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tome15 's review for:
The Pickwick Papers
by Charles Dickens
Dickens, Charles. The Posthumous Papers of the Pickwick Club. Published serially 1836-37.
This is a bucket-list book for me that fills a longstanding hole in my education. I decided to read it a little like a reader might have encountered it in the 1830s—by the numbers, though I did not make myself wait a month to read each number. But pausing where Dickens’s original audience had to pause gave me a better idea of structure, such as it is, than I might have otherwise had. It is notoriously loosely planned—its young author inventing its form as he went along. It began as something like a graphic novel, captions for a series of pictures that told a story. But when the illustrator committed suicide, Dickens and his publishers reached a deal to increase the size of the installments and decrease the number of illustrations. The success of the 32-page number with two pictures set a pattern in publishing for years to come. Pickwick Papers never becomes a novel exactly, but it is prose fiction, and once it got rolling, it really caught on with its audience. It started out as a travel book, but it morphed into something like a picaresque sitcom. It gave Dickens a chance to practice the skills he would use his entire career—establishing a memorable character in a phrase or two, skewering the cruelties and absurdity of the law and the court system, and creating suspense, sentimentality and humor with equal facility, often in the same few pages. Characters stand out: Sam Weller with his “as the man said when” jokes; Mr. Pickwick with his middleclass kindness, stubbornness and occasional foolishness; and even, at the end, a couple of stock brokers wagering on whether a man whose investments look iffy will commit suicide in the next few days. They all stick in the mind. Pickwick changed the publishing industry. Dickens’s publishers found a way to publish and market the book that was perfectly suited to Dickens and the new mass audience he would build. This one is off my bucket list. If you haven’t read it, it should be on yours.
This is a bucket-list book for me that fills a longstanding hole in my education. I decided to read it a little like a reader might have encountered it in the 1830s—by the numbers, though I did not make myself wait a month to read each number. But pausing where Dickens’s original audience had to pause gave me a better idea of structure, such as it is, than I might have otherwise had. It is notoriously loosely planned—its young author inventing its form as he went along. It began as something like a graphic novel, captions for a series of pictures that told a story. But when the illustrator committed suicide, Dickens and his publishers reached a deal to increase the size of the installments and decrease the number of illustrations. The success of the 32-page number with two pictures set a pattern in publishing for years to come. Pickwick Papers never becomes a novel exactly, but it is prose fiction, and once it got rolling, it really caught on with its audience. It started out as a travel book, but it morphed into something like a picaresque sitcom. It gave Dickens a chance to practice the skills he would use his entire career—establishing a memorable character in a phrase or two, skewering the cruelties and absurdity of the law and the court system, and creating suspense, sentimentality and humor with equal facility, often in the same few pages. Characters stand out: Sam Weller with his “as the man said when” jokes; Mr. Pickwick with his middleclass kindness, stubbornness and occasional foolishness; and even, at the end, a couple of stock brokers wagering on whether a man whose investments look iffy will commit suicide in the next few days. They all stick in the mind. Pickwick changed the publishing industry. Dickens’s publishers found a way to publish and market the book that was perfectly suited to Dickens and the new mass audience he would build. This one is off my bucket list. If you haven’t read it, it should be on yours.