Dickensian Intemperance: Charity and Reform

Novel: A Forum on Fiction, Fall 2003 by Claybaugh, Amanda

Pickwick everywhere bears the marks of Dickens's efforts to transform the text into something more realist and more disciplined. That this was his aspiration is demonstrated by Pickwick's publication history. Pickwick began when a publishing firm, Chapman and Hall, commissioned a series of sporting sketches from a celebrated illustrator, Robert Seymour, and then looked for someone to write the accompanying text. They settled on the promising young author of the Sketches by Boz. In securing the illustrator before the writer, the publishers were following the contemporary practice of subordinating serial text to serial illustration, but Dickens famously challenged this subordination. His challenges reveal the novelistic ambition that was growing within him, and they also help us to specify what he understood a novel to be. Dickens struggled for two specific prerogatives. From the beginning, he insisted that he, and not the illustrator, be the one to choose the topics Pickwick would take up. In practice, this meant that Pickwick would focus on something other than hunting and shooting, specifically on the London Dickens knew so well. The second prerogative was harder won. The illustrator, harassed by money worries and harassed by Dickens's demands, finished three of the four illustrations for the second number and then shot himself through the heart. The publishers wanted to cancel the serial, but Dickens persuaded them to continue on very different terms. He insisted that he be allowed to choose the next illustrator, further securing his own predominance, but he also insisted that the number of pages per serial part be increased by a third while the number of illustrations be halved. In practice, this meant that Dickens was now free to develop two rather long episodes per serial part rather than four very brief ones, and this new expansiveness made it possible for him to imagine episodes extending the length of a part or even from one part to the next.9

Over the course of Pickwick, we can see Dickens exercising these two prerogatives more and more, as he works to transform the comic serial into the realist serial novel. In Boz, it was the retrospective reorganization of the sketches that enabled us to read the text as the story of Dickens's apprenticeship in city writing. In Pickwick, by contrast, his apprenticeship in novel writing is inadvertently recorded by the unforgiving nature of serial publication itself. Rendering revision impossible, the serial preserves within itself the history of its own false starts, failed experiments, and new beginnings. And in this history, too, we see the same aspiration toward narrative discipline and realist detail. Pickwick's main plot had begun with the loosest of frames. Mr. Pickwick has called a meeting of the Pickwick Club and proposes that a Corresponding Society be formed to travel through England and report back on the adventures that befall them. Pickwick and his young friends thus begin their travels free to go almost anywhere and do almost anything, and Pickwick's early chapters are remarkable for the abundance and variety of the adventures they contain. The adventures are connected by a narrative as capacious as Pickwick's proposal: the picaresque.