The
Posthumous Papers of the Pickwick Club (1836), Charles Dickens
The Posthumous Papers of thePickwick Club was the fictional publication that really made the
name of Charles Dickens famous. After his reasonable success with
descriptions and written sketches of London life (Sketches by Boz)
in 1833-36, Dickens gained a popular following and the beginnings of
a loyal audience thanks to the increasing success of The Pickwick
Papers.
His publishers commissioned Dickens to
provide the text for a picture novel about unsuccessful, bumbling
sportsmen, with the pictures supplied by Robert Seymour. But rather
than wait to be given illustrations to describe, Dickens began
writing his descriptions before anything had been drawn and so,
increasingly through The Pickwick Papers, his words took
precedence over the illustrations. Seymour, who had originally
proposed the idea of a series of illustrations of city-dwellers
inexpertly hunting etc., shot himself before the second instalment's
publication – though that probably wasn't just down to Dickens's
increasing level of artistic control.
The collection of illustrations and
story-captions detailing the exploits of the Pickwick Club eventually
attracted a wide readership – and it's easy to see why. While not
quite the soap opera of its day, The Pickwick Papers is a
running light comedy, with each instalment dropping its increasingly
familiar (dare I say predictable?) characters into fresh situations
full of potential mishaps and fumbles.
Handily, the members of the Pickwick
Club take copious notes of their bungled adventures and the mishaps
they endure. A few select members, who seem to have unlimited
reserves of money and free time, set out with Pickwick to discover
curious things about England, people and life in general. The
exception is Pickwick's manservant, Sam Weller, credited with much of
the book's popular success – in part, no doubt, due to his
down-to-earth worldliness, as compared with Pickwick's utter
cluelessness. Think Jeeves and Wooster, but with a cockney Stephen
Fry who doesn't have that smug, quietly superior face.
The
Pickwick narrator's style is either naïve or sly, often telling
us one thing and probably meaning quite another. Much of the comedy
of the book lies in the discrepancy between, on one hand, the
narrator's interpretation of the notes taken by the Pickwickians, and
on the other hand, the likely reality of the situation. For example,
while staying in the house of a regional newspaper editor, Pott, who
spends the evening reading his editorials to Pickwick, Pickwick has
his eyes closed in rapturous enjoyment of the prose...or has fallen
asleep in boredom. Here is a narrator who, like the world of people
he describes, seems to have fallen for the legend of Pickwick's
intellect and popularity, interpreting his notes accordingly. In
reality, Pickwick is a bumbling, inept man with more money and
self-importance than sense.
Dickens' audience may have also fallen
for Pickwick's charm, but either way the novel's popularity rose and
made Dickens a household name. Not only that, but The Pickwick
Papers gave Dickens his first experience of writing weekly
instalments of novels – a pattern he followed for years afterward.
It's a light read, quicker perhaps than some of Dickens' later work,
but no weaker for it. While not so mature or impressive as, say,
Bleak House, The Pickwick Papers is a solid debut into
long-form fiction.
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