WHEN the Author commenced this Work, he proposed to himself three
objects—
First. To establish a periodical, which should enable him to present,
under one general head, and not as separate and distinct publications,
certain fictions that he had it in contemplation to write.
Secondly. To produce these Tales in weekly numbers, hoping that to
shorten the intervals of communication between himself and his readers,
would be to knit more closely the pleasant relations they had held, for
Forty Months.
Thirdly. In the execution of this weekly task, to have as much regard as
its exigencies would permit, to each story as a whole, and to the
possibility of its publication at some distant day, apart from the
machinery in which it had its origin.
The characters of Master Humphrey and his three friends, and the little
fancy of the clock, were the results of these considerations. When he
sought to interest his readers in those who talked, and read, and
listened, he revived Mr. Pickwick and his humble friends; not with any
intention of re-opening an exhausted and abandoned mine, but to connect
them in the thoughts of those whose favourites they had been, with the
tranquil enjoyments of Master Humphrey.
It was never the intention of the Author to make the Members of Master
Humphrey’s clock, active agents in the stories they are supposed to
relate. Having brought himself in the commencement of his undertaking to
feel an interest in these quiet creatures, and to imagine them in their
chamber of meeting, eager listeners to all he had to tell, the Author
hoped—as authors will—to succeed in awakening some of his own emotion in
the bosoms of his readers. Imagining Master Humphrey in his chimney
corner, resuming night after night the narrative,—say, of the _Old
Curiosity Shop_—picturing to himself the various sensations of his
hearers—thinking how Jack Redburn might incline to poor Kit, and perhaps
lean too favourably even towards the lighter vices of Mr. Richard
Swiveller—how the deaf gentleman would have his favourite and Mr. Miles
his—and how all these gentle spirits would trace some faint reflexion in
their past lives in the varying currents of the tale—he has insensibly
fallen into the belief that they are present to his readers as they are
to him, and has forgotten that, like one whose vision is disordered, he
may be conjuring up bright figures when there is nothing but empty space.
The short papers which are to be found at the beginning of the volume
were indispensable to the form of publication and the limited extent of
each number, as no story of length or interest could be begun until “The
Clock was wound up and fairly going.”
The Author would fain hope that there are not many who would disturb
Master Humphrey and his friends in their seclusion; who would have them
forego their present enjoyments, to exchange those confidences with each
other, the absence of which is the foundation of their mutual trust. For
when their occupation is gone, when their tales are ended, and but their
personal histories remain, the chimney corner will be growing cold, and
the clock will be about to stop for ever.
One other word in his own person, and he returns to the more grateful
task of speaking for those imaginary people whose little world lies
within these pages.
It may be some consolation to those well-disposed ladies and gentlemen
who, in the interval between the conclusion of his last work and the
commencement of this, originated a report that he had gone raving mad, to
know that it spread as rapidly as could be desired, and was made the
subject of considerable dispute; not as regarded the fact, for that was
as thoroughly established as the duel between Sir Peter Teazle and
Charles Surface in the _School for Scandal_; but with reference to the
unfortunate lunatic’s place of confinement; one party insisting
positively on Bedlam, another inclining favourably towards St. Luke’s,
and a third swearing strongly by the asylum at Hanwell; while each backed
its case by circumstantial evidence of the same excellent nature as that
brought to bear by Sir Benjamin Backbite on the pistol shot which struck
against the little bronze bust of Shakespeare over the fireplace, grazed
out of the window at a right angle, and wounded the postman, who was
coming to the door with a double letter from Northamptonshire.
It will be a great affliction to these ladies and gentlemen to learn—and
he is so unwilling to give pain, that he would not whisper the
circumstance on any account, did he not feel in a manner bound to do so,
in gratitude to those amongst his friends who were at the trouble of
being angry at the absurdity that their inventions made the Author’s home
unusually merry, and gave rise to an extraordinary number of jests, of
which he will only add, in the words of the good Vicar of Wakefield, “I
cannot say whether we had more wit among us than usual; but I am sure we
had more laughing.”
DEVONSHIRE TERRACE, YORK GATE, _September_, 1840.