Charles Dickens and the Great Theatre of the World. Simon Callow

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 not only for its view of the city, but for the range of the material and the variety of forms: stories, fantastical impressions, hard-core reporting. A voice – although an exuberantly polyphonic one – had been established. More startlingly, there was an authority, a perspective of passionate radicalism and a compassion extraordinary in such a young man: ‘such sights will make your heart ache,’ he wrote of what he had seen in the slums at St Giles’s, ‘always supposing that you are not a philosopher or a political economist’.

      With the Sketches and now Pickwick, Boz, whose identity was still known only to his inner circle, was the toast of the town; speculation was rife as to who he might be. ‘We do not know the author,’ said a sharp anonymous review of Sketches in the Metropolitan Magazine, ‘but we should apprehend that he has, from the peculiar turn of his genius, been already a successful dramatist; if he has not, we can safely opine that he may be if he will.’ The review strongly recommends ‘this facetious work to the Americans … as it is a perfect picture of the morals, manners, habits of a great portion of English society … it would be needless for us to particularise any one of these admirable sketches, very many of which would form an admirable groundwork for light comedies and farces.’

      He made another pseudonymous appearance early in 1836, this time in the guise of Timothy Sparks, in a pamphlet entitled ‘Sunday Under Three Heads’, in which he articulated his championship of people’s right to pleasure. There was a move afoot in Parliament to ban games on Sundays: Dickens came forth blazingly against it.

      The wise and beneficent Creator who places men upon earth, requires that they shall perform the duties of that station of life to which they are called, and he can never intend that the more a man strives to discharge those duties, the more he shall be debarred from happiness and enjoyment. Let those who have six days in the week for all the world’s pleasures, appropriate the seventh to fasting and to gloom, either for their own sins or for those of other people, if they like to bewail them; but let those who employ their six days in a worthier manner, devote their seventh to a different purpose. Let divines set the example of true morality: preach it to their flocks in the morning, and dismiss them to enjoy true rest in the afternoon; and let them select for their text, and let Sunday legislators take for their motto, the words that fell from the lips of that Master whose precepts they misconstrue, and whose lessons they pervert – The Sabbath was made for man, and not man for the Sabbath.’

      Dickens’s lack of enthusiasm for organized religion is bluntly expressed.

      Look into your churches – diminished congregations and scanty attendance. People have grown sullen and obstinate, and are becoming disgusted with the faith which condemns them to such a day as this, once in every seven. And as you cannot make people religious by Act of Parliament, or force them to church by constables, they display their feeling by staying away. Turn into the streets [on a Sunday] and mark the rigid gloom that reigns over everything around … all is as melancholy and quiet as if a pestilence had fallen upon the city …

      Dickens was increasingly becoming the Voice of the People.

      Sales for Sketches by Boz continued brisk, and at last confident that he could support and maintain a family, he formally asked George Hogarth for Catherine’s hand and was warmly accepted; no Beadnell-like hesitations here. He was writing round the clock to complete the 12,000 words per instalment for Pickwick, plus doing other journalistic bits and pieces, which, to Catherine’s continuing dismay, kept him writing till two in the morning. By getting ahead of himself, he had managed to clear the decks for a week’s honeymoon, and lived only for the great day. ‘Here’s another day off the fortnight. Hurrah!’ he wrote to Kate.

      In the event, the wedding,