Reading Pickwick Quotes

“A labourer sat in a gin shop soon after dawn, reading his Pickwick. He was joined by a fishmonger, also with his Pickwick, whose reeking skin would normally drive men to anywhere else, but not now, for a jolly mood bonded the two and they talked of the antics on a Pickwickian page. Then came a man who parked his donkey cart outside, and, having given the beast a nosebag, he sipped gin noisily in between quoting Sam Weller; and then a milkmaid came, who put down her pails, and she too stopped for a gin and a few minutes’ talk of Pickwick.

The surgeon would read Pickwick in a cab on his way to the hospital; the omnibus driver would read Pickwick while the horses were changed; the blacksmith would read Pickwick while waiting for metal in a furnace; the cook would read Pickwick when she was stirring the soup; the mother would read Pickwick when the child was at her breast. In all the unfilled gaps in people’s lives, in all those moments when it was possible for reading to overlap another activity, Pickwick appeared.”
― Stephen Jarvis, Death and Mr. Pickwick