And with every sidetrack, Jarvis spins another interesting tale. He sprinkles out details of Seymour’s life, such as the time he met a carriage driver named Moses Pickwick, as hints of how Seymour birthed the idea of The Pickwick Papers.
I wondered if Jarvis, like so many of us, was forced to write a term paper on A Tale of Two Cities and, even as a teenager began plotting his revenge on this Charles Dickens person.
Yet in the book, Seymour is a much more sympathetic character than Dickens. Jarvis makes the reader curious about every side tale woven through the novel, which is based on the truth that Charles Dickens did indeed start his career using the pseudonym Boz, and that illustrator Robert Seymour worked with Dickens at the beginning of The Pickwick Papers project. Imbelicate’s name is not Indelicate is its own story, of course.) The sad tale of Grimaldi the Clown, so vividly drawn, pales in comparison to the tragedy that befalls Grimaldi’s son. Imbelicate and his employee, Scripty, to connect the dots when necessary. He uses two characters from modern day, Mr. The man also possessed a large leonine head, strong brow, and two thick groves of whiskers overhanging a laugh.” Making his decisive sniff, he approached a smartly dressed man in a blue coat, whose swallow tails hung down behind a stool at the end of the bar. “A boy with patched breeches, lopsided hair and a sniff entered the Old Red Lion public house, where he looked here and there among the numerous drinkers gathered for the evening within. And the best part is Jarvis’ ability to plop us smack-dab in the middle of Dickens’ time, with the horse-drawn carriages and butcher shops and pubs, where even the most gentlemanly of gentlemen would stop in for a pint now and then. Like Russian nesting dolls, there are stories within stories within stories in this book. Jarvis has the enviable skill of being able to switch nimbly not just from character to character, but from story to story - all while holding the reader engrossed. It could have happened, and author Stephen Jarvis shows us exactly how in one of the most fascinating, multilayered tales imaginable.
What if Charles Dickens’ inaugural novel was born of an idea that was never his in the first place? What if The Pickwick Papers were the creative brainchild of an illustrator? What if Dickens was such a pushy prima donna that his hijacking of the novel project caused that illustrator to commit suicide?
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