Pickwickian Manners and Customs

PERCY FITZGERALD.
the ROXBURGHE PRESS , Limited, FIFTEEN, VICTORIA STREET, westminster.
Inscribed to AUGUSTINE BIRRELL, M.P.
No English book has so materially increased the general gaiety of the country, or inspired the feeling of comedy to such a degree as, “The Pickwick Club.” It is now some “sixty years since” this book was published, and it is still heartily appreciated. What English novel or story is there which is made the subject of notes and commentaries on the most elaborate scale; whose very misprints and inconsistencies are counted up; whose earliest “states of the plates” are sought out and esteemed precious? “Pickwick,” wonderful to say, is the only story that has produced a literature of its own—quite a little library—and has kept artists, topographers, antiquaries, and collectors all busily at work.
There seems to be some mystery, almost
miracle, here. A young fellow of four-and-twenty throws off, or rather “rattles off,” in the exuberance of his spirits, a never-flagging series of incidents and characters. The story is read, devoured, absorbed, all over the world, and now, sixty years after its appearance, new and yet newer editions are being issued. All the places alluded to and described in the book have in their turn been lifted into fame, and there are constantly appearing in magazines illustrated articles on “Rochester and Dickens,” “Dickens Land,” “Dickens’ London,” and the rest. Wonderful! People, indeed, seem never to tire of the subject—the same topics are taken up over and over again. The secret seems to be that the book was a living thing, and still lives. It is, moreover, perhaps the best, most accurate picture of character and manners that are quite gone by: in it the meaning and significance of old buildings, old inns, old churches, and old towns are reached, and interpreted in most interesting
fashion; the humour, bubbling over, and never forced, and always fresh, is sustained through some six hundred closely-printed pages; all which, in itself, is a marvel and unapproached. It is easy, however, to talk of the boisterousness, the “caricature,” the unlicensed recklessness of the book, the lack of restraint, the defiance of the probabilities. It is popular and acceptable all the same. But there is one test which incontestably proves its merit, and supplies its title, to be considered all but “monumental.” This is its prodigious fertility and suggestiveness.