A new post for the Wordsworth Editions blog
Dickens had only just celebrated his 24th birthday when the publisher Willian Hall paid a call on him at his lodgings in Furnival’s Inn to offer him a writing contract. It was early February, 1836, and Dickens’ collected Sketches by ‘Boz’ had literally just been published in book form by John Macrone. These sketches ‘Illustrative of Every-day Life and Every-day People’ had been published individually in several popular newspapers over the previous four years, but Macrone’s book represented a professional breakthrough. Dickens had been socially adopted by some heavy hitters in literary London, like the author of the bestselling Rookwood, William Harrison Ainsworth, his partner in crime the illustrator George Cruikshank, and the Examiner’s literary editor, John Forster. These contacts had brought Dickens to Macrone and thus to the collected Sketches, but for all that, he was still just an unknown with a bit of potential when Hall came calling. Hall was half of the relatively new firm of Chapman and Hall, a publisher and bookseller he had co-founded with his friend Edward Chapman in 1830. Chapman was a voracious reader with a good eye for talent while Hall had the business brain.
Chapman and Hall had had some success working with the illustrator and caricaturist Robert Seymour, an artist then rivalled only by Cruikshank. The Squib Annual of Poetry, Politics, and Personalities was a collection of comic verses written around twelve cartoons by Seymour. The artist was also independently publishing Sketches by Seymour, a series of humorous lithographs depicting inept sportsmen and comedic Cockneys huntin’, shootin’, and fishin’. Seymour had pitched the idea of a shilling monthly magazine to Chapman and Hall depicting the misadventures of a group of Cockney sportsmen known as the ‘Nimrod Club’. Cheap paper and advances in printing had created a new market for shilling magazines aimed at the growing urban middle and working classes. Gentlemen’s sporting clubs were a popular subject, and had been since the Regency publishing sensation Life in London, with illustrations by George and Robert Cruikshank and ‘letterpress’ by the sporting journalist Pierce Egan. As a well-known artist, Seymour’s illustrations would lead the project, to which an ’editor’ would append a few thousand words of text. Hall was offering the job to Dickens. Dickens knew nothing about sport, but as he was planning to marry, the money was too good to turn down at nine guineas per sheet (sixteen pages of printed text), one-and-a-half sheets per month – about 12,000 words. He wrote to his fiancée Catherine Hogarth, ‘the work will be no joke, but the emolument is too tempting to resist.’
Though fourteen years Seymour’s junior and hardly the ‘name’ in the project, Dickens quickly reversed the roles, arguing (as he later wrote in his preface to the cheap edition of 1847) that ‘it would be infinitely better for the plates to arise naturally out of the text; and that I should like to take my own way, with a freer range of English scenes and people, and was afraid I should ultimately do so in any case, whatever course I might prescribe for myself at starting.’ Dickens also told Hall that ‘the idea was not novel, and had already been much used.’ The sporting club was therefore dropped as the premise, although the character of Nathaniel Winkle was created as a concession to Seymour’s original plan, being a young man who fancies himself a sporting gentleman yet has no aptitude whatsoever and is downright dangerous when it comes to horses and guns. This must have been humiliating for Seymour, but he begrudgingly concurred. Thus did Dickens become the ‘editor’ of The Posthumous Papers of the Pickwick Club. ‘Pickwick is at length begun in all his might and glory,’ he wrote to his publishers.
Dickens hit the ground running, and playing to his strengths as a journalist – ‘Boz’ the observer of London life and also the court reporter and parliamentary correspondent who had travelled around the south of England covering local elections. He even threw in favourite places from his childhood. The Pickwick Papers was to be the Sketches on a much grander scale, the mission statement plain in the first couple of pages of the opening chapter:
‘That the Corresponding Society of the Pickwick Club is therefore hereby constituted; and that Samuel Pickwick, Esq., G.C.M.P.C., Tracy Tupman, Esq., M.P.C., Augustus Snodgrass, Esq., M.P.C., and Nathaniel Winkle, Esq., M.P.C., are hereby nominated and appointed members of the same; and that they be requested to forward, from time to time, authenticated accounts of their journeys and investigations, of their observations of character and manners, and of the whole of their adventures, together with all tales and papers to which local scenery or associations may give rise, to the Pickwick Club, stationed in London.’
Samuel Pickwick, founder of the club which bears his name, is a warm-hearted if naïve retired businessman who fancies himself a philosopher though his insights are unremarkable: ‘There sat the man who had traced to their source the mighty ponds of Hampstead, and agitated the scientific world with his Theory of Tittlebats.’ Tracy Tupman is a middle-aged lothario who never makes a conquest; Augustus Snodgrass describes himself as a ‘poet’ but never writes anything; and Nathaniel Winkle is a sportsman of staggering inability. By the end of the first instalment, they are on the road and already in trouble.
Despite his reputation, Seymour, meanwhile, was struggling financially. In 1827, his publishers Knight and Lacey had gone bankrupt owing him a lot of money. He had married that year and overwork and money worries led to a nervous breakdown in 1830. More recently, he had been illustrating comic text for Gilbert Abbott à Beckett, the editor of Figaro in London, a forerunner of Punch. Later one of the ‘Dickens Circle’, à Beckett was younger than Seymour and the two men eventually quarrelled. He resigned, and à Beckett refused to pay him, ridiculing him in the magazine. The humiliation of the public smear had triggered severe depression, but Seymour returned to Figaro when Henry Mayhew took over as editor. Although at the height of his popularity when The Pickwick Papers commenced, Seymour was on the ragged edge and losing control of his project. The cover of the first issue says it is ‘Edited by “Boz” With Illustrations’, but Seymour’s name does not even appear. He was also struggling to meet Dickens’ requirements, which went far beyond the humorous sporting illustrations originally envisioned and which were his stock in trade. After an argument between the two men at Dickens’ home over the illustration for ‘The Stroller’s Tale’ in the second number, Seymour returned home, worked late into the evening on the new plate and then killed himself with a ‘fowling piece’ (a sportsman’s shotgun).
As his entry in the Dictionary of National Biography delicately puts it, ‘Seymour could not brook the mere toleration of his designs, and when to this was added something in the nature of dictation from his collaborator (though couched in the kindest terms), his overtaxed nerves magnified the matter until it grew unbearable.’ Issue 2 went out with Seymour’s three completed illustrations, and Dickens changed the format from the third part, reducing illustrations from four to two per issue in order to increase his text to 32 pages. Seymour was initially replaced by Robert William Buss (later known for his painting Dickens’ Dream), but Dickens was not satisfied with his work and he was dropped after one issue. Buss was replaced by ‘Phiz’ (Hablot Knight Browne), who would go on to illustrate much of Dickens’ later work. Jane Seymour, the artist’s widow and mother of his two children, always blamed Dickens for her husband’s suicide, likening him to Milton’s Satan, although it was his dispute with Figaro that was cited as a cause in the coroner’s verdict of suicide. Seymour was a delicate, sensitive man in an increasingly Darwinian industry. His mental health had been declining for almost a decade, and to lay his death at Dickens’ door would be unfair. His announcement of Seymour’s death in the second number of Pickwick is sombre and respectful:
Some time must elapse, before the void which the deceased gentleman has left in his profession can be filled up: – the blank his death has occasioned in the Society, which his amiable nature won, and his talents adorned, we can hardly hope to see supplied.
After Pickwick became a success, which was far from certain when Seymour died, rumours persisted – largely circulated by Jane and family friends and amplified in some obituaries – that Seymour was the real brains behind the serial. In his preface to the 1867 edition, Dickens decided to set the record straight, stating that ‘Mr. Seymour never originated or suggested an incident, a phrase, or a word to be found in this book. Mr. Seymour died when only twenty-four pages of this book were published, and when assuredly not forty-eight were written.’ In a final, rather ghoulish twist, Seymour’s headstone (removed from St Mary Magdalene Church, Islington, during building work and for many years thought lost) is now on permanent display at the Charles Dickens Museum in Camden.
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