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
Racism in the work of Charles Dickens of making him a voter glares out of every roll of his eye". Bernard Porter suggests that Dickens' race prejudice caused him to actually oppose imperialism rather than promote it citing the character of Mrs. Jellyby in "Bleak House" and the essay "The Noble Savage" as evidence. However, Dickens did not join other liberals in condemning Jamaica's Governor Eyre's declaration of martial law after an attack on the capital's courthouse. In speaking on the controversy, Dickens' attacked "that platform sympathy with the black- or the native or the Devil.." In an essay on George Eliot, K.M. Newton notes: One of