Charles Dickens the house. The success of "Sketches by Boz" led to a proposal from publishers Chapman and Hall for Dickens to supply text to match Robert Seymour's engraved illustrations in a monthly letterpress. Seymour committed suicide after the second instalment, and Dickens, who wanted to write a connected series of sketches, hired "Phiz" to provide the engravings (which were reduced from four to two per instalment) for the story. The resulting story became "The Pickwick Papers", and though the first few episodes were not successful, the introduction of the Cockney character Sam Weller in the fourth episode (the first to be
Francis Dickens successfully done), but died of a heart attack at a friend's house in Moline, Illinois the night of his first speech. He was 42 years old. Contemporary portrayals of Francis Dickens (such as the character Inspector Dicken in the romantic novel "Annette the Metis Spy"), conformed to a conventional heroic type, reflecting the dominant view of the Rebellion held by (English-speaking) Eastern Canada. However, some of his superiors in the Mounted Police held unfavorable opinions about his overall competence, echoing his father Charles Dickens, who wrote in a letter to his friend on being asked by his son for three