Page:Notes and Queries - Series 12 - Volume 4.djvu/57

 12 s. iv. FEB., 1918.] NOTES AND QUERIES.

51

7. Laugh, and the world laughs with you ; Weep, and you weep alone.

JOHN B* WAINE WEIGHT.

[7. Mr. Gurney Benham in ' Cassell's Book of 'Quotations,' revised edition, 1912, cites these lines from ' The Way of the World,' by Ella Wheeler Wilcox, but states that they are also claimed by Col. J. A. Joyce.]

PICKWICK: ORIGIN OF THE NAME. (12 S. iv. 12.)

THEBE can be no doubt, I think, that " Dickens got the name of Pickwick from the name of the proprietor of a line of coaches running between London and Bath," as stated by Mr. Justice Darling.

In vol. i. chap. v. of Forster's ' Life of Dickens ' there is a note on p. 88 which runs thus : " The name of his hero [Pickwick] Dickens took from that of a celebrated coach proprietor of Bath."

It will be remembered also with what indignation Sam Weller saw the name of Pickwick painted on the coach by which they were to travel to Bath.

So far as I am concerned, I have always been under the impression that this was an established fact. HENBY F. DICKENS.

8 Mulberry Walk, S.W.

Probably the learned judge had in mind the 35th chapter of ' Pickwick,' wherein is described Sam Weller' s indignation when he discovered " on that part of the coach door on which the proprietor's name usually appears. . . .the magic name of Pickwick."

It has already been pointed out that there is a village of the name a few miles from Bath, and it may, perhaps, be of some interest to say that at the time the book was written there was in the neighbourhood a gentleman named William Eleazer Pick- wick, who owned (as did his father before him) an estate in the parishes of Box and Bathford, through which the Great Western Railway ran. This I know from the fact that the conveyances, which I recently inspected, and which are dated in 1839 and 1843, were in my custody when I was Registrar of Deeds to the company. Mr. Pickwick is therein described as " Esquire," but a preliminary document calls him " Captain." Was he related to the owner of the coaches ? J. MAKEHAM.

Crouch Hill, N.19.

Mr. F. G. Kitton, in an article on ' Dickens's Characters and Prototypes,' in Temple Bar for May, 1888, thus wrote :

" The name of Pickwick may be' traced to that of a Bath coach-proprietor, for it is recorded that Dickens, on seeing it painted on the door of a stage-coach which had passed him in the street, rushed into the publisher's office, exclaiming, ' I've got it. Moses Pickwick, Bath, coach- master.' It is interesting to know that the same Moses Pickwick was a foundling, left one night in Pickwick street, and brought up in Corsham workhouse, till he was old enough to be employed in the stables where the mail coach changed horses ; then he got to be head ostler, and eventually coach proprietor. His Christian name was given to him as being a foundling, and his surname from the village where he was left as an infant."

To Mr. Kitton' s article is appended a note that, " since this article was written," the novelist's son, Mr. Henry Fielding Dickens (now Common Serjeant of the City of London), in a case at the Law Courts, Strand, introduced a witness named Pick- wick as presenting nothing less than the identification of the origin of the name, stating that the witness was a descendant, or grand-nephew, of Mr. Moses Pickwick, who kept a coach at Bath, and that he (the speaker) had every reason to believe that it was from this Moses Pickwick that the name of the immortal Pickwick was taken.

W. B. H.

The Pall Mall Gazette of March 3, 1888, contained a report of the hearing of a case in the High Court of Justice, before Mr. Baron Huddleston and a jury, in which Mr. Henry Dickens, a son of the famous novelist, and counsel for the defendant, called as a witness a Mr. Pickwick.

See also 7 S. ii. 325, 457; iii. 30, 112, 175, 273, 393, 526; v. 285, 455; xi. 268, 401, 472, 476 ; xii. 72 ; 10 S. iii. 447 ; xi. 7.

JOHN T. PAGE.

Long Itchington, Warwickshire.

There is no doubt where Dickens got this name ; it was from Brooke v. Pickwick in 4 Bingham, 218, an action against the actual proprietor of the Bath coach in respect of that vehicle, tried in the spring of 1827 at Taunton. Mr. Pickwick lost. Moreover, on the motion for a new trial Mr. Justice Gaselee ( = " Stareleigh ") was one of the judges. It must be remembered that about this time Dickens was in a lawyer's office.

This and other Dickens " finds " were published in ' A Chance Medley ' (Con- stable & Co., 1911) see pp. 326 and 346 by H. C N.