Note 34 — Chapter XIII

Already he had been the subject of similar reports on the occasion of the family sorrow which compelled him to suspend the publication of Pickwick for two months (ante, p. 120), when, upon issuing a brief address in resuming his work (30th June, 1837), he said, "By one set of intimate acquaintances, especially well informed, he has been killed outright; by another, driven mad; by a third, imprisoned for debt; by a fourth, sent per steamer to the United States; by a fifth, rendered incapable of mental exertion for evermore; by all, in short, represented as doing anything but seeking in a few weeks' retirement the restoration of that cheerfulness and peace of which a sad bereavement had temporarily deprived him."