Mr. Pickwick's Christmas
Being an Account of the Pickwickians' Christmas at the Manor Farm of the Adventures There
9781465637710
188 pages
Library of Alexandria
Overview
To begin with nothing and end with something as great as Pickwick is an achievement given to few men to realise. Yet it seems that in this most haphazard way Pickwick was created. At the age of twenty-three Charles Dickens opened his door in Furnival’s Inn to the managing partner of the firm of “Chapman and Hall.” The idea then propounded to Dickens was that a monthly publication should be the vehicle for certain plates to be executed by Robert Seymour, an admirable humourist-artist of great popularity. These were to deal with a Nimrod Club and their adventures, fishing, hunting, and so forth, rendered intensely humorous by exposing the lack of experience and dexterity of the members. Dickens was requested to contribute a letter-press to these pictures, but he objected on the grounds that he was not familiar enough with sports or the sportsman’s life to produce such material and also because the idea was not fresh. He thought the results would be much happier if he wrote more freely of the English people and their customs, and, too, it would be infinitely better were the plates to be inspired by the text. The suggestions were accepted and “I then wrote,” says Dickens, “the first number and from the proofsheets Mr. Seymour made the drawing of the Pickwick Club, producing that happy portrait of the founder by which he was made a reality.” In March, 1836, the first monthly number of the “Posthumous Papers of the Pickwick Club” made its appearance and “... in less than six months from this time the whole reading world was talking about them; the names of Winkle, Wardle, Weller, Snodgrass, Dodson, and Fogg had become familiar in our mouths as household words. ‘Pickwick chintzes’ figured in linen-drapers’ windows, and ‘Weller corduroys’ in breechesmakers’ advertisements; ‘Boz cabs’ might be seen rattling through the streets, and the portrait of the author of Pelham and Crichton was scraped down or pasted over to make room for that of the new popular favourite in the omnibuses.” It was only natural that a work so launched, with the author pressed for copy for each part, should be lacking in any definite form or plot. Dickens writes in the preface to the original edition: “The publication of the book in monthly numbers, containing only thirty-two pages in each, rendered it an object of paramount importance that, while the different incidents were linked together by a chain of interest strong enough to prevent their appearing unconnected or impossible, the general design should be so simple as to sustain no injury from this detached and desultory form of publication, extending over no fewer than twenty months. In short, it was necessary—or it appeared so to the author—that every number should be, to a certain extent, complete in itself, and yet that the whole twenty numbers, when collected, should form one tolerably harmonious whole, each leading to the other by a gentle and not unnatural progress of adventure. “It is obvious that in a work published with a view to such considerations, no artfully interwoven or ingeniously complicated plot can with reason be expected. The author ventures to express a hope that he has successfully surmounted the difficulties of his undertaking. And if it be objected to the Pickwick Papers, that they are a mere series of adventure, in which the scenes are ever changing, and the characters come and go like the men and women we encounter in the real world, he can only content himself with the reflection that they claim to be nothing else, and that the same objection has been made to the works of some of the greatest novelists in the English language.”
