“I have had to charge for half a dozen breakdowns in half a dozen times as many miles. Also for the damage of a great-coat from the drippings of a blazing wax-candle, in writing through the smallest hours of the night in a swiftly flying carriage and pair.”
“I have been . . . belated on miry by-roads, towards the small hours, forty or fifty miles from London, in a wheel-less carriage with exhausted horses and drunken post-boys, and have got back in time for publication, to be received with never-forgotten compliments by the late Mr Black . . . in the broadest of Scotch.”
We see plainly enough whence came the description [205] of the chase after Jingle and Miss Wardle. “‘I see his head,’ exclaimed the choleric old man, ‘Damme, I see his head. . . ‘ The countenance of Mr Jingle, completely coated with mud thrown up by the wheels, was plainly discernible at the window of his chaise, and the motion of his arm, which he was waving violently towards the postillions, denoted that he was encouraging them to increased exertion.”
“I never did feel such a jolting in my life,” said poor Mr Pickwick; but it was under such conditions that Dickens worked through the nights transcribing his shorthand notes.
While he was still a reporter his career as an author began.
In a letter to Wilkie Collins, 6th June 1856, Dickens relates that he began “to write fugitive pieces for the old Monthly Magazine” when he was in “the gallery” for the Mirror of Parliament. His op. 1 was Mrs Joseph Porter over the Way; and when it appeared in the glory of print “I walked down,” he wrote, “to Westminster Hall and turned into it for half an hour, because my eyes were so dimmed with joy and pride that they could not bear the street, and were not fit to be seen.”
This was followed by several other articles in the Monthly Magazine, the last in February 1835 was the first to bear the immortal signature of Boz, [206] and in 1836 the series of Sketches by Boz was published.
In the same year, 1836, a notice appeared in the Times of 26th March “that on the 31st would be published the first shilling number of the Posthumous Papers of the Pickwick Club.” The original plan had been to make Pickwick an essentially sporting book, but to this Dickens demurred on account of his ignorance of such matters, and poor Mr Winkle remains as a sacrifice to the idea.
It is curious how important the illustrations of his books seemed to Dickens; there are constant references to the subject in his Letters, nor does he seem to have been generally satisfied.
Illustrations in fiction are in my judgment only tolerable when a book is read for the first time in