Free Charles Dickens: A Life by Claire Tomalin Page A

end of April when Seymour, suffering from depression, shot himself. This could have been enough to sink the whole thing, especially when the replacement artist lacked the right touch. William Makepeace Thackeray, who had skill and ambitions as an illustrator, came to see Dickens with his sketchbook and offered to take on the task, but he was turned down, and the commission went to Hablot K. Browne, a young artist and neighbour, with his studio in Furnival’s Inn. Browne caught the spirit of the work perfectly, called himself ‘Phiz’ to fit ‘Boz’, and made his reputation alongside Dickens.
    In May, Dickens agreed with Macrone that he would write a three-volume novel to be called ‘Gabriel Vardon’ – it became
Barnaby Rudge
– and delivered ‘next November’, for a payment of £200. The second volume of the
Sketches
was being prepared, and he still had his full-time job with the
Chronicle
. In June he was kept especially busy reporting a scandalous case in the law courts in which the Prime Minister, Lord Melbourne, was accused of adultery by the loutish jealous husband of Caroline Norton, the beautiful and gifted granddaughter of Sheridan. The public was of course eagerly interested in this washing of the dirty linen of the upper classes, but Mr Norton failed to produce any evidence and lost his case. Dickens had to move nimbly between the roles of reporter and novelist, and in the same month he was inspired to carry
Pickwick
from its shaky start to popular success as he introduced the character of Sam Weller, Pickwick’s cockney servant.
    From this moment sales of the monthly numbers in their pale green wrappers rose steadily and soon spectacularly, and the critics vied with one another to praise it. The appearance of a fresh number of
Pickwick
soon became news, an event, something much more than literature. ‘Boz has got the town by the ear,’ a critic said, and he spoke the truth. 13 Each number sold for a shilling and they were passed from hand to hand, and butchers’ boys were seen reading them in the streets. 14 Judges and politicians, the middle classes and the rich, bought them, read them and applauded; and the ordinary people saw that he was on their side, and they loved him for it. He did not ask them to think but showed them what he wanted them to see and hear. The names of his characters became common currency: Jingle, Sam Weller, Snodgrass and Winkle, Mrs Leo Hunter the cultural hostess with her ‘Ode on an expiring Frog’, the political journalists Slurk and Pott, the drunken medical student Bob Sawyer. It was as though he was able to feed his story directly into the bloodstream of the nation, giving injections of laughter, pathos and melodrama, and making his readers feel he was a personal friend to each of them. Dickens knew he had triumphed, and this sense of a personal link between himself and his public became the most essential element in his development as a writer.

     
    The Pickwick Papers as it first appeared, serialized in green-paper wrappers.
     
    He already had two publishers – Macrone for
Sketches
and Chapman & Hall for
Pickwick
– and in August 1836 he agreed to write a children’s book for a third, Thomas Tegg, for £100. A children’s book could be seen as a special case. Later in the same month, however, he entered into negotiations with a fourth, Richard Bentley, who had been pursuing him for some time. Bentley trumped Macrone with an offer of £400 for the copyright of his next novel. Dickens pushed him up to £500, and Bentley pushed Dickens up to promising two novels. Dickens then sold him the publishing rights in his opera, describing it as ‘Boz’s first play’, which Bentley did indeed publish as a pamphlet. Dickens also agreed to become editor of a monthly magazine for Bentley, what was eventually called
Bentley’s Miscellany
, to which he would contribute something of his own every month, for twenty guineas. This would bring him a further annual income of