MR PICKWICK'S BIRTHDAY.

Star (Christchurch), Issue 11949, 7 March 1917, Page 4

MR PICKWICK'S BIRTHDAY.

Mr Pickwick is eighty years o»d.. writes an American Dickens worshipper. Like a great number—a very great number—of other famous English to Mi, the exact day of h:s birth i» uncrrtain but. some tune between Apia, 1836, and November, 1837, the groat Cockney was. in the portentous phraseology of the minor biographers, ushered into the world by a Sairey Gamp in the person of a printer - foreman. Mr Pickwick has thug filled the space of years allotted, in the most erroneous way. to man by the Psalmist, but, what is' very much more to the point, he is as much a- boy at eighty as ever Methuselah was, and there 's no reason to anticipate a shorter life for him than that enjoyed by the patriarch. Because, of all this the world is t-o-day wishing Mr Pickwick many happy returns of the day. for Mr Pickwick's friends are to be founri all the world over. Like many another great family the Pickwicks tool; their name from a town, or rather in their case, from a Tillage, Pickwick in Wiltshire. the original Pickwick was history does not afford any information, beyond the fact that lie was a foundling picked up in the village, and named after it. In due course, however, one of his descendants. n certain Moses Pickwick, settled in Bath, where he became a proprietor of stage coaches. So it came about that on emerging from the travellers' room, at the White Worse Cellar, to enter the Bath coach, Mr Samuel Pickwick first saw the name of this mail «fter whom he had', unknowingly to himself, boon filer who made the discovery, ami there and then drew his master's attention to the outrage—Mose? Pickwick painted in large, letters, in c:old, on the coach door. " Not cnutr-nc with writiiv up Pickwick." he indignantly exclaimed. " thev put* ' Mo*r«.- - afore it. vinh I ball addin insult lo 1.1jury, as the parrot said' ven they n ,,! . only took him from bis native land, but made ruin talk the 'English lans:widge artervards.'" Aftor^drlirorirrr himself of which sentiment. Mr Well; r demanded. Ain't nobody to be whopped for t.ikiii" this here liberty?'" Mr Pickwicks. trip to Bath was only one of the many trips which made the ; famous romance the last great storv of the road. The literary ancestors or Samuel Pickwick and Samuel Welifv are not of one c-ountry or of one are. but th<M- number amongst them thosr lenowned figures Don" Quixote anc Rancho Panzn, r<tk[' Sir Hu'libras an*l Balpho. (here is much more it must, however, bp admitted of Don Quixote than of Sir ITudibras in Mr Pickwick i whilst both Sancho and' Ralpho Lick ' the brilliancy, fmi-h. ;in;l moral stam ma of Mr Welles Nevertheless there is a certain similarity between Don famous onslaught, upon tho h indium, jiiitl Mr Pickujck's disastrous attempt to warn the mistress 0 f the thirty voung lady boarders at Westgate House, on the outskirts of th-\ ancient town of p„„ T St Edmunds. of the machinations of Mr Charles Eitz.■\lar>}inll. .]list as there is a glimmer of resemblance in Mr Pickwick's unfortunate experience in the pound to tho it"i-i ' m 'Ph".isani experience of S'r Hud,br ;; < ji! the stocks. The fact";* j" 1 ic.-.v. ie.; is a sort of cockne'.' Odyssem._ laying for his wander-land ■that quaint old England of the c,in'Sf> and the post ins-house, wh : -h exited in the days before the railwav. Much o} this old England still re mnins._ despite the oigHtv vear<; winch hare intervened. Yon 'mar still fhd toe court in Gray's Inn 'where Mr 1 etKoi bad his chnn.lxrs, and the diV mal c-treet ,n the Borough uh-ro Mis Kaddle ,et loagjngs to Mr Bob S-,w----yer jnst as you m.iv dine in the t.eal room, m the Bull, at Rochester, where Dr Slammer came face to fa™ with Mr Jmgkt, or wander down the viHaee street, pas! the Leather Bottle, at Cobb are. where Mr Pickwick discovered vhe stone with the mnarkrb! f inscnption. which later subjected him to the vulgar calumnies of that cont'Miiptioie .A Id gate haberdasher, Mr Biotton. Thee, of course, are only a fen or the spots to which the pilsrim, in a Fickwickian sense," mnv direct nis teet.

As a matter-of fact, however Af.-1-iclcwHc was not-a great traveller if travelling is to be estimated hv mer* mileage. It f s to be suspected, 'indeed that in one particular he closelv resembled Oueen Elizabeth, who altlionHi accommodated on paper with a bed V one time or another, in nearlv e'verv great house m Entfand, in realitv wa« never once more than one hundred and twenty-five miles from the place of her birtb. The resolution of the cb : i> thanking lmn for his learned nancr ef Med on the L.fTo the Hampstead Pond, with some Ohservations on the Theorv of Tittlebats '' r.oes not even hint that he had' at ♦hw moment earned his researches fnrtVr than tne suburbs of Homsey and Hie- - gate on the north of London, or th'oi... of Cambenre.ll and Brixton to th<> south whilst we know that he fmaliv settled at Dulwich, itself onlv a few miles from London, and at that tima picturesque village. The intermed'ate years of his life have been care fiil'y recorded, with the fnithfnln<wand mmi'toness of a Boswell. bv M"Charles Dickens, the novelist. * Mr T-ickwick's jonrrsevs, r,v-.--to Bath, Bristol, Ipswich 'and Bury ,<t Edmunds. These, we -imagine, wou'd not have entitled him to membership nt the revellers' Club, but thev were fiaught with many well-known nnd surprising adventures. It was at Ip--vich. for instance, that there ocenrml the mystery of the tasseled nightcap, which he succeeded in assuming in tho bedroom ho had entered in mistakeHow Mr Pickwick found his nightean in another person's room has long been an enigma to the commentators; and it) has, indeed', been more than once assumed that this particular passage must necessarily be a gloss maliciousb inserted in the original text.