‘Annual income twenty pounds, annual expenditure nineteen nineteen six, result
happiness. Annual income twenty pounds, annual expenditure twenty pounds ought
and six, result misery. The blossom is blighted, the leaf is withered, the god of day goes
down upon the dreary scene, and – and in short you are forever floored. As I am!’The Pickwick Papers
The experience had also given young Dickens what he called ‘the key of the street’.
The office boy contrived to get a job as reporter on a London daily newspaper. He
travelled England by coach, writing news reports to deadlines, and also sketches.
Sketches by ‘Boz’ and Cuts by Cruikshank, a famous illustrator, was commissioned;
then The Posthumous Papers of the Pickwick Club. Chapter 2 begins:
That punctual servant of all work the sun, had just risen, and begun to strike a light on
the morning of the thirteenth of May, one thousand eight hundred and twenty-seven,
when Mr. Samuel Pickwick burst like another sun from his slumbers, threw open his
chamber window, and looked out upon the world beneath.Mr Pickwick is soon on the stage-coach to Rochester with a Mr Jingle:
‘Head, heads – take care of your heads!’ cried the loquacious stranger, as they came out
under the low archway, which in those days formed the entrance to the coach-yard.
‘Terrible place – dangerous work – other day – five children – mother – tall lady, eating
sandwiches – forgot the arch – crash – knock – children look round – mother’s head off- sandwich in her hand – head of a family off – shocking, shocking! Looking at
Whitehall, sir? – fine place – little window – somebody else’s head off there, eh, sir? – he
didn’t keep a sharp look-out enough either – eh, sir, eh?’
‘I am ruminating,’ said Mr Pickwick, ‘on the strange mutability of human affairs.’
‘Ah! I see – in at the palace door one day, out at the window the next. Philosopher,
sir?’
‘An observer of human nature, sir,’ said Mr. Pickwick.
‘Ah, so am I. Most people are when they’ve little to do and less to get. Poet, sir?’
The shorthand reporter in London’s streets, inns and courts had kept ‘a sharp
look-out enough’. But the caricaturist, mimic, and raconteur also invents: Mr Jingle
is a ver sion of Dickens himself, a Cockney Byron; he talks himself into our confi-
dence.Pickwick is not a novel, ‘merely a great book’, as George Gissing said, and full
of writing which begs to be read aloud, to be shared. Not all its successors are great
books, though all have passages in which the language bounds and cavorts like a
tumbler. Not all are novels, if the novel has both to tell a coherent story, and render
social reality. The approach is too theatrically stylized to be realistic. Dickens loved
comic acting. The novelist he admired was Fielding, the play in which he most often
ac ted was Jonson’s Every Man in his Humour: tough satiric models, like the carica-
turists of the 18th century and early 19th: Hogarth, Gillray, Rowlandson – and
George Cruickshank, who illustrated early Dickens. But Dickens also loved melo-
drama,the source of some of his own memorable effects and less memorable plots.
As Ruskin said,Dickens’s action takes place within ‘a circle of stage fire’.
Some who laughed at Pickwick over its nineteen-month appearance also
ex claimed over a serial he brought out simultaneously, one in which Oliver asked for
more, and Nancy was murdered.Olive r Twist pr esents Dickens the hagiographer of
martyred innocence – in workhouse, school, factory, prison and law court – the
Dickens who makes us feel the cruelty of injustice and the pinch of poverty. His
witness to the life of the back streets is not documentary but symbolic, fabulous,
THE TRIUMPH OF THE NOVEL 291