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DICKENS AS A REPORTER—SKETCHES BY BOZ—THE PICKWICK PAPERS

Charles Dickens was admitted to the gallery of the old House of Commons,—the unreformed and unburned House of 1831,—at the age of nineteen years. He had made himself, even in the merely mechanical sense, a marvellous reporter. He had conquered the systems of shorthand as then dispensed at ten and sixpence by a Mr. Gurney. He could write it with singular speed and accuracy, and write it, apparently, sitting or standing, moving or at rest, and,—what is the really harder thing to do with shorthand,—read it again and transcribe it without a missing word. Thirty years later Dickens once told an admiring company of what reporting meant in the days when the stage coach was, and the telegraph was not. ‘I have often,’ he said, ‘transcribed for the printer from my shorthand notes important public speeches in which the strictest accuracy was required, and a mistake in which would have been to a young man severely compromising,—writing on the palm of my hand by the light of a dark lantern in a postchaise and four, galloping through a wild country, through the dead of night, at the then surprising rate of fifteen miles an hour.... I have worn my knees by writing on them in the old back row of the old gallery of the old House of Commons; and I have worn my feet by standing to write in a preposterous pen in the old House of Lords where we used to be huddled like so many sheep.... I have been in my time belated on miry byroads towards the small hours, forty or fifty miles from London, in a rickety carriage, with exhausted horses and drunken postboys and got back in time for publication.’

From such memories as these Dickens was to draw later on those wonderful scenes of coaching days and coaching nights that adorn so many pages of his books; the flight of Mr. Jingle and the maiden aunt; the moonlight journey of Tom Pinch, and the mail coach on the Dover Road on a heavy November night in the scene that opens the immortal Tale of Two Cities.

But meantime Dickens, while still reporting, had begun to ‘write’. It seems that from his childhood he had always made up in his head imaginary tales and sketched imaginary characters. He had even written them down. At school he had improvised dramas and made up a sort of mimic language for himself and his schoolfellows. Now he began in earnest, writing stories, and at length, greatly daring, he sent one by post to a magazine. Every book on Dickens has quoted the passage in which he has himself described his sensations at his first literary success. He had dropped his first manuscript into a letter-box, posting it after dark with stealth and fear. Then in due course he saw himself in all the majesty of print. ‘On which occasion,’ he says, ‘I walked down to Westminster Hall and turned into it for half an hour, because my eyes were so dimmed with joy and pride that they could not bear the street and were not fit to be seen there.’ The magazine to which he sent the story was the Old Monthly Magazine, published by a Captain Holland, and the story was entitled A Dinner at Poplar Walk, afterwards published under the name of Mr. Minns and his Cousin. It appeared in December of 1833 and was followed by nine other sketches in the same magazine. The sketch of August 1834 was the first to be signed with the pen-name ‘Boz’. This was the nickname of Dickens’s youngest brother, Augustus, and was a sort of nursery adaptation of Moses.

The young author received no pay, the editor of the struggling publication being utterly unable to give him any. So the contributions came to an end. But by good luck a new opening appeared just at the right moment. The Morning Chronicle, for which young Dickens worked as a reporter at a salary of five guineas a week, was about to add an evening edition of a special nature. Dickens proposed to the organizing editor, a Mr. Hogarth, that he should contribute sketches to the evening paper and receive an award of extra pay. The arrangement was made. Indeed every one on the Chronicle, and most of all John Black the editor, seems to have been immensely impressed with Dickens from start to finish. The extra two guineas a week added to his salary was a further proof of it. Henceforth the sketches flowed in a stream from Dickens’s easy pen. The name ‘Boz’ became well known, not to the world at large but at least to the newspaper world of London. When the sketches had sufficiently accumulated, a publisher (John Macrone) was found who offered a hundred and fifty pounds for the copyright. In due time the Sketches by Boz (2 volumes, 1836) appeared as Dickens’s first work. The volumes were illustrated by the well-known George Cruikshank. Thenceforth and for many years Dickens was ‘Boz’ to those who read him. The Pickwick Papers in their first dress bore the legend, ‘Edited by Boz’. Oliver Twist as a serial was signed by ‘Boz’, and it was ‘Boz’ who edited the Memoirs of Grimaldi in 1838. But Pickwick as a book (1837) and Oliver Twist as a book (1838) were signed by Charles Dickens. After that the name disappeared, but the public both in England and America went on using the name at least as an affectionate term for Dickens for many years. It was never, however, a question of hiding a real name behind an anonymity. At first people knew who Boz was, and were no wiser if told that his real name was Dickens. In time the name wore out, fortunately enough, for it lacked dignity and seriousness, being after all more fit for a dog or a clown or a patent medicine than for a writer. The wonder is that it clung so long. The Americans of the ‘forties all welcomed Dickens as ‘Boz’: old-fashioned people kept it up for a long time. Mr. Percy Fitzgerald, writing his book on Dickens in 1905, ‘bozzes’ him perpetually and apologises for it, as a reminiscence not shaken off in old age. ‘Time was’, he says, ‘when it was in everybody’s mouth, and it conveyed a great deal more than it does now, ... a pleasant tone of affectionate interest.’

It is difficult at this date to estimate the literary value of the Sketches by Boz. On the one hand, they belong to a bygone time. The passage of a hundred years (it is, one notes, exactly a hundred years since they were written) has greatly changed the form of our thought, the fashion of our literature and the character and cast of our humour. Since they were written a million writers, great and small, have chronicled their impression of ‘everyday life and everyday people’. In this, as in all else, we stand on the shoulders of those who went before us; albeit that in imaginary literature the position is different from the rising steps of science and the footing is infinitely harder to keep. It would be silly to say that all writers now are better than any writers then. But at least all now share in the legacy they left then.

On the other hand, and working in the other direction, is the fact that the Sketches by Boz were written by Charles Dickens, and that when we read them we know who wrote them. This gives them something of the sacred quality which surrounds the quaint incompetence of a primitive artist and opens the way to much the same conventional admiration.

The Sketches made no pretence of being in a lofty plane, or opening a tragic depth. They are just light pictures of ordinary people and ordinary happenings. The aim is to interest and amuse. The humour is distinctly in advance of most that had preceded it. Humour in its expression in literature has passed through various stages. There is the humour of primitive literature, reproduced in the nursery as Jack the Giant Killer and such; there is the gargantuan and grotesque humour of the Middle Ages; the eighteenth century humour of horseplay and the practical joke; and this we see here passing into the humour of discomfiture and comic misadventure. This became par excellence the humour of the early Victorian England and is only now passing to its rest. From the volumes of Dickens it is never quite absent, and it was at least intended as the primary inspiration of Pickwick. This mode of humour appears as the main current of Dickens’s first story, Mr. Minns and his Cousin. Mr. Minns, a precise trim little old bachelor, is visited by a loud-voiced vulgarian cousin who eats a lion’s share at his breakfast, cuts his ham the wrong way, and whose dog chaws up Mr. Minns’ curtains. Invited to dinner by the cousin, Mr. Minns is delayed by the coach, choked by the dinner, bored by the company, kicked in the shin by the cousin’s awful child (his godson), and brought to a collapse by having to make a speech, misses the home coach, walks till three in the morning,—and as a result cuts the awful child out of his will.

But there is much more in the sketches than the mere humour of misadventure. That alone could never have floated them so long and so high. There is a power of description, or rather of observation, quite out of the common; and that easy and extraordinary command of language to match the observation which came to Dickens as a birthright. But the quite moderate success of the Sketches by Boz was soon to be entirely absorbed by the colossal, the phenomenal success that was so rapidly to follow.

Before, however, the sunrise of Mr. Pickwick appeared over the horizon, an even greater illumination, in the personal sense, was breaking upon Dickens’s life. He was rushing headlong towards marriage. The Mr. Hogarth who had come down from Scotland to work on the Morning Chronicle was a man of cultivation and culture, possessed of a comfortable home, adorned with a bevy of three charming daughters, each as beautiful as the other. Young Dickens, talented and brilliant, was taken into the bosom of the family, and took the girls, all of them, to his heart. No doubt it was a wonderful experience for him, after his nondescript upbringing, to find himself the welcome guest of a normal and comfortable home, the idol of an admiring circle of pretty sisters. Charles ended by marrying one, and one only, of the Hogarth girls, inasmuch as the law of the land would not allow him more than one. But he fell in love with them collectively, and those who know the sequel may still wonder where his final preference lay. All were young. Catherine the eldest, when Charles Dickens became engaged to her, was only twenty years old. Below her was Mary Hogarth, a beautiful girl of sixteen, the joy of the household, beside whose chair there stood already the unseen figure of Death. The youngest was Georgina, whose later fate it was to share his home for nearly thirty years.

In those days the youth of Catherine, the inexperience of Charles, and the uncertainties of the future were no bar to marriage. It was the fashion then to marry early, just as it is the fashion now to marry often. Aspiring brides of eighteen and nineteen dashed off to Gretna Green, pursued by pink and white parents of eight and thirty. An unmarried female of twenty-five was an old maid and Cupid closed his ledgers, apart from his comic supplement, well below forty. Readers of Dickens’s books do not need to be told that with him a woman over forty was either a saint, a freak, or a joke.

Meantime young Dickens, in the process of blossoming forth, had left the parental roof and set up quarters of his own in Furnival’s Inn—not a tavern but a set of chambers,—a quite portentous place in Holborn with a sort of terrace effect and a spacious colonnaded portico. Here, for example, he was seen and described by that once famous American writer Nathaniel P. Willis, who was at this time in London putting together the notes for a book on England. He speaks of an ‘uncarpeted and bleak-looking room with a deal table, two or three chairs and a few books.’ He describes young Dickens as showing an ‘English obsequiousness’ to the publisher who introduced the American to the youthful Boz,—a statement which John Forster charmingly describes as ‘garbage’.

It was to this Inn that Dickens a short time later was to bring his bride. But that was not till the marriage had been rendered feasible by the ‘tempting emolument’ of fifteen guineas a month,—the dazzling bait which lured him to the writing of Pickwick. Indeed the wedding and the appearance of Pickwick took place almost simultaneously. The 31st of March 1836 saw the publication of the first month’s number of the Posthumous Papers of the Pickwick Club, containing a Faithful Record of the Perambulations, Perils, Travel Adventures and Sporting Transactions of the Corresponding Members, edited by ‘Boz’. The 2nd of April of 1836 witnessed the marriage of Charles John Huffam Dickens to Catherine Thomson Hogarth. (He had dropped the ‘h’ of his baptismal name.) The honeymoon was spent at Chalk, on the Dover Road close to Rochester in that part of Kent with which the life and works of Dickens were so closely associated. Then the young couple returned to take up their quarters in London (at Furnival’s Inn, and then at 48 Doughty Street) with all the world, and all that is best in it, before them.

Happily and auspiciously began the married life whose hearth thus brightly illuminated was to burn to dead, cold ashes.

But meantime Mr. Pickwick waits.

Just before his marriage,—while young Dickens was enjoying the rapture of courtship and engagement and tasting the first delights of literary success, the fates were preparing for him a sudden and astounding rise to eminence, unparalleled at any time in the history of letters. The ‘origin’ of the Pickwick papers has been the subject of so much controversy, so much vituperation, and of so much anger on the part of Dickens himself, that it is well to proceed step by step, moving on assured ground.

There was in London at this date (the close of the year 1835) a new and enterprising firm of publishers by name Chapman and Hall. Dickens had acquired a certain connection with them, having contributed to their Library of Humour a story called The Tuggs’s at Ramsgate, afterwards included in the Sketches by Boz. There was in London also a caricature artist called Robert Seymour. He also had worked with Chapman and Hall, having drawn the plates for their Squib Annual which came out in November 1835. Seymour made a suggestion to Mr. Chapman which Mr. Chapman (thirteen years later at the request of Dickens for a statement as to the origin of the Pickwick Papers) explained as follows: ‘He said he would like to do a series of cockney-sporting plates of a superior sort to those he had already published. I said they might do if accompanied by letterpress and published in monthly parts.’ Mr. Hall, the other member of the firm, then called on Dickens to invite him to undertake the work.

‘The idea propounded to me,’ explained Dickens afterwards, ‘was that the monthly something should be a vehicle for certain plates to be executed by Mr. Seymour. And there was a notion either on the part of that admirable humorous artist or of my visitor that a Nimrod club, the members of which were to go out shooting, fishing, and so forth and getting themselves into difficulty through their want of dexterity, would be the best means of introducing these.’ Dickens adds that, as he ‘was no great sportsman except in regards to all kinds of locomotion,’ he asked permission to take his own way with a freer range of English scenes and people. He adds in a sentence that deserves an abiding place in the history of literature, ‘My views being deferred to, I thought of Mr. Pickwick, and wrote the first number from the proof sheets of which Mr. Seymour made his drawings of the club and his happy portrait of its founder.’

Seymour drew also the well-known cover of the first number of The Posthumous Papers of the Pickwick Club. It carries at the top the picture of a very clumsy marksman firing at a very saucy bird; at the bottom, the picture of a middle-aged gentleman fishing in a punt,—fast asleep: at the sides, guns, fishing-rods, landing nets and the bows and arrows of genteel archery. This is Seymour’s Nimrod Club right enough, with Mr. Winkle specially designed for membership in it and Mr. Pickwick destined to rise to glory out of it.

Seymour did three pictures for the next number and then,—it is too far away now to inquire why,—died by his own hand. Later on the claim was made by his widow and his family that Seymour was the real creator of Pickwick, that Dickens had practically appropriated, one might almost say stolen, his idea. The family even put in a claim for legal compensation. The whole contention was ludicrous. Dickens owed nothing to Seymour except the accident of a start,—from somewhere to anywhere. Mr. Pickwick could just as well have begun on board a ship, or at the battle of Waterloo, as in a punt. Dickens would have got him straight presently—by inspiration and by instinct. Seymour’s plan had really nothing to do with Dickens’s book. Pickwick got out of it, not into it. The serial papers of Pickwick never succeeded, indeed were a flat failure, till they got clean away from Seymour’s misadventures into the larger atmosphere of the White Hart Inn and the larger companionship of Mr. Weller. There was nothing new in cockney sportsmen. They were already as old as gunfire. The novelty, the merit, the genius of the book was all Dickens’s and none of it Seymour’s. Dickens should have passed over the criticism with a kindly laugh, with a gentle word for the merits of a fellow-craftsman dead and gone, with a kindly donation from a flowing purse. He could have even said, ‘I owe it all to Seymour,’ and no one would have believed him. But Dickens was not like that. From first to last he was as sensitive, as jealous of his work as any third-rate actor or any unprinted author. An ignoramous could hurt his feelings: a fool could strike him to the heart. He must have homage, he must have recognition. Everyone, every single person, must admit that all that he did was wonderful. He knew that he had created Pickwick and he could not tolerate denial. As late as the year 1866 he wrote to the Athenaeum an angry letter in regard to something written by Seymour’s son.

‘Mr. Seymour the artist,’ he wrote, ‘never originated, suggested, or in any way had to do with, save as illustrator of what I devised, an incident, a character (except the sporting tastes of Mr. Winkle), a name, a phrase, or a word, to be found in the Pickwick Papers. I never saw Mr. Seymour’s handwriting in my life. I never even saw Mr. Seymour but once in my life.’

This, from a man crowned with thirty years of unparalleled success, with honour, fortune and acclaim, sounds,—sounds just what it is,—petty, ungenerous, and unnecessary. The whole episode is of interest now only as it illustrates the smaller sides of great men. The extension of human genius in one direction involves perhaps its contraction in another.

In any case, as already said, the Pickwick Papers, as they appeared first in monthly parts beginning in April 1836, were not a success, indeed were something very like a flat failure. Only four hundred copies of Part I (there were to be twenty-four altogether) were put out, and even that at first seemed too many. Dickens, in fact, seems to have groped his way into the book as Mark Twain did into Huckleberry Finn, the prospect opening before him as he moved on. It was only as he shook off all trace of the Seymour stuff that the book seemed to gather inspiration. The first chapter opens with the proceedings of the Pickwick Club, an institution which somehow vanishes into nothing as the book goes on and is painlessly dissolved in the last chapter. The Club is a sort of burlesque of Charles Dickens’s recollections as a reporter of parliaments, committees and elections. It is a first indication of his abiding conviction of the comic nature of British government and British politics. Then follow the ‘Seymour’ scenes of the misadventures of Pickwick and Winkle and the rest. But for most of us the Pickwick Papers really begin with Mr. Alfred Jingle, or at any rate with Mr. Jingle at the cricket match. At once we are lifted into an atmosphere of exhilaration, not alone for Jingle himself but for the new light thus thrown on Mr. Pickwick. It is perhaps with Jingle that Dickens first really finds himself: that extraordinary magic by which he turns a cheat and a crook into a charming character, a criminal impostor into a thing of delight,—that is Dickens, and that is no one else. Jingle is the first of the long line of these amazing creatures. It is as if the world itself is transformed and its worse sins seen in the light of a kindly and amused tolerance that is higher than humanity itself. This is the highest quality of Dickens’s work; beside this all his comic humour, his melodramatic climax and his fountain of tears is as nothing.

Not that even Jingle (who appears first in Chapter II) was enough alone to carry the Pickwick Papers. The publishers seriously considered abandoning the enterprise and almost did so, when on the publication of the fifth number the circulation went up by leaps and bounds. This marks the appearance of the immortal Samuel Weller as first seen cleaning boots in the yard of the White Hart Inn. Lord Macaulay, not really himself a comic genius, chronicled the fact that it seemed to him that with Samuel Weller something new and great had come into English literature. This was apparently the view of thousands of lesser people. From this point on the ‘papers’ move with an accelerated power and interest. The Homeric episode of Bardell vs. Pickwick gathers on the horizon. The vast gigantic satire upon the law and lawyers, law courts and justice, with the tragic background of the debtors’ prison, lifts up the Pickwick Papers from the hit-and-run of the Nimrods to the proportion of the grand Romance. From this point on a breathless interest followed each successive number. The sales before the end rose to 40,000 copies per number; the publishers’ profits were more than £20,000; and the young author in addition to his ‘tempting emolument’ of fifteen guineas a number, received by the generous foresight of his publishers no less than £2,500 for the serial numbers, and a share in the copyright.

Quite apart from any vain pretension of or for the dead-and-gone Seymour one may well speculate as to what literary people would call the ‘genesis’ of Mr. Pickwick. Where did he come from! The genesis of the Pickwick Papers as a publication begins of course not with Dickens but with the artist Seymour and with the publishers Chapman and Hall; and before them with the many writers and artists who had dealt in random misadventures and the mishaps of sportsmen. The idea goes back at least to Apuleius, and survives in the perennial ‘hunt pictures’ of Mr. Punch. The name ‘Pickwick’ is probably taken from the sign of a coachmaker at Bath. But Mr. Pickwick? ‘I thought of Mr. Pickwick’, says Dickens, with the sublime brevity of genius. Seymour the artist made, as his first suggestion, the picture of a tall thin man. Chapman the publisher, writing on the subject about thirteen years later, said that he himself suggested to Seymour to change his Pickwick into the stout and comfortable gentleman who sits fishing, asleep, in a punt on the cover of the priceless Part I. ‘He made the drawing’, wrote Chapman, ‘from my description of a friend of mine at Richmond, a fat old beau who would wear, in spite of the ladies’ protests, drab tights and black gaiters’. We are not informed why the ladies protested. But whatever this recollection amounts to, whether or not Chapman saw for himself from the written words the type that Dickens meant, or gathered it from Dickens’s talk, is of no consequence. Mr. Pickwick, mind and gaiters, belongs to Dickens alone. One may imagine that Mr. Pickwick came into the world head-first, like the Cheshire Cat in Alice in Wonderland. The first thought would be a vague notion of a set of qualities, a conception of amiable incompetence. This would demand and shape itself to middle age, a certain dignity, a comfortable port and sufficient affluence to set aside all question of finance. The resulting figure of Pickwick seems as inevitable as a proposition in Euclid. Later on, the completed character with its necessary relationship to other people and to the world at large would all lock into its place, item by item.

The book was written as everyone knows without forethought and prearrangement. Dickens himself had no idea of what was to happen. The original idea of Chapman and Hall and Seymour,—the banging guns of the rook-shooting, the balking horses and the awkward riders, was utterly forgotten and left behind. Mr. Pickwick and his friends are carried away on the flood tide of life. Dickens himself was afterwards savagely sensitive upon the point. He fiercely challenged the claim that Seymour originated Pickwick. He bitterly resented the accusation or the assertion that the character of Pickwick changes in the book from that of an amiable nincompoop, an easy mark for cheap deception, towards that of a hero, or even, as Sam Weller called him at the end, ‘an angel in gaiters’.

“It has been observed of Mr. Pickwick, that there is a decided change in his character, as these pages proceed, and that he becomes more good and more sensible. I do not think this change will appear forced or unnatural to my readers, if they will reflect that in real life the peculiarities and oddities of a man who has anything whimsical about him generally impress us first, and that it is not until we are better acquainted with him that we usually begin to look below these superficial traits and to know the better part of him.”

This is very characteristic of Dickens. Of course Pickwick changes. But Dickens could not bear to admit it.

Many things in regard to the Pickwick Papers seem amazing when we look back upon them. The notion of publishing a huge story in monthly issues spread over two years would appear ghastly in the world of to-day. It suggests those Chinese dramas which are said to go on night after night for a month. Yet Dickens not only ‘got away with it’ but made it his familiar and expected method of entertaining his readers. The same plan, varied with serial weekly publication, was followed from Pickwick to Edwin Drood. As each novel was published as a book after coming out in numbers the scheme represents financially an excellent receipt for eating a cake and still having it.

So terrific was the interest in Mr. Pickwick that he had to go upon the stage before even Dickens had finished with him, or before the public yet knew how the great case of Bardell versus Pickwick would end. A playwright of the hour, a versatile Mr. Moncrieff, put on a Pickwick play in which the denouement is perhaps,—if such a heresy may be hinted,—more ingenious than the author’s own ending. In this noble drama, entitled Sam Weller or the Pickwickians, Mr. Alfred Jingle turns out to be the missing Mr. Bardell, who had not been killed with a pewter pot. Mrs. Bardell is only saved by the generosity of Pickwick from a trial for bigamy. The weak spot of the idea is that not even the alchemy of Dickens would have turned Mrs. Bardell into a real Mrs. Jingle or converted Mr. Jingle back to a Mr. Bardell.

In many respects the peculiar nature of the success of Pickwick was as amusing as the book itself. It broke out into a sort of ‘boom’. Men blossomed forth in ‘Pickwick’ coats of dark green or plum colour with large brass and horn buttons: there were ‘Pickwick’ hats copied from the one worn by Mr. Pickwick in the punt, ‘Pickwick’ canes and ‘Pickwick’ gaiters; and most noticeable of all was the famous cigar, the ‘Penny Pickwick’, very long and very thin and named on the Latin principle of Lucus a non lucendo. In short, the success of the Pickwick Papers was entirely Pickwickian.

One tragic and devastating episode occurred to mar the happiness of Dickens’s life and work. Mary Hogarth, his sister-in-law, died with appalling suddenness while he was engaged on the Pickwick Papers. Dickens was prostrated with grief. Work was impossible even at such an important juncture. The publication of the current number had to be postponed. ‘Young, beautiful and good,’ so wrote Dickens, characteristically, as the epitaph for the girl’s gravestone. ‘God numbered her among his angels at the early age of seventeen.’ He never forgot her. Her memory often came back to him as he wrote: and once, years afterwards in Italy, she came to him as a vision of the night,—so lifelike that he could hardly call it a dream.