Death and Mr. Pickwick: A Novel, by Stephen Jarvis
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Death and Mr. Pickwick: A Novel, by Stephen Jarvis
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Death and Mr. Pickwick is a vast, richly imagined, Dickensian work about the rough-and-tumble world that produced an author who defined an age. Like Charles Dickens did in his immortal novels, Stephen Jarvis has spun a tale full of preposterous characters, shaggy-dog stories, improbable reversals, skulduggery, betrayal, and valor-all true, and all brilliantly brought to life in his unputdownable book.
The Posthumous Papers of the Pickwick Club, featuring the fat and lovable Mr. Pickwick and his Cockney manservant, Sam Weller, began as a series of whimsical sketches, the brainchild of the brilliant, erratic, misanthropic illustrator named Robert Seymour, a denizen of the back alleys and grimy courtyards where early nineteenth-century London's printers and booksellers plied their cutthroat trade. When Seymour's publishers, after trying to match his magical etchings with a number of writers, settled on a young storyteller using the pen name Boz, The Pickwick Papers went on to become a worldwide phenomenon, outselling every other book besides the Bible and Shakespeare's plays. And Boz, as the young Charles Dickens signed his work, became, in the eyes of many, the most important writer of his time. The fate of Robert Seymour, Mr. Pickwick's creator, a very different story-one untold before now.
Few novels deserve to be called magnificent. Death and Mr. Pickwick is one of them.
Death and Mr. Pickwick: A Novel, by Stephen Jarvis- Amazon Sales Rank: #583116 in Books
- Brand: Jarvis, Stephen
- Published on: 2015-06-23
- Released on: 2015-06-23
- Original language: English
- Number of items: 1
- Dimensions: 9.22" h x 1.75" w x 6.21" l, 1.00 pounds
- Binding: Hardcover
- 816 pages
Review Burstingly informative and thronged with colourful characters, [Jarvis's] panoramic novel about the shady start and sunny breakthrough of a literary phenomenon is a phenomenon itself.--Peter Kemp "Sunday Times (UK) "A masterpiece of imagination.--Christian House "The Telegraph "So dramatically convincing that it is all the more surprising how much of it is historically verifiable . . . Jarvis's novel is ostensibly about the origins of "Pickwick" the gin-soaked precincts of the London press where it was shaped; the milieu of theatricals, boxing matches, and stagecoach houses from which its shapers took inspiration; and not least, the artists and writers Dickens would surpass. But look more closely, and it becomes clear that Jarvis has another aim: to tell the story of the mass culture that "Pickwick" created. He has written a novel that reflects upon the world-altering effects of novel-reading.--Nicholas Dames "The Atlantic "For someone saddened that there will never be any more new novels coming from the pen of Charles Dickens, Jarvis's sprawling, 800-page work could be the next big thing.--Jean Zimmerman "NPR "Formidably knowledgeable . . . Jarvis sends readers on marvelous excursions into English social and cultural life in the early nineteenth century.--Wendy Smith "The Washington Post "
About the Author
Stephen Jarvis was born in Essex, England. Following graduate studies at Oxford University, he quickly tired of his office job and began doing unusual things every weekend and writing about them for The Daily Telegraph. These activities included learning the flying trapeze, walking on red-hot coals, getting hypnotized to revisit past lives, and entering the British Snuff-Taking Championship. Death and Mr. Pickwick is his first novel. He lives in Berkshire, England.
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21 of 23 people found the following review helpful. A MASTERWORK OF A NOVEL By Mark Stephen Jarvis has in Death and Mr. Pickwick created an 800+ page masterwork of a novel incorporating an astronomical amount of research and history into an incredibly readable, thought provoking, touching, funny and exciting (yes exciting) piece of literature.Multiple vignettes, each a gorgeous little fully fleshed nugget of story, are tied together so flawlessly to the main narrative of illustrator William Seymour, writer Charles Dickens and the origin, creating, publishing and reception of The Pickwick Papers, making an incredible reading experience.I won't go into the plot of the book, I'm sure many people leaving reviews will do this. And I'm sure there will be some controversy regarding the theories within, especially from die hard Dickens fans. Some may say it's too long, or overwritten... IT'S NOT! Don't let any of this steer you away from this amazing piece of work.Thank you Mr. Jarvis for two weeks (I'm a slow reader) of Seymour, “Boz” and of course Pickwick and the rest of the Club! I hope you have a VERY long and prolific career.
12 of 12 people found the following review helpful. Seymour vs. Dickens By Michael Greenebaum Among the many venues recreated in this mammoth novel are publishers offices - and a multitude of engagements (and disengagements) between publishers and their authors and illustrators. It might not be out of order, then, to imagine a conversation in the Random House (UK) office and Stephen Jarvis about the length of this very Dickensian (and anti-Dickensian) work. I can hear Jarvis (shall we call him Scripty?) insisting that his novel cannot be shortened by one page or one character. Nonsense, says the editor, it is too good (perhaps even brilliant) a book to put off potential readers who can hardly lift it, much less make their way through eight hundred rambling, digressive pages. But, responds Scripty, all sorts of people read very long novels today, and I am creating a world, not a neighborhood.Well enough of this imagined dialogue. If it ever took place, Jarvis won, for better and for worse. He has created a world in which those twenty-first century readers who are moved to pick it up will feel at home, because it is the world of Mr. Pickwick and of other mid-nineteenth-century English novels that are part of our cultural birthright - again for better and for worse. We have walked those streets, ridden in those coaches, stayed in those coaching inns. Whether there are, in fact, many of us left in the twenty-first century will determine the success of Jarvis's tour de force.However, Jarvis is more than an author; he is an advocate. Actually, he is more than an advocate - he is a righter of wrongs. His client is the sad artist, Robert Seymour, and the accused in the dock is Charles Dickens, known throughout most of this book as Chatham Charlie or as Boz, the nom de plume under which The Pickwick Papers were first published serially..Did Dickens in fact steal the idea of The Pickwick Papers from Seymour? This seems to matter a great deal to Stephen Jarvis; whether he can make it matter to us is questionable. Dickens' reputation has been buffeted about considerably but his novels have never been out of print.The saddest thing about Jarvis's remarkable novel is that this case is not strong enough to bear the weight of eight hundred pages, and, in fact, gets lost among the byways and digressions which account for its length. His characters appear, disappear, reappear; it is a crowded world and Seymour and Dickens easily get subsumed in it. I suppose one can say the same thing about The Pickwick Papers, Bleak House, or War and Peace. Certainly Don Quixote.So Death and Mr Pickwick is in good company and an honorable tradition It is vivid and vigorous, funny and sad. It is imaginative and historically acute. I admire the author's tenacity and virtuosity but I think he would have written a better novel if he were not trying so hard to win his case.
9 of 9 people found the following review helpful. Did Dickens Plagiarize? By Paul Benjamin Did Dickens Plagiarize?The astonishing debut novel of Stephen Jarvis: Death and Mr. PickwickI had occasion to read a prepublication copy of Death and Mr. Pickwick, a remarkable new book from debut novelist Stephen Jarvis. It is a fantastic book – and at 800+ pages one of the heavier books I have undertaken in recent years – with a story that is at once tightly focused on the creation of one of Charles Dickens’s seminal achievements: Samuel Pickwick, the eponymous star of The Pickwick Papers, and at the same time broad in scope about era, the rise of mass culture, and (perhaps) the creation of literary superstardom.The Pickwick Papers began as a serialization and appeared in book form in 1837, by which time Charles Dickens had become a household name in England, thanks largely to the enormous popularity of the rotund Samuel Pickwick. (It’s worth giving the full title of the original work: The Posthumous Papers of the Pickwick Club, Containing a Faithful Record of the Perambulations, Perils, Travels, Adventures and Sporting Transactions of the Corresponding Members. It was the great author’s first novel, but second book, after Sketches By Boz.)But as Jarvis’s immense and wonderful new book demonstrates, and as my deliberately provocative title suggests, Pickwick is not, strictly speaking, the invention of Charles Dickens. Instead, credit for the creation of Pickwick must go, at least in part, to illustrator Robert Seymour, a name that goes hand in hand with the names of other great caricaturists and illustrators of the 19th century such as George Cruikshank, Thomas Rowlandson, and William Heath.It was Seymour who conceived of Pickwick and the Pickwick Club, and his fame and commercial popularity as an illustrator led publishers Chapman and Hall to plan a serialized publication of images of Pickwick and his fictional “clubland.” But the publishers felt the need for some words to accompany the pictures, and so they hired the relatively unknown author of Boz to provide “letterpress” (i.e., copy, using an old word that means something completely different to most readers today) for the publication.Dickens took the commission—and transformed Pickwick into a cultural phenomenon that has virtually no precedent in our time (or not one I can think of).“Many books are, simply, books,” says Seymour’s son in Jarvis’s account. “Not Pickwick. No character man has created – not even figures of mythical status – I say no character has ever established such a hold upon the affections of a nation as Mr. Pickwick.” (Pickwick’s popularity with readers inevitably led to more commercial uses of the character: “Pickwick is the most powerful advertising tool in the world.”)Jarvis’s novel, appropriately enough, is told in a very 19th century way. There’s a framing story, a dialogue between the book’s contemporary narrator and a Mr. Imbelicate, who has devoted his life to the study of the “great book.” Mr Imbelicate (a very Dickensian name, with its nods towards character, suggesting combining imbecilic obsession with a pedantic fussiness) wants his research carried on and turned into a book; the narrator becomes his helper and happily goes along for the ride. The present-day conversation is simply the structural device to set up long, intricate, lovingly researched, and wonderfully etched perambulations into 19th century English media and culture.We don’t just read about Seymour’s life as an illustrator; we read about Seymour’s life full stop, from his earliest memories and compulsive forays into draughtsmanship to his apprenticeship with a furniture maker and his launch as a commercial artist (his backstory is central to the very name “Pickwick”). We read about the enormous popularity of Seymour (and his fellow illustrators); the print shops that sold their art became informal meeting places for the fashionable and less so.I’m no expert, but I think these printed drawings might represent one of the first examples of a mass media and a mass-market form of cultural consumption, driven largely by the technology that made them affordable—not unlike the Japanese woodblock print.Jarvis’s research is exhaustive (but never exhausting). We learn about the prints (in prose; a Google search can turn up all of them as images, and many are worth a look), about printmaking and etching techniques, about the economics of this form of publishing, and the role of caricature, political and otherwise, in 19th century England. One important theme of the book is just how much primacy the image had before education and literacy combined with more affordable printing to make it possible for books to be a part of popular culture.Death and Mr. Pickwick is an encyclopedic portrait of the era when the image gave way to the word (though now it seems that the image has triumphed almost completely). When the plan for Seymour’s Pickwick was floated, Robert Seymour was the commercial draw. By the time the book was published in full, Seymour’s name was nowhere to be found on the cover.Seymour, understandably, felt shortchanged and unappreciated, which led to his suicide shortly thereafter, leaving his family essentially impoverished and indignant. His widow even publicly claimed that Pickwick was the brainchild of her husband, which Dickens denied: “ In his preface to the 1867 edition,” according to Wikipedia’s entry on the book, “Dickens strenuously denied any specific input, writing that “Mr Seymour never originated or suggested an incident, a phrase, or a word, to be found in the book.” [1]Jarvis makes it more than clear that Seymour came up with the idea for Pickwick and set about its first (visual) articulation. I don’t really believe Dickens was a plagiarist (he couldn’t literally be, not by “copying” in words a visual conceit), and I believe it was Dickens more than Seymour who was primarily responsible for the success of Pickwick and his loyal retainer Sam Weller.Of course, it was the power of Dickens’s words – and the story he crafted around the characters – that captivated the public imagination; as Wikipedia puts it in its entry on the book, “The story thus became the prime source of interest, and the illustrations merely of secondary importance. By this reversal of interest, Dickens transformed, at a stroke, a current type of fiction, consisting mostly of pictures, into a novel of contemporary London life.”It was Dickens’s immense literary skill that turned a two-dimensional sketch (literally) into a fully rounded character (figuratively).This may be the longest novel I’ve ever read, but I found it to be an enormously entertaining accomplishment, a panoramic perspective on literary 19th century and a window onto the moment when the novel became a key part of popular culture, though at an enormous personal cost to an accomplished artist in his own right, Robert Seymour.
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