Dickens

by Fred Kaplan

  Despite a delay of a few days because of moving from 13 to 15 Furnival’s Inn, he assured his new publisher on February 18, 1836, that “Pickwick,” a name taken from a stagecoach owner he remembered from his travels, “is at length begun in all his might and glory. The first chapter will be ready tomorrow.” When Seymour did a sketch of a thin Pickwick, Chapman protested that he “must be a fat man; good humour and flesh had always gone together since the days of Falstaff.” When, on the twenty-first, both Chapman and Hall came to see what their new man had done, the first number was ready. They apparently liked it. Dickens had more trouble with the second, though he had it ready by the middle of March. They had scheduled the first number to come out on March 31, dated April 1. That second number, ready by mid-March, was insurance that there would be an April 30 appearance of the May 1 number. Thereafter he would provide his text about the end of the third week of the month for publication about five weeks later. In mid-April, Dickens glowingly proclaimed, on the basis of scanty evidence, “PICKWICK TRIUMPHANT.” Actually, the sale of the pressrun of a thousand copies of the first number had been modest. Chapman and Hall reduced the run of the second to five hundred copies.

  While they were at work on the third, a shocking event brought progress to an abrupt halt. Overtired, irritated, sensitive about his lack of education and his working-class background, Seymour shot himself to death on April 20 in the garden of his home in Islington. The coroner’s verdict was “temporary derangement.” Having returned from his honeymoon ten days before, Dickens had praised the artist for “how much the result of your labours, has surpassed my expectations.” He had urged him, though, perhaps uneasy at having inserted into the second number an interpolated “Stroller’s Tale” that he had written some time before, to redo the etching to accompany it, since “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.” On the seventeenth, Seymour had spent a short time with him at Furnival’s Inn, their only meeting, probably trying to get clear what his young colleague wanted and assessing with whom he was dealing.25

  The artist’s legacy to his associates was a business problem. He had provided four illustrations for the first number but had completed only three for the second. What, then, should they do with Pickwick Papers? So far, it had been neither a success nor a failure. Ready with a bold proposal, Dickens recommended that they continue it, with some changes that would improve the chances for increased sales. Why not have two instead of four illustrations each monthly number, and thirty-two pages of text instead of twenty-four? With sixteen pages between illustrations, he “could expand his scenes and amplify his characterizations in ways he could not when he had to invent a new comic climax every six pages.” The diminution of the role of the illustrator would give him more control over the book. His words would now unarguably be more important than the illustrations. And the publisher would have to pay more attention to the author than to the artist, for the success of the work would depend on the text. For every two sheets, or thirty-two pages, he had proposed that he should receive twenty pounds, a raise of one pound per sheet over the rate of payment for the first two numbers. “If the Work should be very successful … I apprehend you would have no objection to go a little further.”26

  The economics were clear to Chapman and Hall. Abandoning the project meant a substantial loss in stock and in cash outlay as well as the inevitable need to find another investment that might or might not be less risky. They had reason to be pleased with what Dickens had done in the first two numbers, though they had not yet and might never gain from it financially. The continuing success of Sketches confirmed that he was still a good author in whom to invest. His youth and ambition were much in his favor. Seymour could be replaced easily, especially since, with the changes that Dickens proposed, there would be less need to employ a well-known, highly paid illustrator. They soon decided that the proposal was worth accepting. Business associates recommended Robert Buss. A young artist, inexperienced with the etching process in book illustration, Buss had worked on Chapman and Hall’s Library of Fiction and was available at short notice. Buss, despite his own reservations, was induced by Hall to give it a try, with the understanding that his initial stumblings in the learning stage would be tolerated until he had a chance to prove himself. He did the two illustrations for the third number to everyone’s dissatisfaction, including his own, and was promptly fired.27 He and Dickens had never met.

  With word out that an illustrator was needed, two young artists separately approached him. A tall, pudgy-faced, well-educated young man, William Makepeace Thackeray, came to see him at Furnival’s Inn. Eager to be selected, among other reasons because he wanted to marry, he brought “two or three drawings … which, strange to say,” Dickens “did not find suitable.”28 A self-trained artist, who, like Thackeray, had been educated at Charterhouse and had studied medicine, John Leech sent him some designs, on Cruikshank’s recommendation. Dickens thought them “extremely well-conceived, and executed.” But when Leech threatened to call on him in late August, he fobbed him off to Chapman and Hall. Dickens and the publisher had already selected the right person. Hablot Knight Browne is “a gentleman of very great ability, with whose designs I am exceedingly well satisfied, and from whom I feel it neither my wish, nor my interest, to part.” Probably he had been chosen for the assignment in the process of the firing of Buss. Three years younger than Dickens, he had trained from an early age as an apprentice illustrator. In 1832 he had won a medal for the best illustration of an historical subject. Now Chapman and Hall’s main illustrator for the Library of Fiction, he had effectively illustrated Dickens’ recent pamphlet broadside Sunday Under Three Heads, directed against a legislative attempt to prohibit all work and recreation on Sunday, which Chapman and Hall had published in June. He had proven himself a rapid, reliable, and observant worker who most likely could work readily under Dickens’ direction.29 A modest and broodingly private man, Browne was a talented illustrator without any painterly or fine-arts ambitions.

  For the third number, in June 1836, the first to reflect the new arrangement, the print run was restored to one thousand copies. Even if they had all been sold, the return to the publisher would have been too small to cover expenses. Short of capital, Chapman and Hall needed to use all the proceeds beyond their fixed costs to pay for the production of the next number. They innovatively created a nation-wide distribution network by enlisting provincial booksellers to take each month at no risk a stack of the thirty-six pages of text and two illustrations, bound like a pamphlet in a green paper cover with a design and inserted advertisements, the unsold copies to be returned at the publisher’s expense.30 With the introduction in the fourth number of the lively, vividly depicted Sam Weller, with his humorous Cockney wisdom, helped by the increasing efficiency of the provincial network, the sales began to increase rapidly. In August, the delighted Chapman and Hall voluntarily increased his remuneration as of November to twenty-five pounds per number. Soon Pickwick Papers was indeed triumphant. Monthly sales rocketed toward forty thousand copies. Profits were immense. By August 1837, when the sixteenth of the twenty numbers appeared, the publisher made an additional settlement with their now prize author of two thousand pounds for the twenty numbers, eighty pounds per number more than the agreement with which they had started. With the copyright entirely theirs, Chapman and Hall made at least ten thousand pounds’ profit on the book.

  What was most on Dickens’ mind, though, was not money, marriage, publishers, a new series of Sketches, newspaper reporting, the theatre, or the pressure of his schedule and commitments, important as these things were. His energies were fast becoming immersed in the all-absorbing challenge of creation. Writing had become a daily confrontation with the sacred, with his craft, his art, and his life. He needed to remind his publisher and himself that Pickwick had a claim on permanence, that it was literature and that he was an artist. Schedules had t
o have the flexibility that art demands. “The spirits are not,” he told Chapman and Hall, “to be forced up to Pickwick point, every day.” Sometimes his imaginative energy outpaced the speed of his pen. Sometimes his nervous energy brought him out of his chair. Sometimes he sat “down to begin a number, and feeling unequal to the task,” he would “do what is far better under such circumstances—get up, and wait.…” With a strong sense of high stakes, of the call to fame and fortune, he began to build on partial truth a myth of total self-sufficiency. Pickwick Papers marked the first conclusive moment of his triumph over early deprivation. “If I were to live a hundred years, and write three novels in each, I should never be so proud of any of them, as I am of Pickwick, feeling as I do, that it has made its own way”—that he had made his own way—”and hoping … that long after my hand is withered … Pickwick will be found on many a dusty shelf with many a better work.”31 At twenty-four years, he was aware that he was creating great literature. He felt Pickwick Papers flowing out of himself and his life.

  In these comic idealizations, he created the purest myth, touched by a manageable darkness, of his own and his culture’s recovery from economic and emotional deprivation. In the Pickwick world the recovery occupies the present of an optimistic consciousness without ever denying the past or promising that the future will be undeviatingly bright and inclusive. It is a novel of personal myth, not history, of the brightness of his own first triumphant self-assertion, of his young adulthood and his temporary liberation. The historical world stands still in Pickwick Papers at the moment in which the bright sun of Mr. Pickwick and his circle flares out with the energy of stagecoaches, rural travels, unshakable comradeship, happy times. After the trauma of the Reform Bill, in the brief pause before the Victorian spurt into social consciousness, the British reading public found its message of optimism, class harmony, benevolence, and comic reconciliation irresistible. The social problems created by poverty, industrialization, undercapitalization, and a restrictive class structure that he knew so well from his own experience are mostly excluded from the novel. At its core is a definition of human nature as essentially benevolent, as desirably Pickwickian. The scenery of Kent, the dignity of Rochester, the comedy of farce and remediation, the glow of Christmas, dominate the Pickwickian self-definition.

  In his childhood, he had experienced isolation and fragmentation. The universe of Mr. Pickwick, though, is fraternal and cohesive, with a penumbra of comicality that transforms a fallen world into a pleasurable place of harmless eccentricity. Matthew Lamert becomes Dr. Slammer. Dodson and Fogg are balanced by the morally responsible Perker. The reprobate Jingle and Job Trotter are redeemed by their response to Pickwick’s benevolence. The corruptions of the political world of Eatanswill, based on what he had seen as a political reporter, cannot touch the essential triumph of right feeling. The world of darkness, nightmare, and insecurity, the laughter of the devil-rat, Chips, is narrowed, imprisoned, so to speak, in the very place in which his father had been incarcerated. Refusing to pay Mrs. Bardell’s legal costs, Pickwick accepts the consequences as an affirmation of who and what he has decided he wants to be. His imprisonment in the Fleet parallels but transcends John Dickens’. Since he consciously chooses to assert his moral integrity, his loss of liberty is an ascension into greater freedom. Through material incompetence, through flaws of personality, through insufficient self and family protectiveness, his father had descended into an imprisonment that he could not avoid. In the depiction of Pickwick’s imprisonment, Dickens plays sensitively with one of the most painful experiences of his childhood. Among other things, he creates in his fictional character an idealized version of his father, an antifather who voluntarily chooses prison as an exemplification of his moral stature and as an expression of his control over his own life, the kind of control that Charles had been so eager to achieve for himself. That John Dickens had not achieved such liberation was painfully clear to his son. While he worked on Pickwick Papers, his father found his success a valuable resource. Reminding the publishers “how your interests are bound up with those of my son,” he attempted to borrow money from Chapman and Hall without his son’s knowledge.32

  Pickwick’s final stasis and happiness, though, demand his separation from adventure and the world, his retreat into the upper-middle-class seclusion of his protected enclosure of self-sufficiency in his pleasant house in Dulwich. Unlike John Dickens, he has managed to liberate himself entirely from financial pressures. There is nothing he cannot afford, nothing that the material world can deny him. The novel never calls into question the applicability of that solution. Pickwick Papers is a novel of exclusion. The Pickwick world is satirized with loving, comic acceptance. No doubt, the novel implies, Pickwick could, if he desired, go out into the world again, a little wiser, adventuring into resolvable farce, ultimately returning to his happy home. But he does not and will not. It is a containment that embodies the new structures of personal relationship, of marriage and of professional life, that Dickens had created for himself, though it is more rarefied, static, and narrow. The novel ends, Pickwick stops. Dickens, though, hardly paused.

  CHAPTER FOUR

  Charley Is My Darling

  (1837–1841)

  WHILE HE WORKED “LIKE A HOUSE O’ FIRE” ON A MORNING IN LATE June 1837, writing the fifteenth number of Pickwick Papers, the bells of St. Paul’s began to toll for the death of King William IV. “If you know anybody,” he wrote to John Forster, “I wish you’d send round and ask them not to ring … I can hardly hear my own ideas.”1 He had neither the power nor the inclination to hold back the new. On the contrary, he and his friends greeted the death of the old king with a combination of personal indifference and communal relief. By the middle of 1837, the twenty-five-year-old author had become important to an expanding circle of writers and artists, most of whom delighted in the prospect of ringing out the old, inaugurating a new era of high seriousness, fervent companionship, and artistic achievement.

  In late 1836 he had been introduced to a successful young artist, Daniel Maclise. Irresistible, “very mad & Irish, but very affectionate,” Maclise was the son of a poor tradesman. From childhood he had shown outstanding ability at drawing. The star student at the newly opened Academy of Art in Cork, he created a stir and received high praise from his subject when he drew Sir Walter Scott. A highly skilled portraitist who excelled in catching likenesses in rapid sketches, he began to make his living as a professional artist in 1825. Arriving in London in the summer of 1827, the twenty-one-year-old, tall, well-built, handsome Irishman, with long “dark hair … in heavy waves,” looked Byronic and ambitious.2 Often moody, sometimes depressed, he had an energy for adventures, passions, and jokes that outpaced his capacity for withdrawal and darkness. He quickly became a member of the Fraserians. Novelists like Ainsworth, Edward Bulwer, and soon Thackeray, artists like Cruikshank, journalists like William Jerdan, Douglas Jerrold, Francis Mahony, and William Maginn, poets like the attractive and ambitious Letitia Landon, and an assortment of Bohemian figures ranging from the romantically dissolute to the dandyesque met regularly in the Fraser’s back room. Maclise introduced Dickens to many of them. Fun-loving, handsome, and talented, with an attraction for and to women, he was a well-known social and amorous man-about-town who appealed immensely to Dickens and soon was to become one of his two most intimate companions. He was to sit for Maclise’s pen and brush many times. But Thackeray’s 1836 drawing of himself, Maclise, Mahony, and a rakishly smoking Dickens at St. James’s Square bring writer and artist vividly together for the first time.

  When he met the young critic and biographer John Forster in the winter of 1836, introduced by Ainsworth, Dickens began the most sustained friendship of his life. Despite stormy moments and some brief estrangements, the fraternal bond resonated warmly for almost thirty-five years. Forster’s passion for him had its fullest expression in his biography of his friend, shaping posterity’s view of the novelist for close to a century. They first shook hands in the
year in which Queen Victoria came to the throne. They were buried over three decades later in the same cultural grave. Forster became a force to be resisted as well as embraced, grist for Dickens’ satiric mill, parodied early in their friendship in Dowler in Pickwick Papers and later in Podsnap in Our Mutual Friend. But when Forster’s eldest brother died in 1845, Dickens reminded him that “you have a Brother left. One bound to you by ties as strong as ever Nature forged. By ties never to be broken, weakened, changed in any way.…”