country place, and at which different traits of character may be observed and recognized.” This was a very scientific and well drawn scheme; and it was, on the whole, most faithfully and even brilliantly carried out. But with infinite art Boz emancipated himself from the formal hide-bound trammels of Syntax tours and the like, when it was reckoned that the hero and his friends would be exhibited like “Bob Logic” and “Tom and Jerry” in a regular series of public places. “Mr. Pickwick has an Adventure at Vauxhall,” “Mr. Pickwick Goes to Margate,” etc.: we had a narrow escape, it would seem, of this conventional sort of thing, and no doubt it was this the publishers looked for. But “Boz” asserted his supremacy, and made the narrative the chief element.
It was interesting thus to know that Mr. Pickwick had visited the borders of Wales—I suppose, Chester—but what was his celebrated journey to Birmingham, prompted by his “fondness for the useful arts”? This
could hardly refer to his visit to Mr. Winkle, sen. The Club, it will be seen, was founded in 1822, and its place of meeting would appear to have been this Huggin Lane, City, “so intimately associated with Lothbury and Cateaton Street.” The picture of the meeting of the Club shows us that it consisted of the ominous number of thirteen. There is not room for more. They seem like a set of well-to-do retired tradesmen; the faces are such as we should see on the stage in a piece of low comedy: for the one on the left Mr. Edward Terry might have sat. The secretary sits at the bottom of the table, with his back to us, and the chairman, with capacious stomach, at the top. Blotton, whom Mr. Pickwick rather unhandsomely described as a “vain and disappointed haberdasher,” may have followed this business. He is an ill-looking fellow enough, with black, bushy whiskers. The Pickwickians are decidedly the most gentlemanly of the party. But why was it necessary for Mr. Pickwick to stand upon a chair?
This, however, may have been a custom of the day at free and easy meetings.
“Posthumous papers”—moreover, did not correctly describe the character of the Book, for the narrative did not profess to be founded on documents at all. He was, however, committed to this title by his early announcement, and indeed intended to carry out a device of using Snodgrass’s “Note Books,” whose duty it was during the course of the adventures to take down diligently all that he observed. But this cumbrous fiction was discarded after a couple of numbers. “Posthumous papers” had been used some ten years before, in another work.
Almost every page—save perhaps a dismal story or two—in the 609 pages of Pickwick is good; but there are two or three passages which are obscure, if not forced in humour. Witness Mr. Bantam’s recognition of Mr. Pickwick, as the gentleman residing on Clapham Green—not yet Common—“who
lost the use of his limbs from imprudently taking cold after port wine, who could not be moved in consequence of acute suffering, and who had the water from the King’s Bath bottled at 103 degrees, and sent by waggon to his bedroom in Town; when he bathed, sneezed, and same day recovered.” This is grotesque enough and farcical, but without much meaning. On another occasion we are told that Tupman was casting certain “Anti-Pickwickian glances” at the servant maids, which is unmeaning. No doubt, Un-Pickwickian was intended.
Why is there no “Pickwick Club” in London? It might be worth trying, and would be more successful than even the Johnson Club. There is surely genuine “stuff” to work on. Our friends in America, who are Pickwickian quand même, have established the “All-Around Dickens Club.” The members seem to be ladies, though there are a number of honorary members of the other sex, which include members
of “Boz’s” own family, with Mr. Kitton, Mr. W. Hughes, Mr. Charles Kent, myself, and some more. The device of the club is “Boz’s” own book-plate, and the “flower” of the club is his favourite geranium. The President is Mrs. Adelaide Garland; and some very interesting papers, to judge from their titles, have been read, such as “Bath and its Associations with Landor,” “The City of Bristol with its Literary Associations,” “The Excursion to the Tea Gardens of Hampstead,” prefaced by a description of the historic old inn, “Poem by Charles Kent,” “Dickens at Gad’s Hill,” “A Description of Birmingham, its Institutions, and Dickens’ Interest therein”; with a “Reading of Mr. Pickwick’s Mission to Birmingham, Coventry and the adjacent Warwickshire Country,” etc. There is also a very clever series of examination questions by the President in imitation of Calverley’s.
“Had Mr. Pickwick loved?” Mr. Lang asks; “it is natural to believe that he had never proposed, never. His heart, however