Picturing Pickwick: The Art of the Pickwick Papers

This spring, a new exhibition will reveal the stories behind the novel which began Charles Dickens’s literary career and set him on the path to fame. Exploring the artworks which contributed to the novel’s instant and everlasting success, Picturing Pickwick: The Art of the Pickwick Papers will present a wealth of original sketches and illustrations, including work by the artist who instigated the novel, but who died before it was fully published.

Featuring an original manuscript page, unpublished works by Italian artist Anna Marongiu and evidence of the first Pickwick Papers fan club, the exhibition runs from 6 April – 11 September 2022.

The Charles Dickens Museum is at 48 Doughty Street, Dickens’s only surviving London house, where he completed The Pickwick Papers, wrote Oliver Twist and Nicholas Nickleby and began Barnaby Rudge. When Dickens moved in, in 1837, he was in the midst of writing The Pickwick Papers, a project which began after illustrator Robert Seymour approached Dickens’s publishers, Chapman & Hall, with the idea of an illustrated story following the characters of a country sporting club. Originally published in monthly parts from March 1836 to November 1837, the novel became an instant success, with readers eagerly awaiting each instalment.

The story of the novel’s creation is a poignant example of the close but often turbulent relationship between Dickens and his illustrators. Although he had initiated the project, Robert Seymour’s illustrations were critiqued by Dickens and Seymour did not live to see the complete book published. On 20 April 1836, Seymour took his own life, leaving Dickens to find a replacement illustrator. Seymour was replaced by artist Robert William Buss (soon discarded) and Hablot Knight Browne (‘Phiz’), the latter beginning a long working relationship with Dickens. The rarely-seen illustration that Seymour was working on shortly before his death, The Dying Clown, will feature in the exhibition, alongside the original illustrations by Buss and ‘Phiz’ that replaced Seymour’s work.

At the centre of the exhibition is a substantial and richly colourful collection of unpublished illustrations by young Italian artist Anna Marongiu, never previously displayed in the UK. Made in 1928 and 1929, the works show scenes rarely depicted and capture the enthusiasm of a young female artist for a novel populated primarily by male characters. The collection, comprising 29 watercolours and 233 line drawings, features such characters as Samuel Pickwick, Nathaniel Winkle, Sam Weller, Tracy Tupman and Alfred Jingle. For each illustration, Anna Marongiu noted in Italian the line from the novel that inspired her work (and referred to the writer as ‘Carlo Dickens’).

Tragically, Marongiu’s life was cut short in 1941, when she died in a plane crash in Ostia at the age of thirty-four. Her Pickwick series was given to the Charles Dickens Museum by her family in the 1980s and featured in a 2019 retrospective exhibition of Marongiu’s work at the MAN Museum of Art in her native Sardinia.

The publication of The Pickwick Papers also began the rise of a phenomenon that is well and truly alive today - the appreciation society or fan club. Even while the novel’s monthly instalments were being released, clubs were being created in honour of Dickens’s first novel, attended by men who adopted the names of his characters, celebrated the novel’s humour and debated the events of the day.

The Museum will display the earliest record of a Pickwick Club: the Pickwick Club Minute Book is a hard-backed, handwritten notebook, used between January 1837 and 1843 by a group of men who gathered regularly in an East London pub. A fascinating window into Victorian London life, the Minute Book ran concurrently with the publication of the monthly parts of The Pickwick Papers for nearly a year. Its pages record its members adopting pseudonyms, debating the Royal Family, capital punishment, universal suffrage and the singing of the National Anthem, discussing literature and voting on the hot topics of the day.

Dickens loved all the attention. A declared admirer of Shakespeare, already the subject of appreciation societies, Dickens was sympathetic to the effects of fandom and engaged with some of the clubs, writing to their members and attending club conventions in the 1840s. In 1837, he wrote to the newly-formed Edinburgh Pickwick Club, exclaiming, “I cannot tell you how much delight it has afforded me to hear of its existence… Mr Pickwick’s heart is among you always’. Later, he wrote to a friend of the New Zealand Pickwick Club, ‘to be associated with their pleasant recollections of home in their hours of relaxation, is to me a most proud and happy distinction. I really cannot tell you how much it interested and pleased me.’

Subsequent Dickens appreciation societies included the Pickwick Bicycle Club (est. 1870), the City Pickwick Club (est. 1909), the Dickens Pickwick Club (est. 1976) and the Dickens Fellowship (est. 1902), as well as smaller associations such as the Boz Club and the Uncommercial Travellers’ Club. The exhibition has been funded by generous donations from the Dickens Fellowship, City Pickwick Club, Dickens Pickwick Club, Pickwick Bicycle Club and several individual donors.

Cindy Sughrue, Director of the Charles Dickens Museum, said, “The Pickwick Papers was so pivotal that it is hard to contain in a single exhibition. The book was a trailblazer in many ways; it was Dickens’s first novel, and it brought him fame, took his work across the world and inspired instant, gleeful fandom, with Pickwick clubs springing up while its monthly parts were still being published, much to Dickens’s delight. We are pleased to be throwing light on to Dickens’s artists, as well as those such as Anna Marongiu, whose beautiful work shows the ability of Dickens’s words to fire the artistic imagination.”

Exhibition Information

Picturing Pickwick: The Art of the Pickwick Papers
Dates: 6 April – 11 September 2022
The Charles Dickens Museum, 48 Doughty Street, London WC1N 2LX.
Open 10am to 5pm, Wednesday to Sunday.
Museum Admission: Adult: £12.50; Concessions: £10.50; Child 6-16 years: £7.50; Children <6 years: Free. Each ticket includes a free downloadable audio guide to keep, featuring narration from one of Dickens’s great-great-great grandsons.
To book tickets please visit www.dickensmuseum.com