ENGLISH ARTICLES

The Pickwick Papers

Charles Dickens, better known to the readers of his sketches as “Boz,” launched his career as a novelist with this episodic, comic adventure tale. The fame it brought him was hitherto unprecedented among popular novelists. Beyond its impact on Dickens’s career, Pickwick charted a new direction for the modern novel and its popularization. It was the first English novel to focus primarily on middleand lower-class characters, and it found an audience even among the illiterate, who attended groups to hear it read aloud.

The novel’s narrator is putatively editing the Pickwick Club’s documents. The club, named after its founder/president Samuel Pickwick, forms a four-man corresponding society to travel across England and forward its findings back to the club in London. Same readers complain Pickwick lacks a cohesive plot, but narrative threads do link its episodes, even though the book is famous for including many apparently digressive stories that Pickwick and company hear on the road and record in their findings (e.g., “The Stroller’s Tale,” “The Bagman’s Story,” and “The True Legend of Prince Bladud”). In reality, Pickwick is a picaresque collection of tales, a veritable Don Quixote of English literature, although its traveling adventurers are not knights but selfimportant gentlemen.

Pickwick, along with Tracy Tupman, Nathaniel Winkle, and Augustus Snodgrass, all of whom had “volunteered to share the perils of his travels, and who were destined to participate in the glories of his discoveries,” set off as the novel begins. Each Pickwickian has an exaggerated sense of his own special gifts and virtues: Tupman sees himself as a romantic adventurer, Winkle as a sportsman, and Snodgrass as an accomplished poet; each endures comic misadventures resulting from the discrepancy between his ideal and actual abilities; and each marries happily by the book’s end. As for the rotund Pickwick, although he suffers disillusionments of his own, he at least succeeds in his avowed attempts to benefit others. The villain is Alfred Jingle, an actor who reappears throughout the novel, wreaking havoc while masquerading as various gentlemen. His machinations are various: He implicates Winkle in a duel, he almost elopes with Rachel Wardle prior to her marriage to Tupman, and his servant, Job Trotter, even fools Pickwick into trespassing at a female seminary. Another recurring character is the redoubtable Sam Weller, whom Pickwick employs as a manservant. His colorful cockney speech and ingenuity in looking after Pickwick’s interests mark him as one of literature’s most memorable sidekicks. Weller, at the book’s close, weds Mary, maid to Winkle’s bride Arabella Allen.

A major plot element concerns Pickwick’s troublesome relationship with a widowed landlady, Mrs. Bardell. When he tries to tell her he has hired a servant, she misconstrues this as a marriage proposal. The rapacious lawyers Dodson and Fogg eventually inspire her to file a breach-of-promise suit against him. Pickwick’s subsequent conviction lands him in Fleet Street Debtors’ Prison for refusal to pay what he considers unjust damages. Most of his friends and enemies follow him there: Sam Weller has his father throw him into the Fleet for debt so he can continue to serve Pickwick. Jingle’s bad debts result in his incarceration. And Mrs. Bardell also suffers eventual imprisonment. In a burst of generosity, Pickwick is moved to forgive Jingle and pay Mrs. Bardell’s debts (for which gift she agrees to absolve him of the charges). Meanwhile, Pickwick is horrified by the Fleet’s conditions (which Dickens knew all too well from his childhood, when his family was jailed there for his father’s debts). The novel’s epilogue-like close finds Pickwick retired from his adventures, attended by Sam and Mary, serving as godfather to the offspring of Winkle, Tupman, and Snodgrass. “Pickwick will always be remembered as the great example of everything that made Dickens great,” wrote G.K. Chesterton; “of the solemn conviviality of great friendships, of the erratic adventures of old English roads, of the hospitality of old English inns, of the great fundamental kindliness and honour of old English manners.”