You need to sign in or sign up before continuing.
Take a photo of a barcode or cover
kingeditor 's review for:
The Pickwick Papers
by Charles Dickens
The Pickwick Papers was not written to be a novel, does not aspire to be a novel, and cannot be read as a novel. It is also not an anthology, a travelogue, or a fix-up—though it has elements of each. No, what it most resembles is a TV show.
Seriously. There’s even a Christmas special.
What I mean by this is that, instead of a plot, The Pickwick Papers has a series of episodes, which cover almost as many genres as there are pages. The main thread—the adventures of Mr. Pickwick and company through the English countryside—is a sort of pastoral comedy, but Dickens, drawing from Don Quixote and The Canterbury Tales, interpolates it incessantly with ghost stories, penny dreadfuls, swashbuckling yarns, contes cruels, and even a smattering of poetry.
This is not because the book is meandering or tangential. It is simply that, without an overarching narrative, there is no more reason for Dickens not to divagate from the Pickwickians than there is for him to work his pen elsewhere, for he abandons nothing in doing so. What we gain in return is a work that is highly funny (if not consistently so), beautifully written (if not quite up to Dickens’ best), and sometimes moving (if not for the reasons that it should be).
Still, no matter how witty and inventive it may be, The Pickwick Papers has nothing to bundle itself together. Unlike Don Quixote, which has unifying themes and recurring tropes, or The Canterbury Tales, which has a framing device and a panoramic perspective, the episodes of The Pickwick Papers have nothing in common, save for various running jokes and subplots.
But this is, after all, merely a debut. One of the greatest writers of the century had a long way to go before his oeuvre would evolve into the label of its own, “Dickensian,” and was only just beginning to cultivate its unmistakable elements—polluted cityscapes and pleasant countryside, corrupt lawyers and honest tradesmen, florid eloquence and glottal Cockney.
The Pickwick Papers, as Dickens in embryo, has all the shortcomings of prenatal development. Yet it is also Dickens in a wildly different form than anything else he would come to write, and that alone makes it worthy to imbibe.
Seriously. There’s even a Christmas special.
What I mean by this is that, instead of a plot, The Pickwick Papers has a series of episodes, which cover almost as many genres as there are pages. The main thread—the adventures of Mr. Pickwick and company through the English countryside—is a sort of pastoral comedy, but Dickens, drawing from Don Quixote and The Canterbury Tales, interpolates it incessantly with ghost stories, penny dreadfuls, swashbuckling yarns, contes cruels, and even a smattering of poetry.
This is not because the book is meandering or tangential. It is simply that, without an overarching narrative, there is no more reason for Dickens not to divagate from the Pickwickians than there is for him to work his pen elsewhere, for he abandons nothing in doing so. What we gain in return is a work that is highly funny (if not consistently so), beautifully written (if not quite up to Dickens’ best), and sometimes moving (if not for the reasons that it should be).
Still, no matter how witty and inventive it may be, The Pickwick Papers has nothing to bundle itself together. Unlike Don Quixote, which has unifying themes and recurring tropes, or The Canterbury Tales, which has a framing device and a panoramic perspective, the episodes of The Pickwick Papers have nothing in common, save for various running jokes and subplots.
But this is, after all, merely a debut. One of the greatest writers of the century had a long way to go before his oeuvre would evolve into the label of its own, “Dickensian,” and was only just beginning to cultivate its unmistakable elements—polluted cityscapes and pleasant countryside, corrupt lawyers and honest tradesmen, florid eloquence and glottal Cockney.
The Pickwick Papers, as Dickens in embryo, has all the shortcomings of prenatal development. Yet it is also Dickens in a wildly different form than anything else he would come to write, and that alone makes it worthy to imbibe.