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Death and Mr. Pickwick: A Novel by Stephen…
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Death and Mr. Pickwick: A Novel (original 2015; edition 2015)

by Stephen Jarvis (Author)

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1731156,521 (3.61)9
"On March 31, 1836, the publishers Chapman & Hall launched the first issue of a new monthly periodical entitled The Posthumous Papers of the Pickwick Club. Conceived and created by the artist Robert Seymour, it contained four of his illustrations; the words to accompany them were written by a young journalist who used the pen name Boz. The story of a club presided over by fat, loveable Mr. Pickwick, assisted by his cockney manservant Sam Weller, The Pickwick Papers soon became a sensation, outselling every other book except the Bible and Shakespeare's plays, read and discussed by the entire population of the British Isles, from the duke's drawing room to the lowliest chophouse. The fame of Mr. Pickwick soon spread worldwide--making The Pickwick Papers the greatest literary phenomenon in history. But one does not need to have read a single word of The Pickwick Papers to be enthralled by the story of how this extraordinary novel came to be. The creation and afterlife of this masterpiece is the subject of Stephen Jarvis's novel, Death and Mr. Pickwick. This vast, intricately constructed, indeed Dickensian work is at once the ultimate homage to a much-loved book, tracing its genesis and subsequent history in fascinating detail, and a damning indictment of how an ambitious young writer expropriated another man's ideas and then engaged in an elaborate cover-up of The Pickwick Papers' true origin."--… (more)
Member:TheCriticalTimes
Title:Death and Mr. Pickwick: A Novel
Authors:Stephen Jarvis (Author)
Info:Farrar, Straus and Giroux (2015), 816 pages
Collections:Loaned from Library
Rating:***
Tags:Historical Fiction

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Death and Mr Pickwick by Stephen Jarvis (2015)

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(Reprinted from the Chicago Center for Literature and Photography [cclapcenter.com]. I am the original author of this essay, as well as the owner of CCLaP; it is not being reprinted illegally.)

Earlier this fall, I ended up randomly stumbling across an intriguing-looking new novel at my neighborhood library, called Death and Mr. Pickwick by Stephen Jarvis, which purports to be the "true story" behind the publishing of Charles Dickens' The Pickwick Papers; but of course to appreciate such a novel to its fullest, I realized that I was going to have to read Dickens' original as well, so I picked that up on the same day and have been spending the last several months slowly making my way through the combined 1,600 pages of material. For those who don't know, The Pickwick Papers was Dickens' first book, after first making a splash in his early twenties with a series of short comical articles in the British penny dreadfuls. See, at the time, a hugely popular form of publishing consisted of stories mainly made up of funny illustrations, of which a writer of light verse would be hired to essentially make up lengthy captions afterwards describing what was going on, the series usually centered around a generalized concept that could be extended for as long as the pieces were popular; and this is exactly how Pickwick started out as well, originally the creation of the then-famous illustrator Robert Seymour, concerning the notes, travels and experiments of a "club" of pompous proto-scientists and wannabe-historians, with the 24-year-old Dickens originally hired simply to write a few lines of humorous prose to explain what exactly was going on in the etches, the main reason people were tuning in to begin with. But Dickens had a different idea in mind, writing lengthier and lengthier stories to go with each illustration, eagerly eaten up by what at the time was a population of rapidly rising literates, a sort of perfect storm of publishing innovations and reform in public schooling that created an insatiable public appetite for the first time for written fiction; and when Seymour ended up killing himself just a few chapters into the series, essentially the process of putting them together got reversed, with Dickens now writing the stories in advance and the hired illustrators now in charge of drawing what he was describing, not the other way around, which most historians consider a hugely positive watershed moment in the history of Victorian literature.

And Jarvis's Death and Mr. Pickwick covers this same ground, only in the opposite direction -- in his equally delightful and equally overstuffed novel, Seymour is the hero, picture-stories are to be commended, while Dickens is portrayed as the evil villain who came along and ruined everything. Although if you're going to pick up Jarvis's contemporary novel, the first thing to know is that it's not just about this subject; in fact it is no less than a sweeping look at what daily life was like in London at the dawn of the Victorian Age, and as such gets into such minute detail about such things as British restaurants and Victorian entertainment options that you will undoubtedly go mad from it all, unless you steel yourself in advance for the idea that this is why the novel even exists, not necessarily to push along a fast-moving (or even normal-moving) plot. As such, then, it's a lot of fun to make your way through as long as you have the right attitude and lots of time; although just like with Dickens' original, if you're not prepared for a regular amount of rambling, off-kilter digressions happening literally every other chapter or so, both of these giant books are going to end up driving you really crazy. It gets a limited recommendation from me today for that reason, a fine read for people who are in the mood for it, but a book you should stay far away from if you're not.

Out of 10: 8.0, or 9.0 for fans of Victorian literature ( )
2 vote jasonpettus | Oct 27, 2015 |
A bravura exercise in fictionalised literary criticism, crammed with Dickensian jokes and allusions, commendably alert to the significance of the Urtext and its attraction to the original readership, Death and Mr Pickwick has two chief drawbacks. The first is that it requires a fair amount of commitment from the non-specialist reader who may not have heard of, say, Joseph Grimaldi and his significance to Dickens studies. The second is that it is well-nigh interminable. Fourteen pages are devoted to the career of the artist RW Buss, whose work was briefly considered before Browne got the nod; a titanic section on the journalist Charles Whitehead’s downward spiral, after he had failed to acquire the job eventually handed to Dickens. Certainly Pickwick’s success had a devastating effect on the people who missed out, but the digressions clang on endlessly. What remains? The raw material would make a first-rate semi-scholarly work of non-fiction. As a novel, on the other hand, like some of the early engraving processes Jarvis writes about at such length, it lacks bite.
 
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"On March 31, 1836, the publishers Chapman & Hall launched the first issue of a new monthly periodical entitled The Posthumous Papers of the Pickwick Club. Conceived and created by the artist Robert Seymour, it contained four of his illustrations; the words to accompany them were written by a young journalist who used the pen name Boz. The story of a club presided over by fat, loveable Mr. Pickwick, assisted by his cockney manservant Sam Weller, The Pickwick Papers soon became a sensation, outselling every other book except the Bible and Shakespeare's plays, read and discussed by the entire population of the British Isles, from the duke's drawing room to the lowliest chophouse. The fame of Mr. Pickwick soon spread worldwide--making The Pickwick Papers the greatest literary phenomenon in history. But one does not need to have read a single word of The Pickwick Papers to be enthralled by the story of how this extraordinary novel came to be. The creation and afterlife of this masterpiece is the subject of Stephen Jarvis's novel, Death and Mr. Pickwick. This vast, intricately constructed, indeed Dickensian work is at once the ultimate homage to a much-loved book, tracing its genesis and subsequent history in fascinating detail, and a damning indictment of how an ambitious young writer expropriated another man's ideas and then engaged in an elaborate cover-up of The Pickwick Papers' true origin."--

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