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3.68 AVERAGE
3.68 AVERAGE
The Pickwick Papers is a perfect example of a book that came at the right place and at the right time for me.
I was in the need of something fun and light-hearted, which is strange because I usually enjoy darker and messier stuff, and I have to admit, for the first 70 pages I was pretty neutral towards it: A Christmas Carol is one of my favorite stories of all time (especially for a sentimental value) and when I read Great Expectations and Oliver Twist I enjoyed them, but I wasn’t in love with either of them so I thought the same thing would happen with this book.
I’m extremely glad to say that I was wrong.
After 100 pages something clicked with me and I started enjoying my experience more and more: the characters became more fleshed out, the story started showing a consistent plot (or somehow consistent) and overall I found myself immersed in Pickwick’s world, with its silliness and humorous events, but also with the bits of social activism (especially in the descriptions of the prison) we usually find in Dickens’ prose.
The story isn’t the most complex and neither are the characters, but there’s something within each of them that makes you fall more and more in love with them at the point you feel yourself a member of their extravagant and over the top family.
My favorites here are without a doubt Mr Jingle (a trickster and con artist with a strange and irregular speech) who made me laugh at loud in more than an occasion and whose friendship with Job Trotter (even though there’s too little of them in the book) really warmed my heart, and Sam Weller, Pickwick’s servant, who becomes, from a point on, the really main character of the book with his humorous and cynical attitude towards life (but his father is almost as humorous as him).
Ultimately, however, I grew also fond of Nathaniel Winkle and Pickwick himself and, overall, of all the characters in the book: every single one of them, though deeply flawed and silly most of the times is a genuinely good person. I’ve never loved reading about good people as much as I did with this book.
It definitely isn’t the “best” Nobel Dickens has ever written quality wise but at the same time it’s fun, imaginative and is able to warm your heart during maybe a not so great time of your life.
100% would recommend.
I was in the need of something fun and light-hearted, which is strange because I usually enjoy darker and messier stuff, and I have to admit, for the first 70 pages I was pretty neutral towards it: A Christmas Carol is one of my favorite stories of all time (especially for a sentimental value) and when I read Great Expectations and Oliver Twist I enjoyed them, but I wasn’t in love with either of them so I thought the same thing would happen with this book.
I’m extremely glad to say that I was wrong.
After 100 pages something clicked with me and I started enjoying my experience more and more: the characters became more fleshed out, the story started showing a consistent plot (or somehow consistent) and overall I found myself immersed in Pickwick’s world, with its silliness and humorous events, but also with the bits of social activism (especially in the descriptions of the prison) we usually find in Dickens’ prose.
The story isn’t the most complex and neither are the characters, but there’s something within each of them that makes you fall more and more in love with them at the point you feel yourself a member of their extravagant and over the top family.
My favorites here are without a doubt Mr Jingle (a trickster and con artist with a strange and irregular speech) who made me laugh at loud in more than an occasion and whose friendship with Job Trotter (even though there’s too little of them in the book) really warmed my heart, and Sam Weller, Pickwick’s servant, who becomes, from a point on, the really main character of the book with his humorous and cynical attitude towards life (but his father is almost as humorous as him).
Ultimately, however, I grew also fond of Nathaniel Winkle and Pickwick himself and, overall, of all the characters in the book: every single one of them, though deeply flawed and silly most of the times is a genuinely good person. I’ve never loved reading about good people as much as I did with this book.
It definitely isn’t the “best” Nobel Dickens has ever written quality wise but at the same time it’s fun, imaginative and is able to warm your heart during maybe a not so great time of your life.
100% would recommend.
Nice use of language, fun stories, reads well, 2nd half is darker and more serious (debt prison etc). 3½ stars.
Brilliantly written at the age of 24. I am reamazed everytme i read Dickens how he adeptly he captures and reveals so many different personalities and their quirky characteristics. This is one of my favorites.
adventurous
lighthearted
reflective
slow-paced
Like most English kids, I first encountered Dickens at school and this put me off reading Dickens for a long while. I remember Mrs Holgate taking us drearily through “A Tale of Two Cities” asking us innane questions about the text. Daniel Pennac in “Comme un Roman” (The English title was “The Rights of the Reader“) describes how young children are introduced to the magic of reading. Then he examines how they’re put off usually at school, when they are asked questions about what they are reading and reading becomes a dreary chore. School can put people off reading for life!
Dickens was a showman and an entertainer, he tackled many social issues of his time, like child labour, but he did so with a lot of humour. “A Tale of Two Cities” lacks a lot of Dickens humour and is probably a poor introduction to his oeuvre. I did read it again in 2016.
“The Pickwick Papers” (also known as “The Posthumous Papers of the Pickwick Club”) was the first of Dickens’ novels, it came out in a serialised form, the first installment of Pickwick sold about 500 copies while the last installment sold about 40,000 copies. The young Dickens was 24 at the time. This was the novel that propelled Dickens into the public spotlight.
It is a comic novel about the escapades of a club, the Pickwick Club, whose founder and perpetual president is one Samuel Pickwick. He and his fellow Pickwickians: Mr Nathaniel Winkle, Mr Augustus Snodgrass, and Mr Tracy Tupman travel from London to more remote parts of the country and report back to the club about their findings. There are wonderful details of various coaching inns of the time.
Pickwick enlists a servant, the cockney Sam Weller, who has a comic turn of phrase and is a source of idiosyncratic proverbs and advice.
The novel is less plot driven than many of Dickens’ later novels, and tends to meander from one story to the next. There is social commentary like descriptions of the Fleet debtor’s prison, where Pickwick finds himself incarcerated after a misunderstanding and some underhand practices by the legal firm of Messrs. Dodson and Fogg.
Dickens worked as a law clerk and his outrage over the inequities and incompetence of the system show up in this and later novels. Each character in The Pickwick Papers, as in many other Dickens novels, is drawn comically, often with exaggerated personality traits. Alfred Jingle, who joins the cast in chapter two, provides an aura of comic villainy, with his devious tricks repeatedly landing the Pickwickians into trouble.
Having read the first two Harry Potter novels, I was amused to see one of the places mentioned in the text named “Muggleton”. The twenty-ninth chapter, “The Story of the Goblins who stole a Sexton“, a Christmas story contains some of the themes Dickens’ more famous Christmas story, “a Christmas Carol“, written seven years later.
I have another Dickens’ novel “The Old Curiosity Shop“, ready for my next dip into Dickens’ prolific oeuvre.
Dickens was a showman and an entertainer, he tackled many social issues of his time, like child labour, but he did so with a lot of humour. “A Tale of Two Cities” lacks a lot of Dickens humour and is probably a poor introduction to his oeuvre. I did read it again in 2016.
“The Pickwick Papers” (also known as “The Posthumous Papers of the Pickwick Club”) was the first of Dickens’ novels, it came out in a serialised form, the first installment of Pickwick sold about 500 copies while the last installment sold about 40,000 copies. The young Dickens was 24 at the time. This was the novel that propelled Dickens into the public spotlight.
It is a comic novel about the escapades of a club, the Pickwick Club, whose founder and perpetual president is one Samuel Pickwick. He and his fellow Pickwickians: Mr Nathaniel Winkle, Mr Augustus Snodgrass, and Mr Tracy Tupman travel from London to more remote parts of the country and report back to the club about their findings. There are wonderful details of various coaching inns of the time.
Pickwick enlists a servant, the cockney Sam Weller, who has a comic turn of phrase and is a source of idiosyncratic proverbs and advice.
The novel is less plot driven than many of Dickens’ later novels, and tends to meander from one story to the next. There is social commentary like descriptions of the Fleet debtor’s prison, where Pickwick finds himself incarcerated after a misunderstanding and some underhand practices by the legal firm of Messrs. Dodson and Fogg.
Dickens worked as a law clerk and his outrage over the inequities and incompetence of the system show up in this and later novels. Each character in The Pickwick Papers, as in many other Dickens novels, is drawn comically, often with exaggerated personality traits. Alfred Jingle, who joins the cast in chapter two, provides an aura of comic villainy, with his devious tricks repeatedly landing the Pickwickians into trouble.
Having read the first two Harry Potter novels, I was amused to see one of the places mentioned in the text named “Muggleton”. The twenty-ninth chapter, “The Story of the Goblins who stole a Sexton“, a Christmas story contains some of the themes Dickens’ more famous Christmas story, “a Christmas Carol“, written seven years later.
I have another Dickens’ novel “The Old Curiosity Shop“, ready for my next dip into Dickens’ prolific oeuvre.
funny
lighthearted
medium-paced
Plot or Character Driven:
Character
Strong character development:
Yes
Loveable characters:
Yes
Diverse cast of characters:
Yes
Flaws of characters a main focus:
Yes
challenging
funny
lighthearted
slow-paced
Plot or Character Driven:
Character
Strong character development:
Yes
Loveable characters:
Complicated
Diverse cast of characters:
No
Flaws of characters a main focus:
Yes
Dickens, el maravilloso Dickens; con tan sólo 24 años describió la vida como ningún centenario con todo su camino recorrido podría hacerlo.
funny
lighthearted
slow-paced
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.
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.