Stephen Jarvis's impressive debut, Death and Mr. Pickwick, is an immersive experience that richly rewards its readers, filled with an array of characters. It's about an ages-old debate concerning who was the creator of the 19th-century serial novel The Pickwick Papers. Robert Seymour, the most prolific illustrator/cartoonist of his era and the first Pickwick illustrator, said that the character of Mr. Samuel Pickwick and his Sporting Club were his ideas. When the monthly installments of the story were published in book form, young Charles Dickens, who provided the text to complement the illustrations using his pen name, Boz, claimed in a note that he was the sole creator. By then, Seymour had committed suicide. As his novel runs its course, Jarvis argues for Seymour's claim of ownership.
Despite a winding and interwoven narrative, the tragedy of Seymour is always at the novel's core. Seymour has some career successes, then failure. When he finally creates a promising new caricature--Mr. Pickwick--his hopes are again thwarted by his publisher. He died before his 40th birthday.
Whether you accept his argument or not, Jarvis provides a fascinating history of the business of publishing and book illustration in the early 19th century: how prints were made, sold, marketed and who the most popular artists were. There might be too much detail for some readers, but for those who read on, it will be an education and a grand entertainment, a rich drama that unfolds at a leisurely pace, made all the more profound thanks to Jarvis's fertile imagination. --Tom Lavoie, former publisher