MANNERS and CVSTOMS of ye ENGLYSHE in 1849
A Weddynge BREAKFASTE.
(Richard Doyle, 1849.)
Upon looking over the sketches of Robert Seymour, which used to appear from time to time in the windows—price threepence—while Boz was getting his "Sketches" through the press, we perceive that Dickens really derived fruitful hints from this artist, besides the original suggestion of the work. Mr. Winkle is recognizable in several of them; Mr. Pickwick's figure occurs occasionally; the Fat Boy is distinctly suggested; the famous picnic scene is anticipated; and there is much in the spirit of the pictures to remind us that among the admiring crowd which they attracted, the author of "Pickwick" might often have been found. Seymour, however, gave him only hints. In every instance he has made the suggested character or incident absolutely his own. Seymour only supplied a piece of copper, which the alchemy of genius turned into gold. In Dickens's broadest and most boisterous humor there are ever a certain elegance and refinement of tone that are wanting in Seymour, Seymour's cockney hunters being persons of the Tittlebat Titmouse grade, who long ago ceased to amuse and began to offend.
Seymour's discovery, in the first numbers of "Pickwick," that it was the author, not the artist, who was to dominate a work which was his own conception and long-cherished dream, was probably among the causes of his fatal despair. When he first mentioned to Chapman & Hall his scheme of a Cockney Club ranging over England, he was a popular comic artist of several years' standing, and Charles Dickens was a name unknown. Nor was it supposed to be of so very much consequence who should write the descriptive matter. The firm closed the bargain with Mr. Seymour without having bestowed a thought upon the writer; and when they had suggested the unknown "Boz," and procured a copy of his "Sketches" by way of recommendation, Mrs. Seymour's remark was that, though she could not see any humor in his writings herself, yet he might do as well as another, and fifteen pounds a month to a poor and struggling author would be a little fortune. To a sensitive and ambitious man, made morbid by various hard usage such as the men who delight the world often undergo, it must have been a cutting disappointment to be asked, in the infancy of an enterprise which he deemed peculiarly his own, to put aside an illustration that he had prepared, and make another to suit the fancies of a subordinate. It was like requiring a star actor to omit his favorite and most special "business" in order to afford a member of the company an opportunity to shine.
The biographer of Mr. Dickens is naturally reluctant to admit the social insignificance in London, forty years ago, of a "struggling author," and he is grossly abusive of Mr. N. P. Willis for describing his hero as he appeared at this stage of his career. Mr. Willis visited him at a dismal building in Holborn, in company with one of Mr. Dickens's publishers, and he gave a brief account of what he saw, which doubtless was the exact truth. Willis was a faithful chronicler of the minutiæ of a scene. He was a stickler for having the small facts correct. "We pulled up," he wrote, "at the entrance of a large building used for lawyers' chambers. I followed by a long flight of stairs to an upper story, and was ushered into an uncarpeted and bleak-looking room, with a deal table, two or three chairs, and a few books, a small boy and Mr. Dickens, for the contents. I was only struck at first with one thing (and I made a memorandum of it that evening as the strongest instance I had seen of English obsequiousness to employers)—the degree to which the poor author was overpowered with the honor of his publisher's visit." He describes Dickens as dressed rather in the Swiveller style, though without Richard's swell look: hair close cropped, clothes jaunty and scant, "the very personification of a close sailer to the wind." There is nothing in this discreditable to the "poor author," and nothing which a person who knew London then would deem improbable. Is it not a principle imbedded in the constitution of Britons that the person who receives money in small amounts for work and labor done is the party obliged, and must stand hat in hand before him who pays it?
Whoever shall truly relate the history of the people of Great Britain in the nineteenth century will not pass by in silence the publication of "Pickwick." Cruikshank, Seymour, and Irving, as well as the humorists of other times, had nourished and molded the genius of Dickens; but, like all the masters in art, he so far transcended his immediate teachers that, even in what he most obviously derived from them, he was original. And it is he, not they, who is justly hailed as the founder of that benign school of comic art which gives us humor without coarseness, and satire without ill nature. It is "Pickwick" that marks the era, and the sole interest which Seymour's sketches now possess is in showing us from what Charles Dickens departed when he founded the Pickwick Club.