  ‘I did not – I truly did not mean my words that way.’

  The judge waved a hand to dismiss the utterance. ‘Do you know who this “Boz” might be?’

  ‘No one knows. Not for sure. Rumours circulate. He may not even be one man. Some people think Pickwick is written by a committee.’

  ‘I would not be surprised if these courtroom scenes are the work of some defeated litigant. Someone who bears a grudge against me for a judgement in a particular case.’

  ‘That is not inconceivable, sir.’

  ‘It is more than “not inconceivable”. The name “Pickwick” is even known to me. I remember the case of a coaching proprietor with that name. He was found negligent in losing a passenger’s luggage. Judge Park was unwell and could not preside over the appeal, and so I was called. I could take action for defamation against this publication.’

  ‘You could, sir,’ said the clerk. An interpretation of the tone of the clerk’s reply might be: ‘But I hope you do not.’

  *

  The senior liveried servant with a face as long and unemotional as a cliff positioned himself two and a half inches from the edge of the rug. His shoulders formed a perfect right angle with respect to the direction of Sir Stephen Gaselee’s armchair.

  ‘You will collect the household wages from the bank tomorrow,’ said the judge, ‘but at three o’clock, as cook must depart for her mother. No later than three o’clock. And no earlier either. Everything else as normal.’

  There was a brief and dignified lowering and raising of the head. He waited for the instruction to go.

  ‘There is one other matter,’ said the judge. ‘Have you heard of a publication called The Posthumous Papers of the Pickwick Club?’

  As the senior liveried servant had seen a man point to the Gaselee residence in Montague Place and shout ‘That’s where he lives!’ and as he knew that cook was taking the latest number to her ailing mother in the hope of enlivening the old lady’s last days, and would delight in pointing out ‘That’s the old fool I work for!’ and as he was aware that every member of the household staff could talk of nothing else but Pickwick, and that his own stone face had cracked with helpless laughter at its contents, it may be assumed that he was indeed familiar with The Posthumous Papers of the Pickwick Club – yet this familiarity was not apparent in the slightest as the servant answered: ‘I have heard of it, sir.’

  ‘You do not read it yourself?’

  ‘I have heard that people do.’

  Gaselee looked down for some time. The servant continued to stand at two and a half inches from the rug’s outermost fibre. The merest movement of his chin suggested that, for once, he considered leaving without being told to do so, and that a silent bow might be appropriate, under the circumstances. Eventually, he ventured upon: ‘Will that be all, sir?’

  ‘All? I don’t know. I was thinking of the past.’ After another long interlude the judge said: ‘When I was a young man, I was a member of a club. There was one very strict rule: bachelors only. Marriage meant expulsion. Well, one day, I made a wager with one of my fellow members: a hundred to one in guineas that I would never reach the bench. We wrote it down in our notebooks, one copy for me, one copy for him – the only wager I have ever made. I lost the wager twelve years ago. But – by then my friend was long dead. I was not deterred. I sought out his executor and paid my debt in full. It was divided among sixteen relatives. I have tried to be thorough.’ After another period of speechlessness, he said: ‘That will be all. Do not forget the bank tomorrow. Did I tell you at three o’clock?’

  ‘If you did not, you have now, sir.’

  ‘Indeed, indeed so.’ The old judge slowly shook his head.

  *

  In the morning, the clerk and others at Sir Stephen Gaselee’s chambers were informed of the judge’s decision to retire at the end of that Hilary term. There were customary expressions of regret. Over lunch that day, the clerk said to another clerk with whom he was on friendly terms, ‘At least he said nothing about putting a stop to Boz.’

  ‘No,’ said his friend. ‘But Boz has put a stop to him.’

  *

  ‘WITHIN TWO YEARS,’ SAID MR Inbelicate, ‘Justice Gaselee was dead.He was buried in the vaults of the Old Foundling Chapel in Guildford Street, where a tablet at the entrance was dedicated to his memory. Yet if Sir Stephen Gaselee was embarrassed to be the original of the judge in Pickwick, that was not the case with Serjeant Bompas, who revelled in being the inspiration for the counsel for the plaintiff.’

  *

  THE SIGHT OF MR SJT Bompas, serjeant-at-law, at work in his goathair wig in the Court of Common Pleas was unlikely to be forgotten. This tall, stout, sandy-complexioned man, approaching fifty, would rise, and the court would hear, by means of his extreme vigour, the point he wished to make – his sandiness turning red as he became excited, his nostrils filling with air, both to fuel his forcefulness and to suggest that the very oxygen he breathed was full of the scent of his own importance. The point was repeated, and repeated once more, so that even the dullest and bluntest and least sharp mind in the jury would understand. Then the penetrating eye of Bompas would run along the line of jurymen, and if he believed that even one man had not grasped the matter, it would be repeated yet again.

  Bompas shaped the minds of the jurymen until they conformed to the conception of events he desired, for he was as skilful with words in the courtroom as many an author in the pages of a substantial work of fiction.

  A fine creator of a character was Bompas! Woe betide the defendant who had not exercised extreme caution with his words in the past, especially if he had committed them to writing.

  In his rise to the position of serjeant-at-law, one phrase was associated with this man: ‘Bompas will get it.’ For when he served as Recorder of Plymouth, Bompas applied for any tempting post that was available – and directly a vacancy appeared, the buzz went around the corridors: ‘Bompas will get it.’ It was inevitable that, when a vacancy arose within the pages of Pickwick for the original of the plaintiff’s counsel, this would be Bompas’s too. At dinner parties, Bompas would say: ‘I am happy to be the inspiration for the counsel in Pickwick; Counsellor O’ Garnish – and you know who I mean – would be desperate for the honour, but he does not deserve it.’

  His formidable memory learnt by heart the speeches in Pickwick. He delighted in drawing out the amorous ambiguities in the note of Mr Pickwick to his landlady: ‘Dear Mrs B., I shall not be at home till tomorrow. Slow coach. Don’t trouble yourself about the warming-pan.’ He could so work himself up, as he declaimed at the dinner table, that his glowing cheek could have been heated from within, just like the pan itself.

  6 May 1837

  Saturday night, the St James’s Theatre – where Boz, not six months before, had appeared in public for the first time, taking the applause. Now he occupied a private box near the stage. With him were his father, mother, wife and sister-in-law. Had the performance taken place on a day when a part of Pickwick was published, there would have been empty rows; but this night, the theatre was full – and for the performance of another piece by Boz.

  ‘I wonder who designed the theatre,’ said Mary, his sister-in-law. ‘It’s lovely!’

  Its overall colour was a delicate white, with caryatids supporting the arches of the roof. There were children in bas-relief, representations of fruit and flowers, and a gilt horseshoe-shaped chandelier, flooding its light upon the audience.

  Boz, his wife and Mary returned to Doughty Street late, wished each other good night, and went upstairs to their respective rooms. It was about one o’clock.

  Boz was in the middle of removing his collar when there was a noise from Mary’s room, as though she were choking. He and his wife ran to her door. They knoc
ked. They called her name. There were more sounds of choking. Boz turned the handle. The girl was on the bed, clutching her chest, struggling to breathe.

  Boz held her in his arms, she took a sip from a bottle of brandy that he applied to her lips. She fell into a gentle sleep.

  Some time afterwards, there came an awareness in Boz that her sleep had gone beyond sleep.

  He cradled her, as the last warmth of her cheek turned cold.

  *

  ‘SHE DIED IN THE MIDDLE of the afternoon,’ said Mr Inbelicate. ‘Doctors were called, but there was nothing they could do. Some weakness in the heart was to blame. You will think me cruel, Scripty, but when I consider Boz’s application of brandy, I want to quip: “On this occasion, brandy was not eau de vie.”’

  ‘That’s a despicable remark.’

  ‘I do not care. If I could, I would dismiss her death in a single line. And do you know what I shall do, Scripty? I shall pour a brandy now. Shall I pour one for you as well?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘She was a virgin for ever once death claimed her,’ he said, as he resumed his position in his armchair, glass in hand, ‘and so in Boz’s eyes she became the most chaste, most pure woman imaginable. It was nonsense of course – there was so much gush he spewed out about her! That is why I want to joke about eau de vie.’ He sipped loudly, and then mockingly imitated Boz. ‘Oh she had not a fault! Oh so perfect a creature never lived! Oh so faultless a girl I have never known! Oh she was the dearest friend I have ever had! Rot.’

  ‘But the grief meant he could not write.’

  ‘That is true. That is the one thing that interests me about this episode.’

  *

  THE PUBLIC CAME TO THE bookshops with their shillings in their fingers, and heard, to their astonishment, there was no Pickwick. In the thoroughfares, the street hawkers did not hold the latest green wrapper above their caps, and met questions with a shrug, or an exasperated shaking of the head. Within an hour of the start of the working day, half the population of London knew Pickwick was not on sale. It was as though the sun had not risen. No one knew why. In the absence of facts, the world was not slow in inventing them: stories circulated in the workplaces, shops and public houses, and were elaborated upon.

  It was said that the strain of producing so much laughter every month had driven the author mad. In one version of this rumour, Boz sat in a Windsor chair in a Hoxton madhouse, staring blankly ahead with a pile of unused paper on his lap and a quill held limply in his hand. In another version he languished in a cell, sometimes raving at the top of his voice, and was visited nightly by the characters he had created in Pickwick. It was even asserted, with authority, that Boz believed his cell to be invaded by ghostly cats, each having been consumed in a pie, gnawing at his toes in revenge, and singing, in a miaowing way:

  Down in the street cries the cats’ meat man

  Fango, dango, with his barrow and can

  Down-to-earth men dismissed these tales. They said that the clue to Pickwick’s disappearance was Mr Pickwick’s entry into debtors’ prison. For where else do authors go? Boz was surely telling his readers that Mr Pickwick’s fate was his own, and there would be no more numbers of Pickwick unless his creditors took pity. Or perhaps he had taken flight, to escape those very creditors? Yes, that was surely it. The author had boarded a steamer across the herring pond, bound for New York. Boz was definitely in America.

  A popular theory, which had circulated for some time, long before the number failed to appear, was the one mentioned by Gaselee’s clerk: Boz was not one man, but many. Pickwick, the theory went, was so vast, with so many details and so many voices speaking within its pages, that it could not possibly be the work of one man. Some believed that Boz was really three men, whose initials spelt out B-O-Z, and the names of Bob, Oswald and Zeno were suggested as the work’s originators. This triumvirate was bound to argue and break up, because two would always side against one. Others held to the view that at least a dozen men, gathered around a table, and pooling their knowledge, were needed to produce such a work, and in this respect, Pickwick bore similarities to the King James Bible; but whatever the committee’s size and composition, it had quarrelled and disbanded itself, and no more would ever be heard of Pickwick again.

  ‘’Sides, he says “ve”,’ said one long-faced theorist of multiple authorship, standing elbows upon a bar in a Brixton public house, in support of this theory. ‘Not “I” – the editor is a “ve”.’

  ‘All editors say that,’ said the slouching man on his left, who shared his misery.

  ‘Vell, I don’t know vether it is the vork of vun man, two men, or many men, young or old,’ said a third companion, on the right, who straightened himself up and tucked in his shirt as a mark of his desire to give his opinion, ‘but if it is vun man, ’e’s a werry strange man. In Pickwick it’s all laughs and smiles vun moment, and then in come a load of ’orrors. If Boz is vun man, ’e’s got a lot of the two men about ’im.’

  All agreed that it would be helpful to know the meaning of the name ‘Boz’. Was it a corruption of Buzz?

  ‘I’ll tell you why he’s called Boz,’ said one thick-lipped knowledgeable fellow from the other side of the bar, with a tendency to lean back and point. ‘Look at the amount of drink in Pickwick. I don’t see why you ain’t realised yet. “Boz” is the biggest joke of all. Pickwick is written by a genius called Booze.’

  *

  An observant few had noticed that an advertisement in The Athenaeum magazine for Sketches by Boz, a year earlier, had revealed the author’s identity. As had a review of The Village Coquettes in early December. If those had been missed, Pickwick itself had even leaked the truth – an advertisement for Sketches by Boz inserted into the eleventh number was as revelatory as the one in The Athenaeum. And, if that was missed, the advertisement appeared in the next number too. If even that was missed, the Gentleman’s Magazine for July 1837 recorded the death of Boz’s sister-in-law, gave Boz’s identity, and confirmed that he was the author of Pickwick. Similar unveilings occurred in issues of the Literary Gazette and the Musical World, while the Court Magazine of April 1837 had gone so far as to publish an etching of Boz, by Browne, sitting in a loose, easy manner, and was certainly sufficient to identify Pickwick’s author if he were spotted in the street.

  Yet none of these had the slightest impact on the vast mass of Pickwick readers: the identity of Boz remained a mystery; and, as another rumour was that Boz was dead, many said it was a mystery he had taken to the grave.

  Boz was, in fact, in Hampstead. Lying to the east of Golders Hill, behind the Bull and Bush inn, was Collins’s Farm, a grey, weatherboarded house with a barn and outbuildings, mostly hidden by trees. It was here that Boz sequestered himself after the funeral of his sister-in-law.

  He was joined by John Forster. Some of the fifteenth number had already been written prior to the death and Forster asked to inspect these manuscript pages. Soon afterwards, Forster said: ‘May I make a few suggestions?’

  *

  ‘WHAT FORSTER SUGGESTED CAN ONLY be guessed at,’ said Mr Inbelicate. ‘Boz had already sent Mr Pickwick to prison, so probably the tone of Pickwick would have darkened in any case.’

  ‘Forster might have encouraged Boz to draw upon the experience of his sister-in-law’s death,’ I said, ‘and make it darker still.’

  ‘Possibly.’

  ‘It seems to me that just as Boz was the notional editor of the club papers, so Forster was now editing Boz.’

  ‘It will not end there, Scripty.’

  *

  THOUSANDS OF POUNDS OF SONOROUS bronze, the Great Bell of St Paul’s Cathedral, tolled across London on the twentieth day of June 1837. The king had passed away early that morning. Some subjects, loyal enough to raise a glass to the king’s memory, also had the humour to repeat an old legend – that the rarely rung Great Bell could turn beer sour in the kegs, and that was why the ale tasted off.

  The face of Boz bore a sour aspect as he sat sl
ippered and jacketed in Doughty Street, endeavouring to complete the latest Pickwick against the concentration-ruining chimes. Even so, he was confident of the number’s power. ‘This number,’ he said to his wife over breakfast, as though inspired by bell metal, ‘will bang all the others.’ In order to explain the absence of Pickwick in the previous month, he also wrote an address for insertion in that fifteenth number:

  Since the appearance of the last number of this work, the editor has had to mourn the sudden death of a very dear young relative to whom he was most affectionately attached and whose society had been, for a long time, the chief solace of his labour. He has been compelled to seek a short interval of rest and quiet.

  When the number appeared, John Forster, in his review for The Examiner, declared it to be Boz’s masterpiece. He placed it beside some of the greatest masters of fiction of such a style in the language.

  *

  ‘Indeed, I would say it rises in the comparison,’ he said to a guest who stood holding a glass of wine, and who had recently arrived for a dinner party at Forster’s home.

  ‘I agwee with you. It definitely wises in the compawison.’

  The guest was Thomas Talfourd, the Member of Parliament for Reading, a delicate-looking man in his early forties, slightly stooped, but overall a handsome individual with deep, dark eyes and short-cropped hair. If he was embarrassed by his inability to pronounce the letter ‘r’ it did not show.

  ‘But here is the man himself,’ said Forster, as a servant brought Boz into the parlour and the guests were introduced.

  ‘I have been delighted to see you at work in both Parliament and in the courts,’ said Boz, warmly shaking Talfourd’s hand.

  ‘I hear you were in the pwactice of the law yourself,’ said Talfourd, returning the warmth.