my visitor, that a NIMROD CLUB, the members of
which were to go out shooting, fishing, and so forth, and getting
themselves into difficulties through their want of dexterity, would be
the best means of introducing these. I objected, on consideration that,
although born and partly bred in the country, I was no great sportsman,
except in regard to all kinds of locomotion; that the idea was not
novel, and had already been much used; that it would be infinitely
better for the plates to arise naturally out of the text; and that I
would like to take my own way, with a freer range of English scenes and
people, and was afraid I should ultimately do so in any case, whatever
course I might prescribe to myself at starting. My views being deferred
to, I thought of Mr. Pickwick, and wrote the first number; from the
proof-sheets of which Mr. Seymour made his drawing of the club and his
happy portrait of its founder. I connected Mr. Pickwick with a club,
because of the original suggestion; and I put in Mr. Winkle expressly
for the use of Mr. Seymour."

Mr. Hall was dead when this statement was first made, in the preface to
the cheap edition in 1847; but Mr. Chapman clearly recollected his
partner's account of the interview, and confirmed every part of it, in
his letter of 1849,[9] with one exception. In giving Mr. Seymour credit
for the figure by which all the habitable globe knows Mr. Pickwick, and
which certainly at the outset helped to make him a reality, it had given
the artist too much. The reader will hardly be so startled as I was on
coming to the closing line of Mr. Chapman's confirmatory letter: "As
this letter is to be historical, I may as well claim what little belongs
to me in the matter, and that is the figure of Pickwick. Seymour's first
sketch was of a long, thin man. The present immortal one he made from my
description of a friend of mine at Richmond, a fat old beau, who would
wear, in spite of the ladies' protests, drab tights and black gaiters.
His name was John Foster."

On the coincidences, resemblances, and surprises of life, Dickens liked
especially to dwell, and few things moved his fancy so pleasantly. The
world, he would say, was so much smaller than we thought it; we were all
so connected by fate without knowing it; people supposed to be far apart
were so constantly elbowing each other; and to-morrow bore so close a
resemblance to nothing half so much as to yesterday. Here were the only
two leading incidents