1836 On this date the up-and-coming London publishers (with a long way still to come in the book trade) Chapman and Hall invited Charles Dickens to write the text (‘letterpress’), under the pseudonym ‘Boz’, for a random series of sporting papers (called in the trade ‘Nimrod’ publications, after the great hunter in the Bible).
The project was centred, initially, on the illustrations of the well known Robert Seymour, who had a line in ‘Sporting Sketches’. Dickens was a wholly unknown journalist in his early twenties. The only original aspect about the ‘Pickwick Papers’, as they were to be called, was that Chapman and Hall decided they should be published monthly, in one ‘gathering’ (32 pages), with an ‘advertiser’ (paper wrappers, with two or three pages of ads), costing 1 shilling (a considerable amount of money in 1836), with two engravings on steel by Seymour (these, it was expected, could be extracted and framed).
There was nothing new about the part-issue of books in ‘fascicles’ like this. The practice goes back to the 17th century and was a handy way of spreading costs for impecunious readers. What was new was that Chapman and Hall’s monthly issue of their papers on ‘magazine day’ (the last Friday of the month) was designed to sell the ‘parts’ like a journal – taking advantage of the new railway distribution system emerging across the country.
The first instalment of The Posthumous Papers of the Pickwick Club began to appear in April. It was not a success. Sales sank as low as 400 – well below break-even point. From the start there was friction – effectively a power struggle – between Dickens (who wanted more ‘story’) and his senior partner (who felt it was ‘his’ venture). There was a particularly fierce quarrel on the night of 19 April. The following day, Seymour shot himself. Dickens promptly took charge and was responsible, in a month or so, for appointing the congenial illustrator who would work with (effectively ‘for’) him through much of his later career – Hablot K. Browne, who took on the matching nom de plume, ‘Phiz’, in witness of his subordinate role. As Dickens went on to pull in thousands of pounds over the next few years, Browne slaved away at £5 for a full-page illustration.
Now effectively a novel – not a loose gathering of sporting papers – organised around the magnificent comic creation of Samuel Pickwick, the series went on to enjoy huge success, selling up to 40,000 copies a month. Dickens went on to become the Shakespeare of Victorian fiction and very rich. Behind every great fortune, says Balzac, lies a crime. So friends of Robert Seymour felt about ‘the Great Inimitable’. Friends of Dickens answer that great careers in literature require some steel: something with which the young Boz (and the older Dickens) was amply supplied.