Les Standiford Read Free

that the idea was not novel, and had been already much used; that it would be infinitely better for the plates to arise naturally out of the text [instead of the other way around]; and that I should like to take my own way, with a freer range of English scene and people, and I was afraid I should ultimately do so in any case.”
    Given their admiration for
Boz,
Chapman and Hall agreed to see it Dickens’s way—he was to be the dog, with Seymour the tail—and once that was settled, Dickens was off and running. As he would write later, “My views being deferred to, I thought of Mr. Pickwick, and wrote the first number.”
    What Seymour had conceived of as a kind of extended set of cartoons profiting at the expense of Cockney sportsmen became something much richer in Dickens’s hands. He and Seymour met face to face only once, on April 17, 1836, “to take a glass of grog” in Dickens’s words, and to discuss a few changes Dickens thought necessary for the plates that would go in the second issue of what was now being called
The Posthumous Papers of the Pickwick Club,
by Boz. Seymour, quite well known in his own right, must have seen which way the winds were blowing, but still he seemed agreeable enough. He made the changes Dickens asked for…
    â€¦and then, on April 20, after dashing off a note to his wife—“best and dearest” of her kind—Seymour killed himself.
    Seymour made no mention in that letter of his own career’s downward trajectory, nor was there any bitter lament to the effect that the master of a project had become its slave. It is one of history’s undeniable ironies, however, that the demise of one artistic career would mark the meteoric rise of another.
    With Seymour gone, Dickens was forced to arrange for another artist, Halbot Browne, to draw the plates for
Pickwick.
Now a married man (he and Catherine Hogarth had proclaimed their vows on April 2), Dickens also negotiated a raise with Chapman and Hall to twenty pounds per month, with the understanding that he would expand each issue of
Pickwick
from twenty-six to thirty-two pages.
    It was something of a leap of faith for Chapman and Hall to continue the project, for the sales of the first issue were fewer than five hundred copies, and the second and third did only marginally better. By the fourth issue, however, Dickens was in full control of the publication. Beginning with that number, he began the transformation of Mr. Pickwick from a fool into a benevolent, incomparable comic protagonist, served and advised by the faithful Sam Weller, whose pungent asides to his earnest but bumbling master have provided the inspiration for mordant comics to this very day: “now we look compact and comfortable, as the father said ven he cut his little boy’s head off, to cure him o’ squintin.”
    As the magazine’s original harmless buffoonery was replaced by such often dark and pointed humor, the stock of the Pickwick Club rose in the eyes of the public. Sales for the fourth number jumped to 4,000. By the eleventh, 14,000 copies were sold. And by the end of the run, in November of 1837, more than 40,000 readers were lining up for installments. The era of Dickens as a true literary star had begun.

    E ntire volumes have been devoted to the impact of Dickens’s immense popularity upon publishing, and he is generally credited as being single-handedly responsible for transforming an industry. In many ways, he would influence publishing as profoundly as the steam engine or the blast furnace would redirect manufacturing. The publishing industry had evolved markedly, however, over the past century, from the moment the startling new form of the novel made its debut. While modern critics debate just which publication constitutes the starting point of the genre, all are agreed that nothing quite like the works of Defoe (
Robinson Crusoe,
1719), Fielding (
Tom Jones,
1729), and Richardson