Brief note: Death and Mr. Pickwick

One of the many things authors can do with historical fiction is, in fact, attempt to write history.  In the nineteenth century, we see such experiments in Joseph Strutt's and Walter Scott's (execrable) Queen-Hoo Hall, some of Bulwer-Lytton's historical novels, and Emily Sarah Holt's novelized history of Europe; in the twentieth, Josephine Tey's The Daughter of Time, Mary Renault's Alexander the Great trilogy, and Dorothy Dunnett's King Hereafter.  Although, as Adam Abraham says, Stephen Jarvis' Death and Mr. Pickwick explicitly emulates The Pickwick Papers' form--"digressive, heterogeneous, and long"--its project descends from this subgenre of the historical novel-as-history.  "Mr. Inbelicate" (unnamed until the very end) hires "Inscriptino" or "Scripty" (not named at all) to help him complete his multigenerational work that names the illustrator Robert Seymour as the true instigator of The Pickwick Papers, his role and reputation forever besmirched by the conniving Charles Dickens and his friend John Forster--"the Mephistophelian ally," as Nicholas Dames puts it, "Dickens needed to cement his reputation while keeping his conscience clean."  (In that sense, the novel falls in line with a number of other Dickens-as-jerk fictions, including Gaynor Arnold's Girl in a Blue Dress, Peter Carey's Jack Maggs [as Tobias Oates],  Lesley Krueger's Mad Richard, and Dan Simmons' Drood.  Then again, as anyone familiar with Dickens' biography has probably noticed, this interpretation is...not really a stretch.) Arguably, though, the novel's real protagonist is The Pickwick Papers, with the plot given over to explaining how the novel was "born," how it succeeded, how it became part of the English consciousness, and eventually, towards the end, how it began to lose its place in the Dickens canon.  At the same time, we see Seymour first made and then unmade, as he asserts control over his art only to lose it to Dickens, while we also see Dickens come into being as a public figure (signified by the literal changes in his name).  Inbelicate and Scripty (along with the mostly silent maid, nicknamed "Mary" after the Pickwick character) analyze the evidence, with Scripty playing the roles of writer, editor, and skeptical reader, and together they produce the most-obviously "novelistic" sections of the novel--the lives of Seymour and Dickens, the reconstructions of various historical events, and so on--in which inset narratives beget inset narratives. These sections are, in turn, supplemented by memoirs--also, of course, fictions--by various supporting characters, including Seymour's son.   The initial critical responses to the novel frequently pointed out the way in which the narrative proliferates (e.g. 1 2 3 4), and it undeniably is a bit disconcerting that the novel keeps going for quite so long after Seymour dies.  But then, as I've said, Seymour isn't entirely the protagonist, and neither is Dickens; The Pickwick Papers is. 

Despite its seriousness, the novel does reflect, sometimes rather ironically, on what it's doing, and whether "it" can be done at all.  The heavyset Inbelicate and the (initially) lean Scripty, for starters, are examples of authorial self-insertion, but they're also echoes of Pickwick and Sam Weller--and Seymour understands Pickwick from the beginning (even before he's Pickwick per se) as a "gullible man" (265).  Pickwick, a man "on a scientific mission, gathering knowledge to benefit the world" (431), acquiring all sorts of stories as he goes, would appear to be rather too close for comfort to Mr. Inbelicate, a man with an (inherited) bee in his bonnet and a penchant for acquiring all things related to Pickwick.   (That's not counting the multiple references to Don Quixote, which also bear a dual application.) Indeed, the novel's ever-growing expanse, as it tells stories about characters who themselves have stories to tell, doesn't just mimic Pickwick, but references more generally the antiquarian drive to completeness that Seymour and Co. set out to parody.  In Pickwick, this is comic; in "real life," this drive translates into blinkered single-mindedness, and the results can be funny (the Pickwick in parts collector) or outright tragic.  As an academic, I found Mr. N--, the concordance-maker, to be ruefully familiar: he describes his repeated attempts to master Pickwick as being "haunted" (753), including the fear that "someone else would" finish the concordance before he did (755).  Moreover, Mr. N--'s proto-computational relationship to Pickwick shifts the parody from antiquarianism to the digital humanities, unearthing "hidden themes" (757) by counting words and noting their omnipresence (or, in some cases, absence).  But what Mr. N-- realizes, as he explains to a previous incarnation of Mr. Inbelicate, is the simultaneous promise and rather intimidating threat of intertextuality, in which the language of Pickwick emerges from earlier texts and then proceeds to infiltrate later ones (763).   There is no analytical process capable of containing Pickwick's meaning, even one that relies on counting its words.  

Mr. Inbelicate's house, full to bursting with ephemera, Pickwick-derived objects, objects featured in Pickwick, musical recordings related to themes in Pickwick, manuscripts, etc., etc., etc., is a kind of antiquarian dream-space: Scripty, assembling the final text (and contributing a bit of fanfiction at the end), has almost no need to leave the house once he has entered it.   Like Pickwick (and Death and Mr. Pickwick), the house spills at the seams.     But Inbelicate's desire to revive Seymour's reputation resembles, in a way, the tiny fish that fascinate Pickwick--not in the sense that the problem is minor ("who is responsible for conceiving Pickwick?" is a pretty major question) but that it can be done, in a way that Mr. N--'s ever-expanding project cannot.  Part of the novel's pleasure rests in the "materiality of the evidence"¹, which, if it cannot offer a key to all mythologies of Pickwick's plot, can at the very least solve the mystery of Seymour's responsibility for Pickwick.  Given the sheer number of unhappy people left in Pickwick's wake (i.e., almost everybody who isn't intimately connected to Dickens, many of whom wind up dying miserably), Death and Mr. Pickwick offers a kind of historical comedy as counterpart to Pickwick's literary variety--a sort of rebirth of the author, if you will.  

¹ Suzanne Keen, Romances of the Archive in Contemporary British Fiction (Toronto: U of Toronto Press, 2003), 154.