Death and Mr. Pickwick

by Stephen Jarvis

  Never before or since have I felt such a sense of reality. Perhaps it is because feelings are stirred by Pickwick that novels do not usually stir. Many have confessed to feelings of respect for Mr Pickwick, that if you were to meet him, you would show him consideration, and would want to introduce him to friends. I don’t know whether any book has ever done such a thing before. Perhaps all this was the cauldron in which my experience happened.

  It was an experience. The Pickwickians were upstairs at the Bull.

  If I shake my head now, if I attempt to doubt the experience, then I feel an overwhelming sense of my own insincerity – and I go back in my mind to the moment of pulling down the slat, and the feeling I had then. If a man saw a ghost, or experienced some supernatural or religious manifestation, I believe he would be an altered man; well, I am an altered man. I know what happened. I do not expect to be believed, and so I rarely mention this experience. But I cannot deny it.

  Such an event occurred only once, and in that location, and nowhere else. I did try to provoke it again. Later in the morning, I wandered around Rochester, aware all the time of the dominating presence of the castle. It is a fine old ruin, and I walked up its crumbling staircases, and lingered in its dark corners, but no matter how much I concentrated my gaze and screwed up my eyes on the shadows, no matter whether I was near or far from its arches, it did not make me know that the Pickwickians were close. I ascended the worn steps of the cathedral, and I heard a tour guide talk of the tragic pilgrimage of St William of Perth, patron saint of the city, but I did not hear – really hear – Jingle’s chatter. I wandered to the theatre at the far end of the town, just before the road reaches the fields, which had now become a Conservative Club with political posters, and I stood by the porch, wondering if I could hear Jingle there, entering the stage door. But no, nothing. Then I walked to Fort Pitt, near the railway station. I wandered up a hill and down again, across a muddy field, into a meadow, by some trees – nothing again. The Pickwickians had flickered into existence, but briefly. I tell you: it happened.

  1932

  Some cobbles in a yard, and the arch, are all that survive of the Golden Cross Inn. These are near Duncannon Street. I stepped on the cobbles, I went under the arch. The inns and public houses of Pickwick are dying. Over fifty were mentioned in the book; now, no more than a dozen survive. Every time I see a workman wielding a pickaxe on a road in London, I fear he will destroy something precious connected with Pickwick and its times. It is not with any pleasure that I shall add to my collection of bricks.

  A friend of mine had taken me angling the previous week, and we went to the clubhouse afterwards, where he recorded the statistics of his catch – that is to say, the species of fish and the weight. I turned the pages of the club’s book, and it contained nothing but such dull statistics. There was another club book, containing formal minutes of meetings, but there was nothing of wider interest: no humorous remarks, no drawings, no character sketches, no poems – nothing at all comparable to the chronicles of the Houghton Angling Club. Nowadays, when people travel easily by car and by train, and a day’s catch can be captured by camera, men do not sit in hotels waiting for the fish to rise, talking to pass the time, and making a chronicle of their remarks.

  But still, after the melancholy trip to the remnants of the Golden Cross, I was cheered by a visit to a hotel, where the barman poured my order from a bottle of Seagers Pickwick Cocktail.

  19 August 1934. The exact day has to be recorded.

  Earlier, in the spring of this year, I gained admission to Shepherd’s Bush film studios, by pretending that I was an actor. Open auditions were taking place for the role of Mr Pickwick in a film of The Pickwick Papers. The studio was one moving mass of fat men, two hundred would-be Mr Pickwicks, each with a number pinned to his chest, each believing the part was his. I was not so fat in those days – otherwise I would have applied myself.

  Mr Forde, the director, had a likeable enough smile, but most of the interviews were conducted by a formidable-looking woman sitting beside him, possibly his wife.

  ‘And your acting experience?’ I heard her say to the huge and numbered man she had called to her table.

  ‘I’ve done amateur dramatics,’ he said. ‘I was praised for my deportment when I made my debut. And that was quite an accomplishment, considering.’

  ‘Considering your size, you mean?’

  ‘No. Considering that my trousers were gradually sliding down as I came on stage, on account of the braces buttons having given way.’

  Forward came another applicant. ‘What are your qualifications?’ she said.

  ‘Well,’ he replied in a north country accent, ‘I weigh twenty-three stun.’

  Then came a slender woman, who was gripping one of the numbers. ‘I’m not here for the part myself, of course, but I want to suggest my boyfriend.’ She brought out a photograph. ‘His figure is perfect for the part. I regret to say.’

  They continued, in a single file, like a gigantic set of unthreaded human beads: a Lancashire butcher, undoubtedly with substantial internal marbling, a London goldsmith who made one think of a brass ball in a pawnbroker’s sign, a Stockport navvy big as a barge on a canal he’d dug; all that was needed, these men apparently believed, was a round tummy and a genial manner.

  This audition happened some months ago. Today, I bought a copy of Empire News. There was an article which began: ‘What has happened to Pickwick?’ Reading on, I discovered that Mr Forde and the executives of Gaumont-British Films had decided to shelve the Pickwick project, because ‘It is not considered box-office.’

  Not considered box-office. So it is now undeniable: the age of Pickwick is coming to an end. Today’s date, 19 August 1934, will stay in my mind as much as 31 March 1836, when the first number was published, and the age of Pickwick began.

  To be frank, there are many signs of the end. I once knew a man who could finish almost any sentence chosen at random from Pickwick; I have met scores more whose speech is peppered with analogies from the book, or are ready to quote from it. But now I notice that the men who have such predilections are all of a certain age. The young are not reading Pickwick. Everyone is so much more mobile these days, not just by railway, but by car and by aeroplane. We do not need Pickwick as our means of travel.

  31 March 1936

  In a banqueting hall, at Grosvenor House, I was among several hundred invited guests. I recognised quite a few faces, distributed around the tables: an archbishop, the Lord Mayor of London, several West End actors, a number of distinguished literary men, a viscountess.

  There was also an empty chair, on the top table, complemented by a knife, fork, wine glass and napkin, all ready for the guest of honour to use. The name card in front of this chair said: ‘Mr Pickwick’.

  There were calls for order, and a dignified but rather nondescript man, with grey eyes and grey hair, of late middle-age, took to his feet. He started his oration.

  ‘March is a month that sees days with noticeably more light, and the weather better, after the darkness of winter,’ he began. ‘So it is appropriate that a great work made its debut at the end of March 1836 – a work which itself greatly increased the light and laughter throughout our world. For we know that at this moment – in England – in America – in the empire – wherever people speak the English language as their mother tongue, or have access to translations, men, women and children are taking up this immortal book, some for the first time, some for the second, many for the third, fourth, fifth, even – I am sure this applies to some in this hall – for the fiftieth time.

  ‘At the heart of this work is a man instantly recognised by his glasses, bald head, tights and gaiters – and yes, by his belly too. This man is known throughout the world. Mr Pickwick is one of the most famous men who has ever lived. And he did live and he does live.

  ‘Think of other men who have achieved fame. Alexander the Great. Julius Caesar. Napoleon. They conquered, yes. But we do not see them everywhere. We do not see Ale
xander brands and Caesar products and Napoleon goods in every high street. In the last hundred years, the flow of Pickwickian wares has never stopped. Do you know – an Australian friend of mine sent me The Pickwick Papers recently, and I mean by that a brand of cigarette paper. I told him I was surprised that no one had thought of it before.

  ‘What of other famous men? Shakespeare, you say. Well, he is famous, but what do we know of him? He is an enigma. Yet we have seen Mr Pickwick sitting at the table for breakfast, lunch and dinner. Whole books have been written just about the inns that Mr Pickwick drank in or the roads of Kent he travelled upon.

  ‘Mr Pickwick is a man so famous that the person who does not know of his adventures has to be treated with suspicion. “What!” you say to the man who confesses he has not read the immortal book. “You have not read Pickwick! You have not read Pickwick!”

  ‘Let me give you an example of the effects of that fame. There are people in this world whose surname just happens to be Pickwick. And once, just once, I came to understand the burden of bearing the most famous name in the world.

  ‘By chance I was in a hotel lobby, and a man was checking out, and I heard the receptionist say: “Have a good journey, Mr Pickwick.” You can imagine my amazement! I was standing at the desk, waiting to collect my keys, and this man, this person beside me, was Mr Pickwick! Well. I looked at him – and he didn’t look anything like our Mr Pickwick – and he gave me a resigned smile. After a little persuasion, he agreed to sit with me and have a cup of tea in the lobby. “Are you sure you would not like something stronger?” I said. And he replied: “I avoid being seen in public drinking alcohol. People always want to buy me a drink in a bar – and believe me, the thrill of that runs dry.”

  ‘He told me that hotels were among the worst places in the world for him – because whenever he went to the desk saying that he had booked a room, and told the receptionist he was Mr Pickwick … well, you can imagine the effect. “I just hope,” he said, “I am never cautioned by the police.”

  ‘He described for me a catalogue of the annoyances he had suffered. Imagine what it is like waiting in a queue for that name to be read out. Or, for that matter, the horror of seeing the effect of that signature when passing over a cheque. He wore glasses for reading, he said, and they had been stolen many times. Worse than that, every few months, when at home, there would be a knock at the street door. He would open up, and it would be someone he had never seen in his life, and often an American. They had looked him up in a directory. And the person on the doorstep holds out a hand and says: “Put it there. I want to say I’ve shaken hands with Mr Pickwick.” There would often be a comment about how he had lost weight, and even the audacity of patting his stomach – imagine a stranger doing that! How would you feel? And wherever he went, people would always want to tell him something about The Pickwick Papers. There were people who had told him that everything connected with Pickwick was of interest to them. And he said to me: “I could give them the dirt off my shoe and they would treasure it.”

  ‘All these things happened to this poor gentleman because no name created by the imagination is better known than that of Mr Pickwick.

  ‘Why is this? Why should this have occurred? I have come to believe that The Pickwick Papers is something approaching a universally fascinating object.

  ‘If for a moment, we concede that Mr Pickwick is a character from fiction – just for a moment – then he is the most famous character in fiction there has ever been. A childlike man, an unsuspecting man; a man who would never connive against his fellow man. And when we read of Mr Pickwick, we feel assured that human beings are good, or might be so. Though we may laugh at Mr Pickwick’s follies, we never despise him. In his presence, we lose the tendency to sneer.

  ‘We in this hall may be respectable people. Or rather – some in this hall may be respectable people! We may act with decorum. But there is a part of us which loves to be foolish, only we dare not. Well, Mr Pickwick can be foolish for us. We can go about our respectable lives, with just a little more ease because of Mr Pickwick. This surely is one of the reasons he plays such a role in our lives, and why we feel he is real.

  ‘Mr Pickwick is more real to us than the characters of so-called real history. Indeed, what does “reality” count for when this fictional man, Mr Pickwick, has enriched our lives so much, and brought more happiness to the world than thousands – millions – of human beings could ever hope to do? Mr Pickwick has brought incalculable joy to the human race. Within a year of the last serial part being published, editions of Pickwick appeared in Philadelphia, New York, Calcutta and Australia. Having conquered Britain, Mr Pickwick was on his way to conquering the world. When a street had to be named, Goswell Street was sure to be a suggestion – and so there are Goswell Streets across the empire and in America. It was inevitable that soon, entire towns called Pickwick came into existence. Let me take you for a moment back to 1854, when a schooner dropped anchor in a tributary of the Mississippi. Within a few years, there stood a six-storey flour mill made of local stone. The mill worked day and night, the wheat was dumped down a chute, into a hopper. You can imagine all the dust. Well, the wife of the operator of the mill read to the workers as they filled the sacks. She read from the book. She read at night, during breaks, choosing parts that struck her fancy. These readings became so popular that in a little while, when it came to finding a name for the settlement, there could be only one name. A name that was pleasant, and might attract new settlers. And so the town of Pickwick, Minnesota, came into the world.

  ‘The Briton spreads his seed across the world, but the colonisation by the fictional is surely unprecedented.

  ‘The Pickwick Papers is, apart from the Bible, the best-known book in the world. What other work, apart from Holy Scripture, has made such a profound impression upon the entire habitable globe? How many editions of The Pickwick Papers have there been? I will tell you. Contrary to what some of you may think, I have prepared for this speech. A collector informs me that at least 223 English language editions have been published. Enough Pickwicks have been printed to place a copy in every other household in the entire English-speaking world.

  ‘I remember wandering in the streets around Mansion House when I was a boy, and I approached a book cart. This cart was different though. Instead of the usual second-hands and remainders, on this cart, piled high, was a new edition of Pickwick. The entire, unabridged Pickwick Papers, double-columned in tiny print, with twenty new illustrations, on sale for just a penny. One penny! It was an advertising promotion, for Goodall, Backhouse and Co.’s range of products – and this was an edition of half a million copies! I remember the pictures were very crudely drawn, but there was one of the Pickwick Club discussing the merits of the company’s custard powder and baking powder, and there were bottles and boxes of Goodall, Backhouse and Co.’s products on the table. And there was Mr Pickwick in his customary pose, holding aloft a bottle of the company’s Yorkshire Relish.

  ‘This is one extreme pole of Pickwick, the cheapest edition ever produced. At the other extreme, is the most expensive Pickwick ever produced – the so-called millionaires’ edition, the St Dunstan edition on illuminated vellum, priced at twenty thousand pounds a copy, of which only fifteen copies have ever been printed. But even the St Dunstan is not the most valuable version of the Pickwick text in the world. That is the manuscript itself, written in Dickens’s own hand. About forty or so leaves have survived of the two thousand that would have made up the entire Pickwick manuscript, but those that do survive are the most valuable modern manuscript in the world. One leaf is in the British Museum, and there it resides, in a glass case, always attracting a steady flow of eager gazers, looking at the ink, which was originally black, but now after a century, faded to brown.

  ‘In between the cheap and the priceless, all manner of other Pickwicks may be inserted. Every Christmas time there is a new Pickwick at the booksellers, with new explanatory notes, and newly commissioned pictures.

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sp; ‘If you were to collect every commentary on this book and if you were to cut out every advertisement, you would have the contents of a small library; if you were to gather every piece of porcelain, or item of clothing inspired by the book, and every doll, shoehorn, spoon and pipe tamper and every other object of a Pickwickian nature, you would fill up a small museum. We can eat off Pickwick plates, we can drink from Pickwick mugs, served up on a Pickwick tray. People speak of the Victorian era. They might just as well call it the Pickwickian era.

  ‘The question has to be asked whether a single more remarkable book has ever appeared in the English language. For you never know Pickwick completely, you never exhaust it. Every year, at the first onset of a tickling cough, I take to bed with my Pickwick and always I am startled by a detail I had not seen before, as though a mischievous elf has inserted extra words in the dead of night. Or should I say goblin, not elf?

  ‘Pickwick surprises you in the way that a person does. It is an enchanted book which seemingly changes its own contents; a book which, when you put it back on the shelf, has altered by the time you pick it up again. Then you sit back, you smoke your pipe, and you contemplate the new discovery you have made about its magical contents.

  ‘Were I a prisoner in a lonely cell, or Robinson Crusoe on his island, and I had but one book to read, then this would be the book! I would never grow tired of it. Pickwick would give me the variety of life I craved.