PAGE FROM MANUSCRIPT OF DICKENS’S “PICKWICK PAPERS”
This great letter is now in the collection of that famous man of affairs, fast becoming equally well known as a bibliophile, Mr. Owen D. Young.
When I read Dickens’s wonderful living message,—isn’t there a tremendous thrill in those words: “Pickwick is at length begun in all his might and glory,”—I never dreamed I should one day own all that is left of the original manuscript of the master’s greatest work, the Pickwick Papers. This, which Dickens wrote when he was but twenty-four years old, is without doubt the most valuable modern manuscript in existence. An earlier owner, the late Mr. W. A. White, abstracted from it a single leaf and presented it most generously to the British Museum. What a gracious tribute this was from an American collector!
When so many of the great English treasures have come to this side of the water, how ingratiating was so splendid a gift! There the Pickwick page lies, in a glass show case, in the British Museum, and any day one may see Dickens’s never-failing admirers crowding in front of it to read and thrill to the broadly penned words, now browned and a bit faded. How rapidly the words seem to fly across the pages of this manuscript! You can’t but feel, as you read, that Dickens was almost divinely chosen to give to the world a fount of humor which in its very humanity will delight man, woman, and child throughout the years. All that is left of the manuscript is thirty-two leaves, which Dickens himself arranged into two chapters. When I read them I feel the closest union with Dickens the author; in these pages the period just before the coronation of Queen Victoria is made alive and vivid to us, bridging the world of yesterday to that of to-day.
The Pickwick Papers first appeared in serial form in 1836, issued monthly. I think he became weary writing them, although, heaven knows, there is nothing in the story which would give the reader the slightest inkling of this. But prefixed to my manuscript is a hitherto unpublished verse. Dickens marks it “Private and Confidential,” and it is written for the benefit of one Mr. Hicks, as follows:—
Oh, Mr. Hick
——S, I’m heartily sick
Of this sixteenth Pickwick
Which is just in the nick
For the publishing trick,