Plagiarizing Pickwick : Imitations of Immortality

Abstract

Will perennial bachelor Samuel Pickwick ever marry? Will he travel abroad? Will he die? Will he be mistaken for a lunatic and locked in an asylum? These and other questions remain unanswered by The Posthumous Papers of Pickwick Club. Into this narrative void hastened a league of imitating authors, with imitative names such as Bos and Quiz and Poz; they knew answers and were keen to share them in exchange for shillings and pence. Commentators from Edgar Johnson to John Bowen have identified this Pickwick mania or phenomenon, and diligent Dickensians have produced annotated lists of various plagiaristic publications. (1) Although Dickens himself could complain, in fiery Nickleby proclamation, of and imitations of our delectable Works (781), critical writing on subject is not extensive. One can find sustained analysis in Louis James and Mary Teresa McGowan, but contemporary readers have generally accepted Dickens's dismissal of wretched imitations. Without exonerating their malfeasance (which may be real), I want to argue that early imitations of The Pickwick Papers can be illuminating--and strange. Anonymous, hackneyed and cheap publications such as Posthumous Papers of Cadgers' and Pickwick in America will each offer a reading of Dickens's text. Despite title appended above, plagiarism is in some ways an imperfect description of Pickwickian excrescences, which flourished from 1837 to 1842 and range from novel-length sequels to aborted serial publications to songbooks, jest books and theatrical adaptations. (2) According to OED, plagiary derives from plagiarius, a kidnapper, someone who abducts children or slaves. Dickens certainly may have experienced a paternal pang at loss of his intellectual progeny, but Peter Shaw further defines plagiarism as the art of using work of another with intent to deceive (327). It is not clear degree to which deception was intended in works that are Pickwick-branded. Many Pickwickian spinoffs are forthright about their imitative status. In incomplete Droll Discussions and Queer Proceedings of Magnum-Fundum (1838), narrator admits that the glorious achievements which 'Boz' has recorded of Pickwickians, gave rise to foundation of Magnum-Fundum Club (2). Of course, lax nineteenth-century copyright laws made such creative intervention possible. By today's standards, some of more enthusiastic Pickwick-inspired works might be read as forms of fan fiction. A tension emerges between two views of a literary text. D. F. McKenzie explains that in first view, a text is authorially sanctioned, contained, and historically definable; according to second view, a text is always incomplete, and therefore open, unstable, subject to perpetual re-making by its readers, performers, or audience (45). Writing The Pickwick Papers, Dickens perhaps imagined that he was composing text No. 1, but Pickwickian successors decided that his book was, in fact, No. 2. Rather than compel imitations of Pickwick into an existing category (such as plagiarism or fan fiction), one might consider this unwieldy batch as prostheses--artificial extensions to Pickwick corpus. (3) Pickwick prostheses make available aspects of original that are omitted, muted, implied, curtailed, forgotten, repressed, or secreted to distant corners. They interpret and interpenetrate with The Pickwick Papers and stand, alongside reviews and newspaper extracts, among earliest and most vivid responses to Dickens's text. Two categories emerge: works that retain Pickwickian innocence and those that draw on darker, hidden energies and discover instances of anti-Semitism, racism and sexual desire. By way of introduction, it will help to foreground a specimen from field, one that is emblematic of Pickwick prostheses. The Penny Pickwick, by Bos, may or may not be best of lot, but it is certainly longest; it was published weekly, from 1837 to 1839, and was gathered into twenty-eight monthly parts. …