'The part of Mr. Pickwick’s biographer': Charles Dickens, George W. M. Reynolds, and the construction of authorship

Abstract

In 1839, George W. M. Reynolds published an unofficial sequel to Charles Dickens’s The Pickwick Papers, in which he playfully undermined Dickens’s ownership of its characters: “[G]entle reader,” he wrote in the preface, “allow me to remark that if the talented ‘Boz’ have not chosen to enact the part of Mr. Pickwick’s biographer in his continental tour, it is not my fault.” By limiting Dickens’s role to mere biographer, Reynolds curtails his intellectual rights over the text and places its characters firmly in the public realm. Reynolds’s Pickwick Abroad was published in the midst of the 1837-1842 copyright debates, as Thomas Noon Talfourd sought to extend the rights of literary authors. According to critics Chris Vanden Bossche and Robert L. Patten, proponents for the Talfourd bill distinguished between “imaginative literature” and “useful knowledge; they viewed the former as more organic and therefore deserving of greater property rights. As a sensationalist writer for the working class, Reynolds was not officially engaged in this debate, but this paper argues that he used plagiarism as a means to reject the kind of textual ownership proposed by the Talfourd bill and the textual distinctions it created between literary and non-literary texts. Reynolds’s disregard for literary ownership parallels and undergirds his radical critiques of mainstream society and also yields insight into Dickens’s populism. The bound version of Pickwick Abroad; or, The Tour in France opened with positive reviews that construe imitation, even plagiarism, as an aesthetic endeavor equal to original creation. Through collecting these snippets that celebrate imitation, Reynolds undermines the proprietary rights of authors over their literary creations in favor of expanded access for the reading public. Reynolds imagines his public in very different terms than Dickens and his counterparts, who envisioned imaginative literature as a moral means of creating a unified national public.