In March 1836, Chapman and Hall printed one thousand copies of the first installment of The Pickwick Papers. They sold four hundred.
The publisher had hired a twenty-four-year-old parliamentary reporter named Charles Dickens to write light prose accompanying a series of sporting illustrations. Nobody expected much. The pay came to fourteen pounds a month. Then the illustrator, Robert Seymour, walked into the garden behind his house, placed a shotgun against his chest, and pulled the trigger. He had completed two installments. The project seemed doomed.
Dickens convinced Chapman and Hall to continue. He cut the illustrations from four per installment to two. He expanded the text from twenty-four pages to thirty-two. Then, in the fourth installment that June, he introduced a character named Sam Weller: a cockney bootblack in a striped waistcoat who mangled proverbs the way a street musician mangles opera.
