Pickwick” with numerous digressions, flashbacks and tales within tales (many of them recastings of episodes found in “The Pickwick Papers”). Jarvis echoes Dickens’s own narrative strategies by packing “Death and Mr. (One historical detail of interest: London’s print shops sometimes doubled as gay pickup spots.)

He also finds drama in the possibility that Seymour was homosexual and that Dickens was aware of it. Jarvis makes the confrontations between Seymour and Dickens painfully vivid, especially in his depiction of Seymour’s downward spiral after he senses that his project is being hijacked. The collaboration lasted for only two issues - featuring seven Seymour etchings - before Seymour killed himself in April 1836. By Dickens’s own later account, he balked at the constraint of allowing Seymour’s illustrations to shape his storytelling. The 24-year-old Dickens - already being published under the pseudonym “Boz” - was recruited to be that “editor” after other writers didn’t work out. The idea was to chronicle the pastimes of an imaginary gentlemen’s club in a pretend periodical whose “editor” would, in fact, write the whole text. There’s little doubt that Seymour and his publisher decided on the format “The Pickwick Papers” would initially take. His novel, in broad outline, sticks to the known facts. Moreover, if you haven’t read the Dickens novel recently and don’t have it fresh in your memory, you won’t pick up on half of the games Jarvis is playing. But it’s so weighted down with minutiae that it may defeat even the most rabid “Pickwick Papers” fan. Pickwick” is, after a fashion, Seymour’s story, and it has some compelling elements.

Pickwick” departs from traditional accounts of the origin of “The Pickwick Papers” because “the accepted origin is not true.” Instead, he credits the caricaturist Robert Seymour with dreaming up the concept of “The Posthumous Papers of the Pickwick Club” (to give the novel its full title).

It’s Jarvis who, in a prefatory note, insists that “Death and Mr. It isn’t just a character in the novel who argues these points. Pickwick” makes some eyebrow-raising claims: that Charles Dickens’s “The Pickwick Papers” was “so widely circulated that only the Bible, Shakespeare and perhaps the Book of Common Prayer can better its circulation” that for a century or more Samuel Pickwick, the book’s genial bumbling hero, was “the most famous character in fiction there has ever been” and that Dickens didn’t name or invent Samuel Pickwick. You don’t normally wish a novel would come with a bibliography, but Stephen Jarvis’s new book practically begs for one.

The pickwick papers book review