Jarvis tells a darker tale, one that owes something to the malignant usurpers of Dickens’s late novels while also making historical sense. Dickens, a young writer without any leverage, badly needed money to marry. Chapman and Hall were, like all publishers, cautious about their investment, and were not about to abruptly undermine Seymour. In order to take over the project, Dickens alternately bullied and quietly disobeyed his collaborator. Jarvis narrates two plausible meetings between the writer and Seymour, carrying us along as Dickens first brusquely critiques Seymour’s presentation of the Pickwick idea, and then clinches his dominance by delivering calculated insults at the climactic meeting. Crippled by self-doubt, Seymour—portrayed as a semi-closeted, vulnerable gay man envisioning a future that would have no need for his kind of art—makes the most dramatic surrender possible.

But as in more-famous scandals, the real crime is the cover-up. Jarvis elaborates on the fact that in the two new prefaces Dickens wrote over the next 30 years, he was increasingly vehement in denying Seymour a role of any significance. By 1867, Dickens was insisting that “Mr. Seymour never originated or suggested an incident, a phrase, or a word, to be found in this book.” Dickens’s publisher Edward Chapman claimed that Pickwick’s plumpness and poor dress sense were his own idea, based on a former friend of his named John Foster. In Death and Mr. Pickwick, Jarvis invents an alternative scenario: he depicts Dickens’s close friend and adviser (and first biographer) John Forster as a cunning and unrepentant liar who orchestrates these claims. Inbelicate and Scripty have no doubt that “John Foster” was a barely disguised calling card Forster left behind to taunt posterity with his cleverness in erasing Seymour from historical memory and protecting the intellectual property of his celebrated friend. Jarvis’s Forster is the Mephistophelian ally Dickens needed to cement his reputation while keeping his conscience clean.

The story is so dramatically convincing that it is all the more surprising how much of it is historically verifiable: the “John Foster” detail, the tenuousness of Pickwick’s early days, the increasingly heated denials in Dickens’s later accounts of what occurred. Yet you could be forgiven for wondering why this should this matter to anyone but Dickens obsessives. One answer is that Jarvis is not simply recounting a gripping Victorian scandal; he is telling an unsettlingly modern tale. His Dickens may be wildly talented, but he is also a very recognizable type, an “innovator” and a “disruptor”—an identity as psychologically peculiar as “genius” and not wholly distinct from it, yet trailing a very different aura.

Coolly confident, a figure who lusts to break arrangements of all kinds: this Dickens belongs in a pantheon alongside not Balzac and Tolstoy but Jobs and Zuckerberg, a canny interloper ruthlessly making the most of a historical transition point. Jarvis doesn’t raise the comparison explicitly, but it is what primes Inbelicate and Scripty, our contemporaries, to suspect the truth of Dickens’s relation to Pickwick; like ours, their lives are lived in the shadow of such course-changing appropriations. For Jarvis, Seymour’s suicide was the last act of a more intimate and artisanal media world, and it freed Dickens’s ambition to imagine, and then seduce, a mass audience.