20 July: Boreham on Sam Weller

The Best of the Bunch
It was July 20, 1836, that Sam Weller first made his appearance. In the judgment of most of those who smilingly and appreciatively survey the Dickens gallery, Sam Weller has taken his place as the best of the bunch. A recent plebiscite decided on Sam Weller, and those who voted for him have, by way of vindication, the judgment of John Forster, the biographer of Dickens. Forster admits that Mr. Pickwick comes a very close second but, he avers, Sam Weller takes the palm. His place is, Forster maintains, an absolutely pre-eminent and unrivalled one. Sam, he holds, is one of the supreme successes of the world's fiction, a character whom nobody ever saw yet everybody recognises at once perfectly natural and perfectly original.

It is eminently characteristic of Samuel Weller that he is in no hurry to put in an appearance. We have to turn more than a hundred pages of "Pickwick Papers" before we come upon him. There is nothing aggressive, nothing self-assertive, nothing unduly emphatic, nothing objectionably pushing about Sam. He does not burst upon us, turning a somersault like a clown at a circus. He is modest; knows his place and keeps it; does nothing to draw attention to himself. We are well into the tenth chapter of the famous novel before we make Sam's acquaintance. Even then there is no word to suggest that he is likely to become the most outstanding and memorable character in the entire volume.

A Cheerful, Witty Philosopher
We are at the White Hart Inn in the Borough. In the yard a man is busily employed brushing the dirt off a pair of boots. He is habited in a coarse striped waistcoat, with black calico sleeves and blue glass buttons, drab breeches and leggings. A bright red handkerchief is wound in a loose and unstudied style round his neck, and an old white hat is carelessly thrown on one side of his head. "Sam!" cries the maid-of-all-work. "Hullo!" replies the man with the white hat. "Number 22 wants his boots," explains the maid. "Ask number 22 whether he'll have 'em now or wait till he gets 'em!" answers Sam. With that introductory and characteristic speech Sam Weller inaugurates the career that has caused millions of readers sometimes to rock with merriment and sometimes to brush the moisture from their eyes.

As though he is still shrinking from prominence, we turn another hundred pages before Sam enters Mr. Pickwick's service and takes that place in literature from which he can never be expelled. He is still wearing the white hat that figured in the inn yard. "'Taint a werry good 'un to look at," he admits to his new master, and to the assembled Pickwickians, "but it's an astonishin' 'un to wear, and, afore the brim went, it was a werry handsome tile. Hows'ever, its lighter without it, that's one thing, and every hole lets in some air, that's another—wentilation gossamer, I calls it." Mr. Pickwick evidently felt that the company of so cheerful a philosopher would materially heighten the gaiety of existence, and he straightway bound him to his service at a salary of £12 a year, his keep and a new suit of clothes every six months.

When Master Obeys Servant
Sam was essentially "a character" but he has his serious side. He provokes gravity as well as gaiety, tears as well as smiles. Again and again his commonsense and quick wit save his master in situations of delicacy and of danger. Sam often commands while Mr. Pickwick obeys. He provides, indeed, a striking illustration of the fact that the voices that are most authoritative and most imperious, frequently come to us not from courts but from kitchens. Who does not remember the satisfying proportions of Richard Jefferies' Gamekeeper? Our prince of naturalists sketches him as he accompanies his master about the great estate. He is only a servant and his master is a lord. And yet "when a trusted servant like this accompanies his master, often in solitary rambles for hours together, dignity must unbend now and then, however great the social difference between them; and thus a man of strong individuality and a really valuable gift of observation insensibly guides his master." And so it comes to pass that the old gamekeeper rules the estate like a lord, and his master does the gamekeeper's will like a slave. Sir Walter Scott too, has accustomed us to the laird who lived in mortal terror of offending his old serving-man.

Sam was never a tyrant, but he kept a firm hand on his master, and Mr. Pickwick recognised his indebtedness to him. The two remain together to the end. "Every year"—so runs, the last sentence in the book—"Mr. Pickwick repairs to a large family merrymaking at Mr. Wardle's. On this, as on all other occasions, he is invariably attended by the faithful Sam, between whom and his master there exists a steady and reciprocal attachment which nothing but death will terminate." The world will be a poor place when Sam Weller makes no appeal to it. When we lose our relish for his native fun and irrepressible good spirits, his rich and ready illustration and his imperturbable self-possession; when we no longer appreciate his devotion to his master, his fine chivalry and his perfect gallantry; when we cease to admire these things and cease to believe that they exist in those about us, it will, as Forster suggests, be worse for us than for the fame of Charles Dickens. When that day comes, the works of Dickens will no longer be read and the essential spirit of the British people will have perished. But those who love Sam Weller, as Sam Weller has been loved for more than a century, will never bring themselves to believe that so dark a day will ever dawn.

F W Boreham

Image: Sam Weller