When Fildes interviewed Dickens preparatory to taking up this commission, he informed the author that although he appreciated the honour of being selected to illustrate “Edwin Drood,” he felt compelled to forego most reluctantly the pleasure of it if the designs had to be of a comic and wholly humorous nature after the manner of Phiz and his predecessors. He reminded Dickens that his writings possessed an intensely serious as well as a jocular side and would lend themselves admirably to a graver style of handling. Dickens replied that he was rather tired of having his illustrators consider him entirely as a humourist and caricaturist. While there is a vast difference between “Pickwick” and “Edwin Drood,” yet there is much of serious life depicted in the various escapades of the club, and it is the keen appreciation of this quality that seems to have escaped entirely the earlier artists.

We turn to Charles Green and find in his series of large water-colours one entitled, “The Pickwick Club,” and our intimate friend clothed, not in caricature, but in all the atmosphere of reality, losing thereby none of his jovial and comic characteristics. The real Winkle, the real Snodgrass, the real Tupman, are listening to his address, and the unnatural elements of the first plates have given way to a more suitable form of expression though retaining the quaint humour of the text.

Who does not find here the Pickwick we have always sought—the Pickwick created by Dickens?

The writer has endeavoured to produce in this series of pictures the true atmosphere, human in the blending of the serious and the comic, and to give to them the semblance of reality produced in our minds by the text.

George Alfred Williams.

Chatham, N. J.

CONTENTS

CHAPTER I
PAGE
A good-humoured Christmas chapter, containing an account of a wedding, and some other sports beside, which although in their way, even as good customs as marriage itself, are not quite so religiously kept up, in these degenerate times[25]
CHAPTER II
The Story of the Goblins who stole a Sexton[87]
CHAPTER III
How the Pickwickians made and cultivated the acquaintance of a couple of nice young men belonging to one of the liberal professions; how they disported themselves on the ice; and how their visit came to a conclusion[118]