Pickwick Plumbs the Hampstead Ponds: Chapter One in its Scientific Contexts

Mr. Pickwick’s “Speculations on the Source of the Hampstead Ponds, with Some Observations on the Theory of Tittlebats,” the paper that “agitated the scientific world” and secured the fame of the immortal Samuel Pickwick, prompts the first big laugh in The Pickwick Papers; its original readers, better attuned to the novel’s rich allusiveness, would have relished the joke in ways we may not fully appreciate. In fact, a short walk would have taken Mr. Pickwick from Hampstead ponds to their known source somewhere in the vicinity of Caen Woods. A popular and accessible tourist attraction, this “fine, fresh chain of water [was] highly delighted in by the summer strollers from London.” Dickens himself loved to ride out to Hampstead with John Forster in the early years of their friendship, and Hampstead Heath recurs frequently in his fiction, especially as a site for thoughtful rambles. Here David Copperfield walks out his depression over the sudden loss of his financial prospects, and Walter Gay ponders “the unknown life before him” in Barbados (Letters 1: 353; DC 35; DS 15).

To be sure, the history and topography of the area were notoriously difficult to map with precision; new bodies of water were constantly being created and others drained, creating a network of ponds, many of them interlinked by underground streams (Davies 26–70). But, though Pickwick’s language evokes scientific adventure on an epic scale, the danger of an occasional drowning “owing to the sudden shelving of the banks” (Park 74) was the only risk posed by this familiar recreational site. Pickwick was no Mungo Park, although – Michael Cotsell has argued – contemporary readers would have heard a mocking allusion here to the famous Scottish explorer who died in 1806 after his thousand-mile journey to trace the elusive source of the Niger ended in disaster (Cotsell 5). As for “tittlebats” (Pickwick uses the inappropriate childish variant for the common sticklebat), nothing could be more commonplace or local or a less plausible route to scientific glory than the study of this “almost universal inhabitant of rivers, ponds, and marshes” (OED; Bowlker 101).

As chapter one unfolds, Pickwick’s paper on the source of the Hampstead ponds emerges as but one strand in a whole tissue of allusions to the “decline of science” – a catchphrase and a concern that was in the forefront of public discussion during the turbulent 1830s and one that emerges as central to the novel Pickwick turned out to be. James A. Secord notes that during the period of Pickwick’s composition “science was changing from a relatively esoteric pursuit into one known to have profound consequences for the everyday life of all men and women.”

Old institutions and methods of understanding were recast and new ones developed that we now see as fundamental. Science […] had previously included all theoretically grounded knowledge – including grammar, rhetoric, and theology; now it was increasingly used to include only the study of nature. New institutions were organized for conducting investigations, with specialized facilities […] for breaking things down and combining them in unexpected ways. […] Behind all these new approaches was a focus on analysis, in which the natural world was taken apart like a machine.

(Visions of Science 5)

Chapter one engages this cultural conversation at multiple points of contact, beginning with allusions to a period its readers would have recognized as belonging to earlier representations of science and scientists. I should say “men of science,” of course, or “natural philosophers,” for only in the barbaric United States did the term scientist gain a firm foothold in the nineteenth century, despite its coinage in 1833 (Secord 105–6). As early as the prospectus for Pickwick, which Dickens composed as an advertisement for the novel he had not yet written, the title of the novel is linked to an older tradition of travel writing specifically associated with the amateur scientist:

The Pickwick Travels, the Pickwick Diary, the Pickwick Correspondence – in short the whole of the Pickwick papers, were carefully preserved, and duly registered by the Secretary from time to time, in the voluminous Transactions of the Pickwick...