Dickens has told us, in his preface to the later editions, much of how
"Pickwick" came to be projected and published. It was in this wise:
Seymour, a caricaturist of very considerable merit, though not, as we
should now consider, in the first rank of the great caricaturists, had
proposed to Messrs. Chapman and Hall, then just starting on their
career as publishers, a "series of Cockney sporting plates." Messrs.
Chapman and Hall entertained the idea favourably, but opined that the
plates would require illustrative letter-press; and casting about for
some suitable author, bethought themselves of Dickens, whose tales and
sketches had been exciting some little sensation in the world of
journalism; and who had, indeed, already written for the firm a story,
the "Tuggs at Ramsgate," which may be read among the "Sketches."
Accordingly Mr. Hall called on Dickens for the purpose of proposing
the scheme. This would be in 1835, towards the latter end of the year;
and Dickens, who had apparently left the paternal roof for some little
time, was living bachelorwise, in Furnival's Inn. What was his
astonishment, when Mr. Hall came in, to find he was the same person
who had sold him the copy of the magazine containing his first
story--that memorable copy at which he had looked, in Westminster
Hall, through eyes bedimmed with joyful tears. Such coincidences
always had for Dickens a peculiar, almost a superstitious, interest.
The circumstance seemed of happy augury to both the "high contracting
parties." Publisher and author were for the nonce on the best of
terms. The latter, no doubt, saw his opening; was more than ready to
undertake the work, and had no quarrel with the remuneration offered.
But even then he was not the man to play second fiddle to anybody.
Before they parted, he had quite succeeded in turning the tables on
Seymour. The original proposal had been that the artist should produce
four caricatures on sporting subjects every month, and that the
letter-press should be in illustration of the caricatures. Dickens got
Mr. Hall to agree to reverse that position. _He_, Dickens, was to have
the command of the story, and the artist was to illustrate _him_. How
far these altered relations would have worked quite smoothly if
Seymour had lived, and if Dickens' story had not so soon assumed the
proportions of a colossal success, it is idle to speculate. Seymour
died by his own hand before the second number was published, and so
ceased to be in a position to assert himself. It was, however, in
deference to the peculiar bent of his art that Mr. Winkle, with his
disastrous sporting proclivities, made part of the first conception of
the book; and it is also very significant of the book's origin, that
the design on the green wrapper in which the monthly parts made their
appearance, should have had a purely sporting character, and exhibited
Mr. Pickwick sleepily fishing in a punt, and Mr. Winkle shooting at
what looks like a cock-sparrow, the whole surrounded by a chaste
arabesque of guns, rods, and landing-nets. To Seymour, too, we owe the
portrait of Mr. Pickwick, which has impressed that excellent old
gentleman's face and figure upon all our memories. But to return to
Dickens' interview with Mr. Hall. They seem to have parted in mutual
satisfaction. At least it is certain Dickens was satisfied, for in a
letter written, apparently on the same day, to "my dearest Kate," he
thus sums up the proposals of the publishers: "They have made me an
offer of fourteen pounds a month to write and edit a new publication
they contemplate, entirely by myself, to be published monthly, and
each number to contain four wood-cuts.... The work will be no joke,
but the emolument is too tempting to resist."[10]
So, little thinking how soon he would begin to regard the "emolument"
as ludicrously inadequate, he set to work on "Pickwick." The first
part was published on the 31st of March or 1st of April, 1836.
That part seems scarcely to have created any sensation. Mr James
Grant, the novelist, says indeed, that the first five parts were "a
dead failure," and that the publishers were even debating whether the
enterprise had not better be abandoned altogether, when suddenly Sam
Weller appeared upon the scene, and turned their gloom into laughter.
Be that as it may, certain it is that before many months had passed,
Messrs. Chapman and Hall must have been thoroughly confirmed in a
policy of perseverance. "The first order for Part I.," that is, the
first order for binding, "was," says the bookbinder who executed the
work, "for four hundred copies only." The order for Part XV. had
risen to forty thousand. All contemporary accounts agree that the
success was sudden, immense. The author, like Lord Byron, some
twenty-five years before, "awoke and found himself famous." Young as
he was, not having yet numbered more than twenty-four summers, he at
one stride reached the topmost height of popularity. Everybody read
his book. Everybody laughed over it. Everybody talked about it.
Everybody felt, confusedly perhaps, but very surely, that a new and
vital force had arisen in English literature.
And English literature just then was in one of its times of slackness,
rather than full flow. The great tide of the beginning of the century
had ebbed. The tide of the Victorian age had scarcely begun to do more
than ripple and flash on the horizon. Byron was dead, and Shelley and
Keats and Coleridge and Lamb; Southey's life was on the decline;
Wordsworth had long executed his best work; while of the coming men,
Carlyle, though in the plenitude of his power, having published
"Sartor Resartus," had not yet published his "French Revolution,"[11]
or delivered his lectures on the "Heroes," and was not yet in the
plenitude of his fame and influence; and Macaulay, then in India, was
known only as the essayist and politician; and Lord Tennyson and the
Brownings were more or less names of the future. Looking especially at
fiction, the time may be said to have been waiting for its
master-novelist. Five years had gone by since the good and great Sir
Walter Scott had been laid to rest in Dryburgh Abbey, there to sleep,
as is most fit, amid the ruins of that old Middle Age world he loved
so well, with the babble of the Tweed for lullaby. Nor had any one
shown himself of stature to step into his vacant place, albeit Bulwer,
more precocious even than Dickens, was already known as the author of
"Pelham," "Eugene Aram," and the "Last Days of Pompeii;" and Disraeli
had written "Vivian Grey," and his earlier books; while Thackeray,
Charlotte Brontë, Kingsley, George Eliot were all, of course, to come
later. No, there was a vacant throne among the novelists. Here was the
hour--and here, too, was the man. In virtue of natural kingship he
took up his sceptre unquestioned.
Still, it may not be superfluous to inquire into the why and wherefore
of his success. All effects have a cause. What was the cause of this
special phenomenon? In the first place, the admirable freshness of the
book won its way into every heart. There is a fervour of youth and
healthy good spirits about the whole thing. In a former generation,
Byron had uttered his wail of despair over a worthless world. We, in
our own time, have got back to the dreary point of considering whether
life be worth living. Here was a writer who had no such misgivings.
For him life was pleasant, useful, full of delight--to be not only
tolerated, but enjoyed. He liked its sights, its play of character,
its adventures--affected no superiority to its amusements and
convivialities--thoroughly laid himself out to please and to be
pleased. And his characters were in the same mood. Their fund of
animal spirits seemed inexhaustible. For life's jollities they were
never unprepared. No doubt there were "mighty mean moments" in their
existence, as there have been in the existence of most of us. It
cannot have been pleasant to Mr. Winkle to have his eye blackened by
the obstreperous cabman. Mr. Tracy Tupman probably felt a passing pang
when jilted by the maiden aunt in favour of the audacious Jingle. No
man would elect to occupy the position of defendant in an action for
breach of promise, or prefer to sojourn in a debtors' prison. But how
jauntily do Mr. Pickwick and his friends shake off such discomforts!
How buoyantly do they override the billows that beset their course!
And what excellent digestions they have, and how slightly do they seem
to suffer the next day from any little excesses in the matter of milk
punch!
Then besides the good spirits and good temper, there is Dickens' royal
gift of humour. As some actors have only to show their face and utter
a word or two, in order to convulse an audience with merriment, so
here does almost every sentence hold good and honest laughter. Not,
perhaps, objects the superfine and too dainty critic, humour of the
most delicate sort--not humour that for its rare and exquisite quality
can be placed beside the masterpieces in that kind of Lamb, or Sterne,
or Goldsmith, or Washington Irving. Granted freely; not humour of that
special character. But very good humour nevertheless, the thoroughly
popular humour of broad comedy and obvious farce--the humour that
finds its account where absurd characters are placed in ridiculous
situations, that delights in the oddities of the whimsical and
eccentric, that irradiates stupidity and makes dulness amusing. How
thoroughly wholesome it is too! To be at the same time merry and
wise, says the old adage, is a hard combination. Dickens was both.
With all his boisterous merriment, his volleys of inextinguishable
laughter, he never makes game of what is at all worthy of respect.
Here, as in his later books, right is right, and wrong wrong, and he
is never tempted to jingle his jester's bell out of season, and make
right look ridiculous. And if the humour of "Pickwick" be wholesome,
it is also most genial and kindly. We have here no acrid cynic
sneeringly pointing out the plague spots of humanity, and showing
pleasantly how even the good are tainted with evil. Rather does
Dickens delight in finding some touch of goodness, some lingering
memory of better things, some hopeful aspiration, some trace of
unselfish devotion in characters where all seems soddened and lost. In
brief, the laughter is the laughter of one who sees the foibles, and
even the vices of his fellow-men, and yet looks on them lovingly and
helpfully.
So much the first readers of "Pickwick" might note as the book
unfolded itself to them, part by part; and they might also note one or
two things besides. They might note--they could scarcely fail to do
so--that though there was a touch of caricature in nearly all the
characters, yet those characters were, one and all, wonderfully real,
and very much alive. It was no world of shadows to which the author
introduced them. Mr. Pickwick had a very distinct existence, and so
had his three friends, and Bob Sawyer, and Benjamin Allen, and Mr.
Jingle, and Tony Weller, and all the swarm of minor characters. While
as to Sam Weller, if it be really true that he averted impending ruin
from the book, and turned defeat into victory, one can only say that
it was like him. When did he ever "stint stroke" in "foughten field"?
By what array of adverse circumstances was he ever taken at a
disadvantage? To have created a character of this vitality, of this
individual force, would be a feather in the cap of any novelist who
ever lived. Something I think of Dickens' own blood passed into this
special progeniture of his. It has been irreverently said that
Falstaff might represent Shakespeare in his cups, just as Hamlet might
represent him in his more sober moments. So I have always had a kind
of fancy that Sam Weller might be regarded as Dickens himself seen in
a certain aspect--a sort of Dickens, shall I say?--in an humbler
sphere of life, and who had never devoted himself to literature. There
is in both the same energy, pluck, essential goodness of heart,
fertility of resource, abundance of animal spirits, and also an
imagination of a peculiar kind, in which wit enters as a main
ingredient. And having noted how highly vitalized were the characters
in "Pickwick," I think the first readers might also fairly be expected
to note,--and, in fact, it is clear from Dickens' preface that they
did note--how greatly the book increased in scope and power as it
proceeded. The beginning was conceived almost in a spirit of farce.
The incidents and adventures had scarcely any other object than to
create amusement. Mr. Pickwick himself appeared on the scene with
fantastic honours and the badge of absurdity, as "the man who had
traced to their source the mighty ponds of Hampstead, and agitated the
scientific world with the Theory of Tittlebats." But in all this there
is a gradual change. Mr. Pickwick is presented to us latterly as an
exceedingly sound-headed as well as sound-hearted old gentleman, whom
we should never think of associating with the sources of Hampstead
Ponds or any other folly. While in such scenes as those at the Fleet
Prison, the author is clearly endeavouring to do much more than raise
a laugh. He is sounding the deeper, more tragic chords in human
feeling.
Ah, if we add to all this--to the freshness, the "go," the good
spirits, the keen observation, the graphic painting, the humour, the
vitality of the characters, the gradual development of power--if we
add to all this that something which is in all, and greater than all,
viz., genius, and genius of a highly popular kind, then we shall have
no difficulty in understanding why everybody read "Pickwick," and how
it came to pass that its publishers made some £20,000 by a work that
they had once thought of abandoning as worthless.[12]
FOOTNOTES:
[10] See the Letters published by Chapman and Hall.
[11] It was finished in January, 1837, and not published till six
months afterwards.
[12] They acknowledged to Dickens that they had made £14,000 by the
sale of the monthly parts alone.