# Works of Charles Dickens, ed. Lang - Volume 1/Introduction

INTRODUCTION.
Not many things in literary history are better known than the origin of Pickwick. Charles Dickens, at the age of twenty-four, had written nothing worth mentioning for publication, except the set of papers, mainly contributed to the Evening Chronicle, called Sketches by Boz. Meanwhile, Messrs. Chapman and Hall had been in communication, through Mr. Charles Whitehead, with Dickens, whom they wished to secure as a contributor to a "Library of Fiction." They had also dealings with Mr. Seymour, an artist whose forte was the designing of "cockney sporting plates." Such things were then popular, and may still be seen on the walls of smokingrooms in country houses. The vein probably worked itself out in Leech's Mr. Jorrocks and Mr. Briggs. Seymour wanted to go on drawing this sort of caricature; Mr. Chapman wanted it to be accompanied by letter-press, and his partner, Mr. Hall, conveyed this desire to Dickens. There was to be "a monthly something," containing the adventures of a cockney sporting club. Dickens was, as he said, no sportsman, and preferred to let his pen run at its pleasure among "English scenes and people." Seymour's original cover of the Pickwick Papers shows Mr. Pickwick asleep in a punt after luncheon; ​he seems to "have a bite." But Mr. Pickwick, of course, was no angler, even of the sort which fishes in punts. Dickens's ideas were accepted; he "thought of Mr. Pickwick," whose type was fixed by Seymour; he threw in the Club and Mr. Winkle, and wrote Number I. for March 31, 1836. Between Numbers II. and III. Seymour died, by his own hand. He was engaged in illustrating the Tale of Dismal Jemmy. Buss then drew for one number, but, happily, was superseded by Mr. Hablot K. Browne (Phiz), whose style was, in many points, much in harmony with that of Dickens. Every one has heard how Thackeray proposed himself as artist.
The beginning of Pickwick was thus fortuitous. It was written from number to number, with the Printer's Devil at the door. Dickens was married, settled, and lost his dear friend, his wife's sister Mary, while the story went on. The old parable of the sad face behind the jester's mask was once more made real. A work thus begun, and thus carried out, interrupted, too, in the manner of Smollett and Fielding, by episodic stories, could not have a regular plan, a pre ordained plot, or a very consistent development of character. Dickens meant the book, from the first, for a picaresque tale, after the manner of Le Sage and Smollett. What he intended it to be, that he made it, and Pickwick is one in a legitimate and historic genre of novels. The Club is allowed to drop out of view; Mr. Pickwick's character acquires a sort of seriousness, and gains on the author. The hero ceases to be a scientific butt, and becomes the sane, benevolent, and chivalrous Don Quixote of England, with his Sancho Weller.
People say that Dickens "could not draw a gentleman." Except in the heraldic sense, Mr. Pickwick is as much a gentleman as the Baron Bradwardine. He is courteous, gallant, considerate, generous, kind, charitable, and courageous. ​He has his foibles; so has the Baron. Both gentlemen have been known to tarry over the wine-cup or the punch-bowl at the Rochester inn, or in the change-house of Tully Veolan. The amount of alcoholic beverages consumed in Pickwick is undeniably startling. That our grandfathers were so often drunk is incredible, but convivial intoxication was still regarded as a thing humorous in itself, as it obviously was by Burns and his contemporaries. That we have reached a more civilised view is owing chiefly, perhaps, to cigarettes; partly to the Temperance movement, of which, as exhibited in Brick Lane, Dickens was not an admirer. His nature was convivial, not intemperate, and his eternal punch and brandy and water ("hot," "cold without," or "luke") is a mere symbol of conviviality. The intoxication is a phrase, a tradition of mistaken humour, handed on from the hard drinkers of the eighteenth century. It is, besides, a mechanial device for getting Mr. Pickwick into otherwise impossible quandaries. The great man himself is a study of the humours of mastership and discipleship. He reminds us now of Socrates, now of Dr. Johnson (who at one time, like Socrates, could take his liquor like a hero); now, if one may say so, of the late Master of Balliol. Wise in counsel (as to Mr. Peter Magnus) even in matters on which he had only reflected as a disinterested student of life, Mr. Pickwick can administer a firm snub on occasion. Yet (as in the adventure of the Girls' School) Mr. Pickwick's warmth of heart overcomes the dictates of his speculative reason. Where he sees wrong, or distress, or meanness, Mr. Pickwick has the prompt feelings of a child—is "as one of these." About his early experiences we are left in doubt. Had Mr. Pickwick loved? It is natural to believe it, but he had never proposed—"never!" His heart, however bruised, was neither broken nor embittered. Thus, in the ​kindly intellect of Dickens, Mr. Pickwick mellowed and matured. Where had Dickens seen any one like this genial sage? No answer is suggested, but possibly Don Quixote, and Dr. Johnson when bound for a frolic with Beauclerk and Langton, may have lent suggestions. Sam Weller, too, is a kind of Sancho, with his proverbs and his anecdotes; also a kind of Greatheart, leading the Pilgrims through a world by them not very distinctly realised. The introduction of Sam gave the book its first bound into popularity. The disciples had their characters marked for them by the original conception; they were the Poet, the Sportsman, and the Lover. Sam was absolutely original and beguiling.
For the rest, the book already shows all Dickens's characteristics. Humour, high spirit, pronounced middle-class Liberalism, hatred of abuses (as of the Factory system), contempt for the "Talking Shop," knowledge of life in walks untrodden by romance, fantastic supernaturalism, pathos, and the black gloom of Dismal Jemmy, are all present in Pickwick. Here is even the love of locomotion, and of walking twenty-five miles after a wedding breakfast.
England was enraptured. Pickwick was in every hand, in every mouth. Men called for it on their death-beds. This was all before culture came and the thin film of sham refine ment now spread over abysses of literary ignorance and critical imbecility. Pickwick is now distasteful to readers who would find Smollett and Fielding at least as little to their minds, but who have never lived with Dickens's masters, Fielding and Smollett. His temperament is unintelligible to young scribes who gloomily peruse Tolstoï in French. He is disdainfully called a caricaturist, as if there were no room in life and art for broad, yet genial, caricature. The young lady in fur-topped boots is now dismissed as "second-rate;" ​Dickens never meant her to be other than she is. Above all, Dickens is now antiquated, as Homer also is. His youth is separated from us by a gulf greater than that which separates him from Smollett. He is not disilluded, like all of us wise moderns. He is practically prior to steam, electricity, the labour movement, popular education. "Naturalism," and the shadow of Darwinism, have not fallen upon him. Science is to him a joke. He is not literary; he does not sedulously beat the bush for "the right word," and pathetically fail to start the hare. In fact, Pickwick is not a book of a man of to-day, and culture has reached such a pitch of knowingness, as to be wholly out of sympathy with everything that is not contemporary.
Not only in things intellectual, but in social customs and material affairs, the breach between us and Mr. Pickwick's world is enormous. We, for example, are, at least, permitted to rest undisturbed in our graves. But it is only too probable that the "subject" in whom Mr. Allen and Mr. Robert Sawyer subscribed for shares, was supplied by a professional body-snatcher, such as Dickens drew in A Tale of Two Cities. In 1832 legislation contrived a measure which ruined those "honest tradesmen," the Resurrectionists, but Bob Sawyer and Ben Allen lived in the palmy days of Burke and Hare, when mortsafes were invented, and iron coffins were in use, and the villagers of Darnick guarded Lady Scott's tomb in Dryburgh. These facts throw rather a lurid light on the medical student of the period.
Quite as remote from modern practice are Grummer and his posse comitatus, and the elegant crown on his mace at Ipswich. The old-fashioned watchman guarded nocturnal London in Mr. Dickens's day, as in Shakespeare's. Almost the earliest of the present Editor's recollections is the hearing ​of the watchman's cry, "Four o'clock, and a misty morning!" in Aberdeen. The watch has gone, and nobody boxes it; nobody "mills a Charlie;" nobody dresses like the watch, and wakes the sleeping City with the yell, "Three o'clock, and an earthquake!"—a simple pastime of our ancestors. The City itself is an altered scene. Oysters are no longer the cheap consolation of poverty, but the costly and infrequent adornment of rich men's tables. The simple bivalve has fallen under the suspicion of sanitary science, for we allow doctors to tell us what to avoid. In Mr. Pickwick's day, no man cared a doit for sanitary science, and the hero himself fears nothing but lemon in milk-punch. The mere phrase, "half price at the theatre," "by himself surprises." Half price is as extinct as the picturesque contemporary custom of hanging men in chains. Mr. Pickwick may often have seen a man hanged in chains; he may even, like Rogers, have seen Townley's head on Temple Bar. And Temple Bar, too, has gone, with many a place which Mr. Pickwick knew. Cheapside is a new Cheapside, not that familiar to Mr. Pickwick and to George de Barnwell. Queen Victoria Street and the Holborn Viaduct have clean abolished the old houses that rose thereabouts after the Great Fire. It has been justly observed that Goswell Street is now no place for Mr. Pickwick's habitation, nor would Mr. Allen "knock double knocks on the door of the Borough Market." The inns where Mr. Pickwick took his ease in the City are no more to be found than that wherein the mad Prince drank with Poins and the Fat Knight; even Leadenhall Market is swept and garnished. The middle classes about Mr. Pickwick's time instituted their oldest clubs, such as the Athenæum and Sidney Scraper's Club, where, as her Majesty's Guards truly observed, the middle classes "do themselves very well." Mr. Winkle would now belong to the ​Isthmian, or the Sports; Mr. Snodgrass to the Savile, among the other poets. Garraway's itself is gone, Troja fuit, and nobody dines at a tavern except American admirers of Dr. Johnson. Bath has, more or less, come into repute again, but it is not Mr. Pickwick's or Miss Austen's Bath, and Mr. Bantam shares the same repose as Beau Nash; while Mr. Wardle is as dead as Squire Western, and the daughter of a Mr. Wardle would never dream of passing her nuptial night in her father's house, as Mrs. Trundle does. Blazer no longer carries a tall brass-headed stick; "Bails" have vanished with serjeants-at-law; and the Fleet was pulled down ten years after Pickwick appeared. The tortoise-shell lancets of the young surgeons are out of use, and an amazing number of new scientific instruments has usurped their place. Some of the ancient Inns of Court have been improved off the face of the earth, and endless miles of stucco now occupy the ancient green fields. In brief, Mr. Pickwick would be lost in London, and feel himself, among New Women, as forlorn as a revivified mummy of the ancient Empire. The railway has made him and his voyages anachronisms; his liquor he would not be allowed to obtain without reproach; his garb is as antiquated as chain-mail. With Mr. Pickwick we inhabit "another world than ours."
Nevertheless, the world reads and quotes Mr. Pickwick. He and his friends have entered into the national memory; we cannot but quote Pickwick on many an opportune occasion. As Mr. Forster writes, "When faith is lost in that possible combination of eccentricities and benevolences, shrewdness and simplicity, good sense and jollity, all that suggests the ludicrous and nothing that suggests contempt for it, . . . the mistake committed will not be one of merely critical misjudgment."
​The mistake can only occur when humour and good humour have ceased to be national qualities. The one thing which we regret about Pickwick is that Scott did not live to read it, and to welcome the successor, so unlike himself, who, like himself, gave England so many happy days.
ANDREW LANG.