The Two Versions of Sketches of Young Gentlemen

In February 1838 Chapman and Hall published a small book written anonymously by Dickens called Sketches of Young Gentlemen. At about the same time, a similarly named volume appeared, the publisher of which claimed that his work had been fraudulently imitated. Consideration of the publication history of the two books, revealed in contemporary press advertisements and notices, allows that claim to be evaluated.

Background

At the end of June 1837, Chapman and Hall, in addition to bringing out the fifteenth monthly number of “Boz”’s phenomenally successful Pickwick Papers, issued another, more modest pseudonymous production. Sketches of Young Ladies by “Quiz” was a slim volume containing humorous, gently mocking descriptions of 24 contemporary female “types” – “The Literary Young Lady,” “The Abstemious Young Lady,” “The Clever Young Lady” – and so on. Illustrated, like Pickwick, by “Phiz” (Hablot Browne), the book sold well, and by the end of the year was in its fifth edition.¹ The identity of its author, a young future cleric called Edward Caswall (ODNB, 1814–78),² remained unknown until revealed in a biographical note in 1908 (Ballasis).

Caswall and Chapman and Hall followed up Young Ladies with a book for children called Morals from the Churchyard; in a Series of Cheerful Fables. In it, graves in a churchyard take turns to tell their (highly moralistic) stories. Illustrated by Browne, Morals was published anonymously to good reviews in December 1837. Caswall claimed later to have also written a companion book to his Young Ladies which contained descriptions of similarly classified young gentlemen, but, “on calm deliberation,” to have “put it aside” and to have concentrated instead on studying for the ministry.³ Dickens was said to have expressed a wish, presumably at about this time, to meet him (Ballasis 7). No evidence for such a wish (or meeting) is recorded elsewhere.

As the 1837 Christmas holiday season approached, Chapman and Hall began a modest press campaign designed to promote items in their current portfolio: Pickwick, the second number of the monthly part issue of Sketches by Boz, Young Ladies, Morals, a book on wines, another on chess, and a few additional “improving” children’s books.⁴ They did so no doubt elated by a recent formal agreement with Dickens that he produce for them “another and new Book or work the title whereof has not yet been decided on of similar character and of the same extent and contents in point of quantity as the […] work entitled ‘The Posthumous Papers of the Pickwick Club’” (Dickens, Letters 1: 659).

In the meantime, their star author, fresh from a triumphal dinner to mark the completion of Pickwick, and the more modest celebrations which accompanied the christening of his first-born, was engaged in editing the monthly Miscellany owned by another publisher, Richard Bentley. To it, he was himself contributing installments of Oliver Twist. He was also, for the same publisher, rather reluctantly converting into something commercially viable an unsatisfactory revision of the memoirs of the clown Grimaldi.

In December 1837, then, the possibility of an imminent exploitation of the formula successfully used in Young Ladies is unlikely to have been high on the agenda either of Chapman and Hall, or of Dickens. Such a possibility had occurred, however, to another, enterprising publisher.

William Kidd

The firm of Edward Chapman and William Hall had begun in the early 1830s as a bookselling establishment and gradually taken on the additional business of publishing. William Kidd’s was one of several other businesses which, at about the same time, followed the same path. By 1837, Kidd (ODNB, 1803–67)⁵ was operating from premises in Tavistock Street, Covent Garden. He dealt in a wide variety of what proved to be ephemeral novels, periodicals, pocket-sized travel and guide books, and miscellanies the commercial attractiveness of which lay at least as much in their illustrations as their letterpress. In one such miscellany, in 1834, a snippet of text taken from “The Bloomsbury Christening,” an anonymous story originally published in the Monthly Magazine, had been reproduced without authority as a basis for a small illustration...