Chapman & Hall

The hypothetically hardest question adjacently a Christmas Carol question is this.

Dickens arranged to pay for the publishing of A Christmas Carol himself in exchange for a percentage of the profits due to disagreements with Chapman and Hall over the commercial failures of what other novel considered the last of his picaresque novels.

Got several

that are running through my head right now.

The facts are simple and familiar to most people.

The publishers, Chapman and Hall, wished to produce some kind of serial with comic illustrations by a popular caricaturist named Seymour.

This artist was chiefly famous for his running of the farcical side of sport, and to suit his specialty it was very vaguely suggested to Dickens by the publishers that he should write about a Nimrod Club, or some such thing, a club of amateur sportsmen foredoomed to perpetual ignominies.

Dickens objected in substance upon two very sensible grounds.

It is true that when this scheme came to be discussed, he suggested that other pens might be occasionally employed.

But reading between the lines, it is sufficiently evident that he thought of the thing as a kind of vast multiplication of himself, with Dickens as editor opening letters, Dickens as leader writer writing leaders, Dickens as reporter reporting meetings, Dickens as reviewer reviewing books, Dickens, for all I know, as office boy opening and shutting doors.

This serial of which he spoke to Messrs. Chapman and Hall began and broke off and remains as a colossal fragment bound together under the title of Master Humphrey's Clock.

One characteristic thing he wished to have in the periodical.