Academy of Music contemporary John Hullah, who had an idea for a piece set in Venice called The Gondoliers. Delighted though he was at the prospect of writing something for the theatre, Dickens said he couldn’t write about gondoliers; he had to write about real people whom he knew and understood, and suggested instead an everyday story of country folk, their love affairs and comic misunderstandings. To this Hullah meekly agreed – an early example of the irresistible force of Dickens’s personality in action – and went away to write the music, while Dickens thrashed out the book and lyrics.
He had temporarily moved to Fulham to be nearer to Catherine, who was still pouting a great deal about the lack of time he spent with her, and receiving more callous reproofs from him.
If the representations I have so often made to you, about my working as a duty, and not as a pleasure, be not sufficient to keep you in the good humour which you, of all people in the world should preserve – why, then, my dear, you must be out of temper, and there is no help for it.
There is something inexpressibly depressing about Dickens’s relations with the women he loved – a lack of spontaneity, of parity, of freedom. He’s always somehow being trapped by them into these terrible patterns of behaviour. His exchanges with Catherine are of a very low grade; it’s paltry, piffling stuff. From time to time fun was had – they loved going to the theatre together, and he was always able to make her laugh. But, forgivably, she simply didn’t understand the sheer amount of work involved in keeping the Boz bubble going: ‘Is it my fault I cannot get out tonight?’ he cried. ‘I must work at the opera.’ Such were the communications between them, before they were married. No great passion, no torrential exchange of thoughts, no intimations of the sublime, as his ardent nature would seem to have demanded. No doubt that was the last thing he wanted; he had quite enough of that for two of them, and he could communicate with his male friends on that level. What he needed was stability, comfort, continuity. At least, that is what he thought he wanted.
Meanwhile, he received a visit that had momentous consequences. As often with Dickens, the encounter had a fated flavour to it, a sense of the inexorable march of destiny. His visitor was William Hall, one of the partners in Chapman and Hall, a newly established publishing firm. When Dickens opened the door of his new flat at Furnival’s Inn in Holborn, he gasped, because Hall, in his former incarnation as a bookseller, had sold Dickens the copy of the Monthly Magazine in which his very first story had appeared. Hall had come to Dickens with a modest proposal: his firm had just had a big success with their first publication, A Christmas Squib, by the noted illustrator Robert Seymour. Seymour had had an idea for a new book based on his pictures of the absurd exploits of some Cockney would-be sportsmen, they needed someone to provide the copy for the pictures, would he be interested? With extraordinary clarity of purpose, Dickens saw an opportunity for something much more ambitious: a story in monthly episodes based on the free-wheeling activities of an eclectic, not to say eccentric, group of friends whose central figure was to be a genial middle-aged man whom Dickens decided should be named Pickwick, borrowing the name of a well-known coach operator just outside Bath that he must have frequently passed on his journalistic hikes around the country. Dickens would not provide copy for the illustrator: he would deliver his copy, and the illustrator would take his cue from that.
Chapman and Hall were swept away by the boldness of Dickens’s plans, and made it clear to Seymour that he must fall in with the new thinking. Dickens immediately dashed off two instalments – ‘Pickwick is at length begun in all his might and glory!’ – and was full of courteous but firm suggestions as to how Seymour might go about his task; even Edward Chapman weighed in with strict notes to the illustrator on how to portray Pickwick, on the basis of the physical appearance of someone he once knew, ‘a fat old beau who, in spite of the ladies’ protests, would wear drab tights and black gaiters’. Seymour, utterly crushed, went away and did his work, but after a particularly trying night wrestling with some recalcitrant etching plates for the third episode, he blew his brains out.
Neither Dickens nor Chapman nor Hall seemed unduly fazed by this turn of events; they hired another designer, who suspended work on his entry for the Royal Academy, but his etching skills were inadequate, so they sacked him (just after the entry date for the Academy competition had passed); they briefly glanced at the portfolio of a young giant of an aspiring illustrator called William Makepeace Thackeray, and then they struck gold with Hablôt Knight Browne, who, under the pseudonym of Phiz, created some of the most memorable of all visual realizations of Dickens’s characters. Perhaps the most extraordinary aspect of this sequence of events is that, despite the splendid and expensive adverts in The Times and the Athenaeum, the first few episodes of The Posthumous Papers of the Pickwick Club were far from successful and the publishers were reduced to halving the print run, but they kept faith. Their young author’s confidence carried all before it, and with the arrival in the fourth episode of the Cockney genius Sam Weller, which also happened to be Phiz’s first as illustrator, it took off in the words of a contemporary reviewer, ‘like a Skyrocket’. And suddenly everybody was reading it. As Forster exuberantly put it: ‘Judges on the bench and boys in the street, gravity and folly, the young and the old, those who were entering life and those who were quitting it, alike found it irresistible.’ It was that publisher’s dream, a book that had in it something for everyone.
For any young writer to have created in his first novel such a complete world, a world teeming with individuals who seem always to have existed, who seem to have come out of the very heart of England, at once real and archetypal, bowling through the contemporary landscape on a journey that might have started at the beginning of time, each strutting his stuff like so many brilliant turns on the stage of life, while blending perfectly into the ensemble, is astonishing enough; that that writer was the same Charles Dickens who only ten years before had thought that his life was over, that he was doomed to a life of humiliation and ordinariness, is simply astounding. The quality that beams out of the book with such golden force is one of optimism and benevolence. That it should do so is a triumph of Dickens’s spirit over his circumstances: but it had not been easily won, and in time to come he would struggle to maintain the faith that he so ineffably expresses in the book’s final pages:
And in the midst of all this, stood Mr Pickwick, his countenance lighted up with smiles, which the heart of no man, woman, or child, could resist: himself the happiest of the group: shaking hands, over and over again, with the same people, and when his own hands were not so employed, rubbing them with pleasure: turning round in a different direction at every fresh expression of gratification or curiosity, and inspiring everybody with his looks of gladness and delight.
Breakfast is announced. Mr Pickwick leads the old lady (who has been very eloquent on the subject of Lady Tollimglower), to the top of a long table; Wardle takes the bottom; the friends arrange themselves on either side; Sam takes his station behind his master’s chair; the laughter and talking cease; Mr Pickwick, having said grace, pauses for an instant, and looks round him. As he does so, the tears roll down his cheeks, in the fullness of his joy.
Let us leave our old friend in one of those moments of unmixed happiness, of which, if we seek them, there are ever some, to cheer our transitory existence here. There are dark shadows on the earth, but its lights are stronger in the contrast. Some men, like bats or owls, have better eyes for the darkness than for the light. We, who have no such optical powers, are better pleased to take our last parting look at the visionary companions of many solitary hours, when the brief sunshine of the world is blazing full upon them.
In between episodes two and three of Pickwick, Dickens got married. He had been emboldened to do so by the success of the recently published Sketches by Boz, a success he had done everything in his power to promote, sending copies to anyone of note whom he had encountered along his way – Lord Stanley, for instance, who had once dictated to him an epically long speech when he was still reporting in the gallery of the House of Commons, and Thomas Talfourd, the distinguished barrister, crusading MP and playwright, whom he had met at Ainsworth’s. The book had been greeted with a powerful review in the Chronicle (by his father-in-law-to-be, as it happens), and another in the Morning Post; it was admired
