Pickwick Club was issued in April 1836. The story of its origin was first authentically told in the preface to the edition of 1847. Some of the details were afterwards slightly modified. The first thought of the work did not originate with Dickens, although the whole character of it was determined by him. The publishers, Messrs Chapman & Hall, and Mr Seymour the artist, had agreed to issue a monthly serial to be illustrated by Mr Seymour, and they went to Dickens, whose Sketches had attracted their attention, to propose that he should write the letterpress of this "monthly something." Their idea was that the author should describe the adventures of a "Nimrod Club," the members of which should go out shooting, fishing, and so forth, and getting themselves into difficulties through their want of dexterity. Dickens undertook the monthly something, but obtained the required diverting incidents by a different machinery, namely, the Pickwick Club. The first four numbers went off slowly; the demand first became "brisk" after the fifth number, in which Sam Weller made his appearance. But by the discerning few the value of the work was recognized; and one of them, Mr Bentley the publisher, only a few weeks before fame came to the author with its capricious and overwhelming suddenness, engaged him to undertake the editing of a monthly magazine to be started the following January, and to write a serial story for it, and further made an agreement with him for the writing of two other tales at a specified early date. Of the vexation arising out of this agreement, when the huge success of the Pickwick Papers showed its terms to be inadequate, and Dickens was disposed to resent it as a selling of himself into slavery, and of the manner in which the bargain was re-adjusted, an account is given by Mr Forster from the author's point of view. Nine monthly numbers of the Pickwick Papers were published in 1836; eleven more in 1837; by November of the latter year the sale had reached 40,000 copies, Pickwick had become a popular hero and godfather to innumerable articles of merchandise, and Sam Weller's sayings were catchwords in the street and the household wherever the English language was spoken.
In the first excitement of success, the young author's appetite for work was unbounded. In 1837 he wrote his monthly instalments of the Pickwick Papers and Oliver Twist side by side, not even by a week in advance of the printer with either. They kept him fully occupied, and held in abeyance for that year a taste which from his youth to the end of his career was strong in him, and had no inconsiderable influence upon his style as a painter of manners. In his childhood at Chatham he got his first experience of fame as the author of a tragedy; at the school in Mornington Place he and his companions mounted small theatres and acted small plays; when in the attorney's office in Lincoln's Inn Fields he frequented minor theatres, the nature of which he has caricatured in the Sketches, and not unfrequently engaged in parts; one of his first published sketches, "Mrs Joseph Porter Over the Way," is a description of private theatricals in a stage-struck family. In 1 836, before his serial engagements multiplied, he wrote a farce called the Strange Gentleman, and a short comedy with songs called the Village Coquettes. It is strange that with this passion for the stage, which he always retained, he should not have written more plays. He probably felt that in this kind of composition he had but the use of his left hand, and did not care to risk his reputation where he had no field for those powers of description and narrative over which ho had proved his mastery. But though he did not write plays, and finally sought no outlet for his theatrical longings except in amateur acting and in reading from his own novels, the habit of realizing incidents as they would appear on the stage is unmistakably apparent in his work. He constantly seems to be working up scenes to the pitch of stage effect, elaborating the actions of his characters as if he were inventing "business" for a player, suggesting, in fact, an exuberance of business far beyond the capabilities of any human performer.
We doubt whether the fact that Dickens did not write plays is explained by saying that his genius was descriptive and narrative, but not dramatic. There is plenty of the raw material of dramatic action in his dialogues. He probably could have written a good acting play if he had tried. His characters are essentially theatrical, though their story is told according to the laws of the novel, and not according to the laws of the drama. The explanation of his not having tried to write plays we take to be simply that he discovered full employment for his powers in another direction before he had applied himself to the art of constructing plays. Dickens was eminently a practical man, and, when publishers were fighting for his novels, he directed his whole energy to meeting the demand without seeking to experiment on other modes of composition. As some compensation to Mr Bentley for releasing him from the strict terms of the agreement we have mentioned, he edited a life of Grimaldi, which was published in 1838; but after that he put his whole strength into the art of writing sketches and serial tales. As soon as Pickwick was off his hands, and before Oliver Twist was yet completed, he made an agreement with Chapman & Hall "to write a new work, the title whereof should be determined by him, of a similar character and of the same extent as the Posthumous Papers of the Pickwick Club;" and between April 1838 and October 1839 he produced the Life and Adventures of Nicholas Nickleby.
Before the end of the serial publication of Nickleby, he had conceived a new project, partly with a view to relief from the strain of writing a continuous story in instalments with the printer at his heels, and partly with a view to getting more profit for himself out of his labours. This was a weekly publication, to be edited by himself, and to contain sketches, essays, tales, adventures, and letters from imaginary correspondents. He was to receive a certain sum every week for what was written, and was besides to share half the profits with the publishers. When the scheme was agreed to by the publishers, he proceeded to release himself from other engagements by resigning the editorship of Bentley's Miscellany, and getting clear of his obligation to write Barnaby Rudge for Mr Bentley in consideration of his buying the copyright and stock of Oliver Twist for £2250. He thus started clear with Master Humphrey's Clock, the title upon which he fixed for his new publication. The first number of Master Humphrey was issued on April 4, 1840. The sale of the first number was 70,000 copies, but the orders fell off when it was found that thers was to be no continuous story. A story in weekly instalments it was thereupon necessary for him to write. A tale which he had begun in his magazine, and put into the mouth of Old Humphrey, was seen to be capable of expansion, and he expanded it into the Old Curiosity Shop, finding himself thus driven to his old employment of keeping ahead of the printers with a serial story, the only difference being that the instalments were weekly, and that he had the stimulus of larger profits from his success.
It is necessary in any account of Dickens, if we care to understand his method as a novelist, to give prominence to the conditions under which he worked. All that has been said about the want of plot in his novels finds its true explanation in those conditions. We need not search for deeper causes. His stories being published in instalments, it was indispensable to success that each separate part should have an independent interest; and as each instalment was published before the next was written, it was necessary that he should have a plot leaving him with the
