Charles Dickens’ first novel was an accidental international sensation. He had been given a prompt from the publisher Chapman & Hall that sound like nothing more than an assignment for a freshman writing course: come up with a narrative to go along with a series of comic illustrations of sporting life in the English countryside, engraved by Robert Seymour. The stories would connect the etchings into a broader narrative and fill in the gaps.
What was produced, however, was such an overnight sensation – widely discussed, parodied, bootlegged, and celebrated – that its serialized rapidly eclipsed its humble ambitions (Seymour even committed suicide after an argument with Dickens, causing him to be replaced as illustrator), so that it was a toasted triumph well before the last installment was printed. Dickens rocketed into worldwide fame overnight, and his “Pickwick Papers” became synonymous with self-deprecating tales of cheeky – but deceptively cerebral – hilarity.
Modelled after the comic, country stories of Washington Irving, the narrative followed the avuncular Squire Pickwick’s commission that three members of his Pickwick Club travel far afield from their London base, then return to report on their pastoral adventures among the English country folk (which they do to comic effect).
Their tales also happen to include four of Dickens more enduring early ghost stories: The Lawyer and the Ghost,” “The Ghosts of the Mail,” “The Goblins Who Stole a Sexton,” and “A Madman’s Manuscript,” commencing Dickens’ career – like his idol Irving – as a master of both the comic and the supernatural – often blending both, as he does in the following tale. Throughout his career, Dickens would write several distinct flavors of ghost stories. His early stories tended to be farcical, even hilarious, but that makes them no less important or even chilling for all their levity.
The first explicit ghost story he is known to have penned[1] is, at face value, a simple joke, but the humor behind this seemingly glib episode is deep and black with bitter cynicism. Presaging Mark Twain, Guy de Maupassant, Ambrose Bierce, and other misanthropists who blended the supernatural and the humorous to unpack the moral problem of human inhumanity, Dickens’ first ghost story may appear to be a soft chuckle in the night – but the echoes boom.
[1] It was not his first horror story (“A Madman’s Manuscript” may have a ghost in it, or it may be a schizophrenic episode), but it is the very first overt ghost story in Dickens’ oeuvre
SUMMARY
Excerpted from "The Pickwick Papers," the story begins in the 1790s with a poor lawyer taking up residence in a mouldering old apartment. The place is musty, dusty, and damp, and he attempts to tidy the place up and make it feel homier, but isn't successful. He sits down by a weak fire, drinking a glass of whiskey purchased on credit, and considers chopping up the old cabinet that came with the room for firewood. He considers this option out loud, and is met with a groan coming from the cabinet. He assumes it was the chimney, but soon the doors of the cabinet part, revealing a raggedy man inside. Taking him for an intruder, the lawyer attempts to attack him, but the specter interrupts him with a doleful description of his life: he is the ghost of a man who died in the apartment years ago, leaving his children without an inheritance, and cursed to spend eternity in the room where he watched his hopes dissolve into misery. He warns off the lawyer, claiming sole ownership of the room, but the lawyer is not put-off: he asks the ghost -- whom he assumes has no limitations of space or time -- why he spends his afterlife in a moldy apartment when he could travel to the world's sunniest, cheeriest places without a moment's notice. The ghost had never considered this, and is staggered by the idea, and before he disappears to find a better place to live, the lawyer asks him to spread the word: if ghosts would leave the world's saddest, grimmest living quarters, then the mortals who live there would have one less trouble. The spirit agrees to alert his compatriots to this option and is never seen again.
ANALYSIS
A onetime favorite of ghost story anthologies, “The Lawyer and the Ghost” has since developed a reputation for being a disappointing joke rather than a spooky foray into the supernatural. But in it was laid the cynical foundation for Dickens’ truly chilling later tales such as “The Signal-Man,” “To Be Read at Dusk,” “The Hanged Man’s Bride,” and “The Trial for Murder,” which similarly use their ghostly situations to expose a disturbing element of mortal society. The sinister foundation for this little jest is the concept that there are people living in modern, industrial cities who would be happier – or at least have a better quality of life – if they were dead. A dead man can escape his misery, and while many people are capable of improving their circumstances, there continue to be some whose only recourse is death: after having advised the spirit to change his circumstances, we may wonder if the tenant took his own advice by committing suicide (advice which Robert Seymour – the Pickwick Papers’ first illustrator and inspiration – had taken six months earlier, with a shotgun, after an argument with the author). Dickens’ ghost stories almost unanimously are used to critique Victorian society through satire, metaphor, analogy, and symbolism. His first foray into speculative fiction is hardly scary, but it is haunting, calling into question the humanity of a society that offers more to its ghosts than its poor. Oh – and before we part ways with this story – be sure to read “Captain Murder and the Devil’s Bargain” to learn what event in Dickens’ childhood inspired him to find a plain, glass-doored cabinet a source of terror.