30 March: Boreham on Mr Pickwick

The First Gentleman in Fiction
There are four characters in fiction so distinctive and outstanding that we all seem to have seen them. If, at a fancy dress ball, a guest were to masquerade as any one of them, he would be identified at once. The four are Shylock, Robinson Crusoe, Uncle Tom, and Mr. Pickwick. The reflection is suggested by the circumstance that we mark today the anniversary of Mr. Pickwick's first appearance, an event that his creator celebrated, a few hours later, by getting married. No other book was, to Dickens, quite as notable as "Pickwick." It was his first serious venture and its success was sweeter to him than that of any of his later triumphs. Mr. Pickwick, who was named after a jolly old innkeeper at Bath, has taken his place among us as the most typical and most celebrated of Englishmen. He is the incarnation of a great national tradition. He represents some of our most amiable qualities. Who would like to think of English literature without him?

Beyond the slightest shadow of doubt, Mr. Pickwick is easily the best known character in fiction. His chubby face, his prominent glasses, his expansive waistcoat and his short, plump legs are familiar to us all. We seem to have watched him as, standing near the inn door, he expostulates with Sam Weller about the luggage, or as, rising with imperturbable gravity after dinner, he grandiloquently proposes a toast, his right hand waving his spectacles in rhythmic unison with his measured cadences whilst his left, hidden, behind him, flicks his expressive coat tails by way of additional emphasis. There was a time—one hopes it has not altogether passed—when, if Mr. Pickwick could have appeared in the dingiest court or most squalid alley in London, he would have been instantly recognised by every ragamuffin about the place.

Pouring Personality Into Paper
Nobody can read Dickens' first great novel without feeling that, in delineating Mr. Pickwick, the author is thoroughly enjoying himself. His pen seems to romp across the pages. He is describing scenes with which he is himself familiar, and is sketching the sort of people that he has often met. Herein lie the resistless charm and the virile strength of Dickens. In discreetly selecting as the field of his fancy the common ways with which he is so intimate, Dickens secures to himself an inestimable advantage. His imagination roves in a realm that he loves; his toil is always congenial; labour, however strenuous, becomes a luxury. His pages ring with reality.

This is true alike of his pathos and of his humour. Dr. A. W. Ward tells us how intensely real the characters in the books became to their creator. After penning such chapters as those that describe the deaths of Paul Dombey and Little Nell, Dickens would behave for days like a broken-hearted man who had been bereft of a lovely and favourite child. "He wrote," says Dr. Ward, "with his very life-blood." The same accent of conviction impresses the reader just as much when the writer finds himself in a lighter or a brighter vein. As we devour the drolleries of Pickwick, we feel that Dickens is tremendously enamoured of life—real life, every day life, the life of the kitchen, the club, and the street. He was never hampered by a theory; he was consumed with a thirst. "His thirst," as G. K. Chesterton put its, "was for things as humble, as human, as laughable as the daily bread for which we cry to God." And the beauty of it is that he immensely enjoyed everybody in his books; and, as an inevitable consequence, everybody else has enjoyed everybody in those books ever since.

Mr Pickwick As A National Ideal
Dickens, like all of us, has his faults and his critics have made the most of them. They allege that he is the victim of a constant tendency to gross exaggeration; that, whilst Shakespeare excelled in his delineations of womanhood, Dickens failed miserably in respect of his feminine characters; that he deals principally with external trappings rather than with basic emotions, giving us the barrister's wig in mistake for the barrister and the beadle's cocked hat instead of the beadle; and so on. However much or however little justice there may be in these indictments, there is no shadow of truth in any of them so far as Mr. Pickwick is concerned. He was a stately, chivalrous, flesh-and-blood reality in the mind of Charles Dickens; he has become a vivid and palpitating reality in the thought of the Anglo-Saxon world. Indeed, it is extremely difficult to believe that he never enjoyed an actual and corporal existence.

It would be interesting to know how Dickens himself visualised Mr. Pickwick as he bent over his manuscript. Was he tall and thin or short and plump? And how old was he? Few things are more certain than that we owe our conception of the physique of Mr. Pickwick to the artists rather than to the author. Seymour's original drawings depict Mr. Pickwick as lean, gawky, cadaverous. And, as to his age, we are probably inclined to overestimate his years. When asked to slide, Mr. Pickwick explains that he has not done such a thing since he was a boy, 30 years ago. This seems to indicate a man in the early forties. But, after all, these are the merest trivialities; they matter little. The thing that does matter is that, in the person of Mr. Pickwick, Dickens has presented for our contemplation and emulation one of the bravest, one of the choicest, and one of the most unselfish characters in our literature, a character, who, devout, genial, and altogether lovable, perpetually radiates cheerfulness, courage, and common goodness. As we think of the debut of Mr. Pickwick on the eve of his creator's wedding, we catch ourselves wishing that the felicity that pickers was preparing for millions of his fellowmen could have been poured into that new relationship upon which he was himself entering.

F W Boreham

Image: Mr Pickwick