ABSTRACT
‘More than Childe Harold or Waverley, more than Adam Bede or The Heir of Redclyffe …, Pickwick was the most sensational triumph in nineteenth-century publishing.’ George Ford's discussion of the reviews, Richard Altick's study of circulation figures, John Butt and Kathleen Tillotson's account of Dickens at work transforming the shilling, serialized issue, all point to the uniqueness of Dickens's first triumph. 1 All of these are ‘pioneer’ explorations of various empirical facts surrounding the appearance of Pickwick Papers and so, focused on those sorts of specific information, none can attempt an explanation of the event. A literary historian would need to read these accounts, the stories of the publication of Pickwick, symptomatically, or dialectically, to explain the historical event and its significance, and that is what I shall attempt here. The general outline of the story of the publication of Pickwick Papers is well-known: in early 1836 the new firm of Chapman & Hall planned with the popular illustrator Robert Seymour for a series of sporting prints in shilling numbers, and they invited the young journalist, Charles Dickens, whose recently collected Sketches By Boz had had a moderate success, to write the accompanying text. Dickens joined the enterprise as an ambitious, opinionated junior partner, differing from the start with Seymour about the precedence of illustration over letterpress, and over the proposed rural setting and the ‘sporting’ interests of the Pickwickians. Seymour, who was harried by personal worries, committed suicide just as the second number was being published, new illustrators were sought and Hablot K. Brown (Phiz) was hired; Dickens was left the dominant partner. His ideas for the Pickwickians quickly prevailed; in the fourth number he introduced into the story Sam Weller, who was especially applauded in the Literary Gazette, which reprinted Sam's monologues. Before the year was out Dickens was ‘the most widely-read author in England’, with the instalments of Pickwick selling 40,000 copies each month – a success ‘unprecedented in the history of literature’. 2
