The Madman's Curious Manuscript, Or, "Judge for yourself," Samuel Pickwick

Abstract

The Madman's Curious Manuscript, Or, "Judge for yourself," Samuel Pickwick Nancy Aycock Metz (bio) Leaving Dingley Dell for Cobham in search of the melancholy Tupman, still smarting under the double lash of Rachel's desertion and Jingle's trickery, Samuel Pickwick is taken aside by the village clergyman who presents him with a curious manuscript found among the papers of a deceased medical attendant at the County Lunatic Asylum. Though he had "'hoped to have the pleasure'" of reading the manuscript to Pickwick himself, he now offers it for his friend's solitary perusal, inviting him to weigh in on the question of authority and provenance; "'whether it be the genuine production of a maniac, or founded upon the ravings of some unhappy being, […] read it, and judge for yourself'" (154; ch. 11). Past midnight, in a nervous and excited state, oppressed by insomnia, Pickwick remembers the manuscript and turns to it for distraction. He is riveted! So was Edgar Allan Poe, who encountered "A Madman's Manuscript" in the first volume of the American edition of Pickwick Papers published by Carey, Lea, and Blanchard in November 1836. The review Poe rushed into print quotes nearly three fourths of this "vigorous" tale; soon Poe was to pay it the ultimate complement of borrowing heavily from the portions he had quoted (Fisher 14–16).1 In later years, the tale was lifted from the fourth number of Pickwick and anthologized as a monologue suitable for dramatic [End Page 125] delivery in school declamation contests and forensic competitions. You will find it included in Ermine Owen's Readings, Recitations, and Impersonations, where it is identified as the June 1890 "prize recitation" for the North Missouri State Normal School (114). In the copy I found online, words had been underscored for special emphasis: "I knew that madness was mixed up with my very blood." "A sister's happiness against her husband's gold?" A young James Dean won first prize in the Indiana statewide Forensic League tournament in 1949 for his performance of this very piece, which he had plucked from a catalog of possibilities provided by his Advanced Speech teacher Adeline Brookshire. One of the judges is on record as declaring: "I was especially impressed with the eerie expression in his eyes. They actually looked glassy and mad, at times" (Nall 2016).2 I offer this highly selective history of the tale's popular appeal in part as a reminder that since its publication, both ordinary and expert readers have found it a powerful piece. And let's note that Dickens himself was among these admiring expert readers. Proudly previewing No. IV for publisher John Macrone in a letter dated 30 June 1836, he paired the story with the literary creation that was soon to make Pickwick a global phenomenon: "Let me beg your particular regard for the specimen of London Life 'Sam Weller' […]. also 'The Madman's MS'" (Letters 1: 154). While readers throughout the years have responded eagerly to the delicious invitation in the story's teasing title, contemporary critics, have by and large dismissed the tale on these same grounds–that it plays to the cheap thrill and the overworked sensibility in stagy, formulaic ways. To be sure, in the general critical rehabilitation of the interpolated tales that took place in the 1960s and 1970s, attempts were periodically made to link the madman's confession to themes developed in the main plot of Pickwick. For William Axton the madman's dementia parallels Pickwick's more benign delusion in the Bill Stumps episode that frames the story: "neither man can recognize a plain and obvious truth before his very eyes" (675). For Robert Patten, the story operates as a tacit warning to the Pickwickians that "a placid exterior can hide malignity as well as wretchedness" (361). For Christopher Hibbert, the tale and others it loosely resembles, function to "haunt and contaminate the novel's jolly sphere, sowing subversive implications in the midst of Dickens' most buoyant farce" (8). The story is often "bundled" with Dickens's other early explorations of intense emotions, abnormal states, [End Page 126] or uncanny occurrences in more wide-ranging discussions of the author's...