The Pickwick Papers – Charles Dickens, 1836-37 ★★★★

Where's the Love for Mr. Pickwick?

Few novelists burst out of the gate with such energy and creativity, or garner such immediate popular acclaim, as did Charles Dickens. Reading The Pickwick Papers makes the case for instant greatness. It remains a marvel in terms of distance traveled, people met, and milieus satirized.

In its own day, Dickens’ debut swept across London with the speed and virulence of a medieval plague. Long before mass media created such things as water-cooler buzz and catch-phrase overuse, a cottage industry of clever hacks toiled at inkwells to pump out joke-books inspired by Sam Weller – the crafty, lowborn assistant of our hero Mr. Pickwick – and his singular take on getting through life:

“If ever I wanted anythin’ o’ my father, I always asked for it in a wery ‘spectful and obligin’ manner. If he didn’t give it to me, I took it, for fear I should be led to do anythin’ wrong through not havin’ it. I saved him a world o’ trouble in this vay.”

Dickens hardly invented the novel, but he raised it to a new level of commercial and critical appreciation. And it all began with his debut.

So why has it been largely forgotten?

There have been a couple of movies, a 12-part BBC series, an opera, even a moderately successful stage musical back in the 1960s. But it doesn’t get the respect or the mindshare of most of Dickens’ later novels. Perhaps its meteoric success as a straight-out comedy has encouraged generations of readers to take it lightly.

Yet, in addition to a striving writer making his bones, there is much serious business going on in The Pickwick Papers. In the course of Mr. Pickwick’s travels, he faces financial ruin, arrest, con artists, and life-threatening disease. But unlike later, deeper Dickens novels, everything is rooted in forward motion and fun.

Steven Marcus’ afterword in my 1980 Signet Classic paperback edition notes a debt to Cervantes’ Don Quixote in its focus on an idealistic wanderer and his faithful servant embroiled in changing times. I got flashbacks of Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales in Pickwick Papers’ frequent employment of side stories, both in terms of episodes involving the lead characters as well as pauses in the narrative where Dickens has some character pop up to tell some fantastic tale, say a ghost story, a revenge scheme, or a fantasy battle, that runs on for an entire chapter.

I don’t really get the enduring love for Don Quixote; in Mr. Pickwick one has a much more likable lead character and a firmer narrative. Canterbury Tales does match up much better by my lights, especially particular stories, yet that suffers a bit from creative overreach. Pickwick Papers would seem a likely victim of the same malady, except for the fact Dickens seems so in charge of his fictive world from first to last. It’s not always successful storycraft, but it keeps you reading.

In short, Pickwick Papers at the very least holds its own in comparison with some of literature’s tallest giants. Yet is it really a great novel, or just a very terrific one? Having read it twice now, I almost would rather read it again than try to hazard an answer.

Maybe the problem is, as Marcus states in his afterword, that we get in Mr. Pickwick an unalloyed good guy, with a simple, straightforward personality unclouded by darker emotions. “The praise of mankind was his swing, philanthropy was his insurance office,” is one of the first things we hear of Pickwick, at the meeting of his club which opens the novel. At the novel’s end, he returns to this club to bid it, and us, a hearty farewell which reveals him triumphantly unchanged:

If I have done but little good, I trust I have done less harm, and that none of my adventures will be other than a source of amusing and pleasant recollection to me in the decline of life. God bless you all!

It would be a mistake to see Pickwick Papers as a novel unruffled by change; in fact the novel undergoes very sharp transitions in its initial chapters. Its central character of interest, hearty Sam, doesn’t appear until Chapter 10, almost 150 pages into my fat old paperback. Before that, despite all the inventiveness and craft Dickens crams into every page, he seems at a loss regarding an overall direction.

According to Wikipedia’s entry on the novel, Dickens started out with a charge to supply some amusing text around comic illustrations by an illustrator named Robert Seymour. These “cockney sporting plates” would depict middle-aged men attempting to hunt and fish. Thus Dickens’ invention of the Pickwick Club, a collection of silly characters led by one Mr. Pickwick.

As he wrote this novel in monthly installments over a two-year period, Dickens was subject to a number of outside influences. Most critically, of course, there was the public, a lasting concern. But before all that, something else came along that pushed things in a more dire, tragic direction: Robert Seymour committed suicide.

Apparently Dickens’ own genius bore some blame; the young writer was producing text at such a high rate of quality and speed that the illustrator felt at a loss to keep up. After a night of arguing with Dickens over grog about his demands, Seymour shot himself.

Robert Seymour's illustration of a dying comedian, one of the last plates he created for Pickwick Papers, wound up being something of his own farewell to life. Dickens proved less sympathetic than the seated listener here. Image from https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Robert_Seymour_(illustrator)

Dickens’ reaction revealed the writer of such singularly good-hearted prose could be quite cold when it came to his art. When Seymour’s widow made claims of her husband contributing to the text of what by then had become a highly popular and lucrative enterprise, Dickens was withering in reply:

“All of the input from the artist was in response to the words that had already been written,” Dickens wrote. Seymour, he continued, “took his own life through jealousy, as it was well known that Seymour’s sanity had been questioned.”

It’s hard to argue with that verdict given what happened, not to mention the evidence of Dickens’ subsequent creativity, but jeez. I doubt Mr. Pickwick would have approved.

Seymour’s death liberated Dickens from what was to that point a small-bore exercise in rustic comedy. Gone went the hunting and parade drills; in their place came the stuff that made a lasting impression. First came one Mr. Jingle, introduced in the second installment while Seymour was still on the job, but built up later into a jovially villainous adversary who fools a spinster with a fake pledge of marriage.

A visit to a town riven by political dispute between rival parties, the Blues and the Buffs, provides us with an early, lasting highlight of Dickens’ comic invention.

“Hush. Don’t ask any questions. It’s always best on these occasions to do what the mob do.”

“But suppose there are two mobs?” suggested Mr. Snodgrass.

“Shout with the largest,” replied Mr. Pickwick.

After Seymour's death, illustrations for The Pickwick Papers were done by Hablot Knight Browne, known professionally as "Phiz," who became Dickens' most successful collaborator. Here Mr. Pickwick sleeps off some punch while seated in a wheelbarrow. Image from http://www.victorianweb.org/art/illustration/phiz/pphe/20.html

By this time, Mr. Pickwick had been joined by Sam, rendering Snodgrass and those other early companions into supercargo. Sam begins his career in Pickwick Papers cleaning boots at an inn, where he relays some useful information on Mr. Jingle’s whereabouts. Apparently response to this character was enough for Dickens to bring him back as Mr. Pickwick’s manservant, a job he would keep till book’s end.

Sam became such a successful character Dickens couldn’t resist the opportunity to double his pleasure, and his impact, by introducing another Weller, Sam’s father Tony. Tony is a widower unhappily married to an alcoholic and abrasive widow. He takes every opportunity to warn Sam of the perils of marriage:

“If ever you gets to up’ards o’ fifty, and feels disposed to go a-marrying anybody – no matter who – jist you shut yourself up in your own room, if you’ve got one, and pison yourself offhand. Hangin’s wulgar, so don’t you have nothin’ to say to that. Pison yourself, Samivel, my boy, pison yourself, and you’ll be glad on it arterwards.”

Most of the women we meet in The Pickwick Papers, at least the ones worth remembering, are high-pitched harpies who live to make misery of men’s lives. It’s a recurring theme that might have grown tiresome if not for Dickens’ facility with making the most of the joke.

Mr. Pickwick’s attempt to resist the clutchy advances of the widow from whom he rents his apartment becomes the basis of The Pickwick Papers’ main plot point, a frivolous breach-of-promise suit. This introduces Mr. Pickwick to the singularly foul law firm of Dodson & Fogg, who in a farcical court proceeding win a judgment of 750 pounds. Mr. Pickwick refuses to pay, a stance that puts him (and Sam) in debtors’ prison.

Dickens’ treatment of this situation anticipates the drama of Dickens’ better-known novels. Pickwick beholds a jarringly unjust state of affairs where families live and die behind prison walls, while hardened criminals live an easy life preying off the weak.

It is left to Sam to tell it like it is: “I’ll tell you wot it is, sir: them as is always a-idlin’ in public houses it don’t damage at all, and them as is alvays a-workin’ wen they can it damages too much.”

One knock I’d make on The Pickwick Papers is that once this situation is resolved, there is little else for the novel to do except wrap itself up. Dickens, working to a monthly paycheck and not a publisher’s deadline, was still trying to give the public what they wanted, and kept at his exercise of novel-writing for a while longer. Just as The Pickwick Papers has a slow takeoff, it similarly spends a lot of time taxiing on the runway after it lands.

The Canterburian sidetrips into stories of menacing goblins and whatnot actually prove diverting; in some ways preferable to the main narrative. This is especially so when Dickens brings romance into focus; it brings out his cloying side, of bright eyes and gushy sentiment. There are a few too many visits to the cozy country estate of Mr. Wardle, where Christmas stories are told and assorted minor characters trot out one-note eccentricities, like a fat servant named Joe who only sleeps and eats and an old woman who has trouble hearing.

In the end, the sum of Dickens’ creation outweighs the weakness of any parts. There is so much going on, so much zest in the telling and sparkle in the description, for the less inspired detours to get me down. After all, some people like silly love songs, and Dickens wrote for them, too. He wrote for everybody, and about everybody, in such a way that makes him a singular classic, even when producing work that only approached classic status.