the ever-memorable Mr. Pickwick.

A young publishing-house had started recently, among other enterprises
ingenious rather than important, a Library of Fiction; among the authors
they wished to enlist in it was the writer of the sketches in the
_Monthly_; and, to the extent of one paper during the past year, they
had effected this through their editor, Mr. Charles Whitehead, a very
ingenious and very unfortunate man. "I was not aware," wrote the elder
member of the firm to Dickens, thirteen years later, in a letter to
which reference was made[8] in the preface to _Pickwick_ in one of his
later editions, "that you were writing in the _Chronicle_, or what your
name was; but Whitehead, who was an old _Monthly_ man, recollected it,
and got you to write The Tuggs's at Ramsgate."

And now comes another person on the scene. "In November, 1835,"
continues Mr. Chapman, "we published a little book called the _Squib
Annual_, with plates by Seymour; and it was during my visit to him to
see after them that he said he should like to do a series of
cockney-sporting plates of a superior sort to those he had already
published. I said I thought they might do, if accompanied by
letter-press and published in monthly parts; and, this being agreed to,
we wrote to the author of _Three Courses and a Dessert_, and proposed
it; but, receiving no answer, the scheme dropped for some months, till
Seymour said he wished us to decide, as another job had offered which
would fully occupy his time; and it was on this we decided to ask you to
do it. Having opened already a connection with you for our Library of
Fiction, we naturally applied to you to do the _Pickwick_; but I do not
think we even mentioned our intention to Mr. Seymour, and I am quite
sure that from the beginning to the end nobody but yourself had anything
whatever to do with it. Our prospectus was out at the end of February,
and it had all been arranged before that date."

The member of the firm who carried the application to him in Furnival's
Inn was not the writer of this letter, but Mr. Hall, who had sold him
two years before, not knowing that he was the purchaser, the magazine in
which his first effusion was printed; and he has himself described what
passed at the interview: "The idea propounded to me was that the monthly
something should be a vehicle for certain plates to be executed by Mr.
Seymour; and there was a notion, either on the part of that admirable
humorous artist, or of