Bizarre carvings posit a pictorial and literary conundrum where Dickens’s imaginary realm enters the factual. The fictitious and non-fictional worlds exist through vignettes of an inverted presentation of the mundane to deliver a body of junctures and phenomena celebrating the mystery.

The Pickwick Club’s new headquarters connect their old base, The George and Vulture, to the mysterious Bill Stumps graffiti on the King Stone monolith on Derbyshire’s Stanton Moor. Bill Stumps is the name of the deviant antagonist in Dickens’s original novel, The Pickwick Papers, where Mr Pickwick discovers the carvings on an unnamed ancient rock. However, inquiries into who did the real-life carving are inconclusive.

The two possibilities are that the actual carving inspired the novel, or it was the other way around, and the newly released book inspired the graffiti. The other mystery, despite the source of inspiration, is ‘whodunnit’. A prime suspect is a fellow nicknamed Flint Jack, a dealer of fabricated antiquities infamous during the novel’s release in 1836.

The architecture, emanating from the visual vocabulary of graphic storytelling, conveys the puzzle of factual fictional carving.