The Pickwick Papers in Never too Late to Read Classics

Dec 18, 2012 Laura rated it it was ok · review of another edition

Shelves: e-books, mtbr-challenge-2013, british-literature, fiction-19th-century, gutenberg, read-2013

Reading online at eBooks@ Adelaide, one chapter per day.

Some David Perdue's Charles Dickens page background about this book:

When artist Robert Seymour proposed to publishers Chapman and Hall a series of engravings featuring Cockney sporting life, with accompanying text published in monthly installments, they readily accepted and set about the task of finding a writer. The publishers were turned down by several writers and finally asked 24-year-old Charles Dickens to provide the text. Dickens acc ...more

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May 02, 2016 Douglas Beagley rated it liked it

Shelves: abandoned

Reading The Pickwick Papers, I had in mind a re-write. Rewrite the whole damn thing, scene by scene, with a different sense of purpose... or any sense of purpose at all.

Yes, the writing shows great promise, yes you can feel the Dickensian Dickensishness coming together. It feels good! There's that genius we know and love! He defines situations and attitudes that are relatable to a 40-year old technical writer living in 2016... astonishing.

But there's a problem with Pickwick Papers—it has no unif Reading The Pickwick Papers, I had in mind a re-write. Rewrite the whole damn thing, scene by scene, with a different sense of purpose... or any sense of purpose at all.

Yes, the writing shows great promise, yes you can feel the Dickensian Dickensishness coming together. It feels good! There's that genius we know and love! He defines situations and attitudes that are relatable to a 40-year old technical writer living in 2016... astonishing.

But there's a problem with Pickwick Papers—it has no unifying purpose or theme, and you don't particularly care about the fate of the characters either. With neither of those pieces in place, The Pickwick Papers is a series of strung together farcical adventures. Some work, some don't. You don’t get to the end of one of these adventures and feel edified. But that’s fine, right? It’s Jeeves and Wooster? Not quite.

The Pickwick Papers is one of the greatest authors of all time getting his first big break and trying out a bunch of different things, doing them for the first time, more or less successfully.

When viewed in the scope of his later work, bits like the wandering actor’s bedside death scene seem a bit vacuous, pointless. Why is that there? What’s it for? Gravitas? To fill pages? Who knows? Dickens felt like writing it, so he fit it into his ongoing paid job, in the frame of the Pickwick ramble. The book has one of these every three or four chapters... the preacher tells at Wurdle’s house. Sure, a fine little morality tale? But what is it for? To lend context to Jingle’s betrayal? Eh. Not really. It doesn’t fit. It doesn’t have to fit.

And then Dickens tries a satire of politics, visiting a town in the midst of an election. It feels spot on, clever, pointed, etc. But what's it for? I don't particularly love or need any of the characters in this book to succeed or fail, and the overriding theme is completely new and unrelated to what came before, so why would I care about the outcome, or the victories or defeats of the folks involved? I wouldn't.

The Pickwick Papers was a phenomenon in its time... it is much better then Cats, but I'm not going to read it over and over. If people were entertained (they were), then Dickens was successful (he was). But I don't need to read it to the end.

I only read the first half, but I did get to see Sam Weller in action. Yes, Sam Weller is wonderful whenever he speaks. Maybe I should have finished just to read all the Weller bits. ...more

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Mar 29, 2016 Douglas Beagley rated it it was ok · review of another edition

Shelves: abandoned

Reading The Pickwick Papers, I had in mind a re-write. Rewrite the whole damn thing, scene by scene, with a different sense of purpose... or any sense of purpose at all.

Yes, the writing shows great promise, yes you can feel the Dickensian Dickensishness coming together. It feels good! There's that genius we know and love! He defines situations and attitudes that are relatable to a 40-year old technical writer living in 2016... astonishing.

But there's a problem with Pickwick Papers—it has no unif Reading The Pickwick Papers, I had in mind a re-write. Rewrite the whole damn thing, scene by scene, with a different sense of purpose... or any sense of purpose at all.

Yes, the writing shows great promise, yes you can feel the Dickensian Dickensishness coming together. It feels good! There's that genius we know and love! He defines situations and attitudes that are relatable to a 40-year old technical writer living in 2016... astonishing.

But there's a problem with Pickwick Papers—it has no unifying purpose or theme, and you don't particularly care about the fate of the characters either. With neither of those pieces in place, The Pickwick Papers is a series of strung together farcical adventures. Some work, some don't. You don’t get to the end of one of these adventures and feel edified. But that’s fine, right? It’s Jeeves and Wooster? Not quite.

The Pickwick Papers is one of the greatest authors of all time getting his first big break and trying out a bunch of different things, doing them for the first time, more or less successfully.

When viewed in the scope of his later work, bits like the wandering actor’s bedside death scene seem a bit vacuous, pointless. Why is that there? What’s it for? Gravitas? To fill pages? Who knows? Dickens felt like writing it, so he fit it into his ongoing paid job, in the frame of the Pickwick ramble. The book has one of these every three or four chapters... the preacher tells at Wurdle’s house. Sure, a fine little morality tale? But what is it for? To lend context to Jingle’s betrayal? Eh. Not really. It doesn’t fit. It doesn’t have to fit.

And then Dickens tries a satire of politics, visiting a town in the midst of an election. It feels spot on, clever, pointed, etc. But what's it for? I don't particularly love or need any of the characters in this book to succeed or fail, and the overriding theme is completely new and unrelated to what came before, so why would I care about the outcome, or the victories or defeats of the folks involved? I wouldn't.

The Pickwick Papers was a phenomenon in its time... it is much better then Cats, but I'm not going to read it over and over. If people were entertained (they were), then Dickens was successful (he was). But I don't need to read it to the end.

I only read the first half, but I did get to see Sam Weller in action. Yes, Sam Weller is wonderful whenever he speaks. Maybe I should have finished just to read all the Weller bits. ...more

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May 01, 2021 Barb rated it really liked it

Shelves: fiction, favorites, library-audio

The Pickwick papers by Charles Dickens
It was a very long audiobook and I really enjoyed it, but it lost focus every now and then. It would be a good book to reread and get the parts that I missed
4⭐⭐⭐⭐

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Apr 06, 2016 Tom Britz rated it really liked it · review of another edition

Charles Dickens wrote this as an ongoing serial for a newspaper and he was paid by the word. It showed! This was a rambling and at times disjointed tale with many side turns. However, it was still a clever and at times quite humorous book. When you remember that Charles was all of 23 at the time, it stands as quite an achievement.

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