The Pickwick Papers in Catching up on Classics (and lots more!)

Sep 19, 2018 Julie rated it it was amazing · review of another edition

Shelves: fin-2018, classic-novels

What an absolute joy to read! I'm slowly making my way through Dicken's major novels and this is my favorite so far. I now understand why this book made him so famous and successful. It's a very impressive first work.

You can definitely see in this book certain themes he'd end up covering in his later works. The chapters dealing with the courts recall Bleak House, the ghost stories recall A Christmas Carol, the coincidences and repeating minor characters recall....all his works!

I enjoyed the mea ...more

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

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

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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Dec 22, 2012 Suvi rated it did not like it · review of another edition

Shelves: novels, _great-britain, 1800s

Eh. Dickens gone wrong. You're pretty much doomed, if you start reading his books with this one. Dull and so not funny. This is Dickens's first novel, so someone might say he deserves some slack. Don't understand that statement. No matter if it's a first or tenth novel, if it's bad it's bad.

The Pickwickians are silly characters, who occasionally meet some person who tells them a story to be added into the books of the Pickwick Club. That's basically it. I think Dickens was just trying to find hi ...more

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Nov 14, 2020 Maggie rated it really liked it · review of another edition

Shelves: fiction, general-fiction, classics, humour, guardian-1000, british

This review has been hidden because it contains spoilers. To view it, click here. Dickens' first novel, The Pickwick Papers were conceived when the publishing firm Chapman and Hall hired Dickens to write texts to accompany illustrations by the artist Seymour. The plan was that there would be four comic plates each month, and Dickens had to write enough text to fill 24 pages. Seymour committed suicide after the second instalment. Dickens persuaded the publishers to carry on with the project, with a replacement illustrator, and increased amount of text, and fewer plates. Robert Dickens' first novel, The Pickwick Papers were conceived when the publishing firm Chapman and Hall hired Dickens to write texts to accompany illustrations by the artist Seymour. The plan was that there would be four comic plates each month, and Dickens had to write enough text to fill 24 pages. Seymour committed suicide after the second instalment. Dickens persuaded the publishers to carry on with the project, with a replacement illustrator, and increased amount of text, and fewer plates. Robert W. Buss was hired for the third instalment, but Dickens and his publishers did not like his work (indeed, his illustrations are some of the poorest in the book, lacking the vigour and definition of the other illustrations). Hablot Knight Browne, who took the nickname Phiz to accompany Dickens' Boz, was hired for the rest of the illustrations, and the pair continued to work together for many years.

The book is about Mr Pickwick, founder of the Pickwick Club, who sets out on a journey with three friends, Tracy Tupman, Augustus Snodgrass and Nathaniel Winkle. The four friends have various amusing adventures, and each of them is somewhat of a joke himself. Mr Pickwick is a wise man with loyal followers, but his scientific wisdom is nonsensical. Tupman is said to be a romantic, but he proposes to a spinster, Rachel Wardle, who soon almost elopes with another man, Alfred Jingle, and Tupman never engages in any other romances. Snodgrass is a poet but he doesn't have a line of poetry to show for it. Winkle is supposedly a sportsman, but he embarrasses himself early on in a duel and in a shooting game.

Keeping the publication history in mind is useful to understanding the construction of the novel and explaining many of its faults. The first half of the book is rather choppy. The friends have adventures and meet new and interesting characters, but there isn't much of a plot. The turning point is when Pickwick is wrongly supposed by his landlady, Mrs Bardell, to have proposed marriage to her, when he was actually proposing hiring a manservant, Sam Weller. When her assumptions come to naught, she sues him for a breach of promise of marriage, and Pickwick ultimately ends up in jail. It is around this point that the characters start to develop. Pickwick gradually loses his naïveté and learns to understand the intentions of the people around him. We learn more about the characters of Tupman, Snodgrass and Winkle, while at the same time their rather bland characters are given smaller roles while new characters take the spotlight. In place of Alfred Jingle and Job Trotter, who have been a sort of humorous intermittent antagonist, the lawyers Dodson and Fogg are introduced as the true menacing villains who use their positions to their own pecuniary advantage. Sam Weller, who has been a capable and streetwise complement to Pickwick's bumbling kindness, and a reliable source of humour in every scene he appears in, demonstrates his deep faithfulness to Pickwick by getting himself sent to jail so that he can care for Pickwick. In jail, the two of them mature. Pickwick learns about wickedness and suffering, both Pickwick and Sam demonstrate forgiveness and kindness to their once enemies Jingle and Trotter, and they come out of jail wiser, humbler, and more devoted to each other.

It is as if Dickens realised midway through writing this that just because the story is published in serials doesn't mean that he can't develop a cohesive plotline between each instalment. This was his first novel too, and the first of many serialised novels, and he was still experimenting with the format and learning how to use it to his advantage. Moreover, while his skill at plot writing developed, he was not able to go back and edit previous instalments of the story. By the end of the book, it feels like a different, more engaging, book from the one we began with. I'm also not sure how much say Dickens had in the first few illustrations. I'm under the impression they were drawn first and Dickens had to think up a story around them afterwards. It might have been difficult to create strong characters when someone tells you who they should be, rather than when they come out of your own imagination. The whole idea of the Pickwick Club probably came from the first illustration of Pickwick giving a lecture at a meeting of gentlemen, and the club itself more or less disappears from the book after Sam appears. Then there's the illustration that accompanies The Stroller's Tale, and it's so out of place from the rest of the early illustrations, that I wonder if Dickens introduced the idea of the scattered tales just so he could write something to accompany that illustration.

While this was Dickens' first novel, the characteristics of his writing that made him such a popular author are all on display. There are caricatured, grotesque characters, and dramatic, overly-sentimental scenes, yet everything stays within the bounds of what is believable. He satires various things, most prominently the injustice of the legal system through which lawyers take advantage of their clients and defendants, but also politics (there is a rather amusing election between two extremely hostile parties), the press, the military, doctors, false religious leaders and high society (there is a lady celebrated for writing an amusingly ridiculous "Ode to an Expiring Frog") amongst others. Almost all of these are portrayed as being hypocritical. On this backdrop, Pickwick's benevolence and Sam's good humour are anchors of optimism to hold on to.

Sam Weller is many people's favourite character, and in fact sales were declining until Dickens introduced Sam, at which point the readership increased. Sam has this amusing way of comparing unrelated things, like "Wery glad to see you, indeed; and hope our acquaintance may be a long 'un, as the gen'lm'n said to the fi' pun' note." I never knew this before, but such sayings are now known as wellerisms. I love the way Sam calmly and coolly handles any situation he finds himself in, never feeling embarrassed in the company of richer men, always having something to say, and saying the most offensive things with such an inoffensive and good-humoured air that he gets away with saying almost anything and diffuses several tense situations. He also recognises and is grateful for Pickwick's generosity to him and repays this with devotion, so that the two are not just master and servant but compatriots.

The centre chapter is a Christmas dinner, filled with good-humour and featuring a story that reminded me of The Christmas Carol. In fact I wonder if this was a prelude to the many Christmas stories that Dickens would later write.

Scattered throughout the book are fictional tales, either told by a minor character to one of the Pickwickians, or written on a manuscript. In the first half of the book, the tales are dark and grim, featuring poverty, suffering and tragedy, and are antitheses to main story, which is filled with sunshine and cheerfulness. The juxtaposition of these tales highlight the optimism and joy of the Pickwickians. But interestingly, the last tale, featuring the bagman's uncle, has a light-hearted tone, in contrast to Pickwick's recent sufferings. ...more

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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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