The Pickwick Papers: Birth of a Genius

Hullo, lovelies.

It’s time for me to do something I’ve never done on this blog before: talk about Charles Dickens. Which, considering my pretentions as a card-carrying lit nerd and closet Anglophile, is a glaring omission to be remedied without delay.

I recently completed my umpteenth re-read of my favorite Dickens novel, The Pickwick Papers. This was my first time reading it since becoming an author in my own right, and knowing it was Dickens’ first novel brought a new dimension to my appreciation of it. It was surreal to realize that, in a way, Dickens once stood where I stood: wrestling his first book-length story into submission, beating his plot and characters into a recognizable shape. I could almost see his mind working as I turned the pages. And I found myself wanting to talk about how he did it.

For this post, my sources (besides the book itself) are G.K. Chesterton’s Charles Dickens: A Critical Study and Richard Russo’s excellent “Introduction” to the 2003 Modern Library edition of The Pickwick Papers. I definitely recommend both if you want to learn more.

All images used here are original 19th-century illustrations for The Pickwick Papers, borrowed from various internet sources–I’ve included links to each one.

Let’s dive into the world of Pickwick!

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A lot of folks I talk to, including those who love Dickens, have never read The Pickwick Papers, or, to give it its unabridged title, The Posthumous Papers of the Pickwick Club. While it was a smash hit on its publication in 1836-1837 and remained an influential part of British pop culture for generations to come, its fortunes have waned somewhat in the modern world. It’s no Tale of Two Cities or David Copperfield, begetting endless waves of film adaptations; it’s no Oliver Twist with a whole Broadway musical to its name, not to mention dozens of retellings and creative spinoffs. It didn’t even get a Muppet movie like The Christmas Carol. No, Pickwick is just Pickwick. And unfortunately, there seems to be a general impression that Pickwick is “not very good.” It was Dickens’ first book–he was still learning the craft–he made a lot of rookie mistakes–it’s weird and embarrassing and perhaps we should just sweep it under the rug.

That’s the thing about Pickwick. It can be weird, embarrassing, and downright bad at times. But what really fascinates me about The Pickwick Papers is… it was never supposed to be a novel.

In 1836, Charles Dickens was a young, unknown author trying to break into the wonderful world of fiction-writing after stints as a journalist and law clerk. He’d had modest success with a series of comic stories called Sketches by Boz. Mildly encouraged by this, the publishers Chapman & Hall hired him to write a similar series of comic sketches for an illustrated paper. They’d already booked a well-known artist to provide the “funny pictures” (think something akin to today’s comic strips), and figured they could trust this fellow Dickens to come up with some loosely serialized story to fill in the gaps. He ought to be able to handle that, right? Just barely? It’s not as if they were asking him to write a book. Lord, no. That would be ridiculous.

Famous last words, eh? Chapman & Hall left young Dickens alone for five minutes, and somehow, when they turned around again, this safe, tame, busy-work, “not-a-real-book” assignment had become a 700-page satire on the corrupt British legal system. Worse, people actually liked it! Readers were clamoring for more! A literary superstar had arrived. More importantly, one of Victorian England’s foremost social critics had found his voice.

How did he do it?

To explain this phenomenon, we need to begin at the beginning. As I’ve said, The Pickwick Papers started as a loosely serialized comedy. The story premise Dickens dutifully came up with to accompany Robert Seymour’s illustrations was the “Pickwick Club,” a band of four men traveling across England with a vague goal of collecting cultural and anthropological data for some future book they might publish. Travel journals were popular at the time, and so were amateur studies of folk culture, so it made sense that four gentlemen with no academic credentials could mosey about asking questions about “local customs” and jotting down the answers in their little notebooks. Thus, the Pickwick Club was born. The leader was Mr. Samuel Pickwick, a retired businessman. He was naive, and he wore glasses, and… yeah, that’s about it. His three loyal followers were Mr. Snodgrass (who was moody), Mr. Winkle (who was accident-prone), and Mr. Tupman (who was fat). These one-note caricatures stumbled through the first few episodes without distinction, until something strange happened. Dickens began to take them seriously.

The first sign of Dickens taking Mr. Pickwick seriously was giving him a real scene partner, a character expressly designed to be his counterpart and foil: Sam Weller. The moment Sam Weller sauntered onstage with his striped waistcoat and his inimitable Cockney accent was the moment this story came alive. Sam was an immediate hit with the serial audience, who grew steadily more invested with each installment, eager to see what young Mr. Weller would be up to next. Even today, reading the published novel, you can sense the electricity, the lightning spark of genius, as you turn the page to Chapter 10 and bump into Sam for the first time.

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Though hired as Mr. Pickwick’s manservant, Sam quickly asserted himself as his equal in every way that mattered. The Pickwick Papers now had two heroes, not one. Mr. Pickwick, like a sensible protagonist, didn’t fight Dickens on this arrangement, instead playing off his new partner with a gusto worthy of Jeeves and Wooster. Their chemistry was brilliant, their contrast exquisite.

“Sam,” said Mr. Pickwick, as Mr. Weller was following.

“Sir.”

“Stay here.”

Mr. Weller seemed uncertain.

“Stay here,” repeated Mr. Pickwick.

“Mayn’t I polish that ere Job off, in the front garden?” said Mr. Weller.

“Certainly not,” replied Mr. Pickwick.

“Mayn’t I kick him out o’ the gate, sir?” said Mr. Weller.

“Not on any account,” replied his master.

For the first time since his engagement, Mr. Weller looked, for a moment, discontented and unhappy. But his countenance immediately cleared up; for the wily Mr. Muzzle, by concealing himself behind the street door, and rushing violently out, at the right instant, contrived with great dexterity to overturn both Mr. Jingle and his attendant, down the flight of steps, into the American aloe tubs that stood beneath.

Yes, Sam could be witty where Pickwick was earnest, cynical where Pickwick was idealistic, street-smart where Pickwick was gullible, acutely aware of injustices Pickwick’s privilege had blinded him to… and yet absolutely, unerringly loyal to the old gentleman with a dogged protectiveness all the cLASS DYNAMICS in the world couldn’t quite delegitimize. Look, I get it, okay? I’m a 21st century woman with a master’s degree, I know this relationship is a overly rosy fictional portrayal of the power imbalance between the bourgeoisie and the working poor, blah blah blah. I don’t care. Not in this case, anyway. When Sam follows Mr. Pickwick into the Fleet Prison, I grin like an idiot every single time.

Oh yeah, that’s right!! Mr. Pickwick goes to jail in this book! Not exactly what you expected from a silly little slapstick comedy written in the 1830s, is it?

As I’ve said, you can sense when Dickens begins to take this story seriously. The first turning point is the introduction of Sam Weller. The second turning point is when Mr. Pickwick gets sued for breach of promise and lands in serious legal trouble.

This breach of promise suit stems from a comical incident in which Pickwick tries to communicate to Mrs. Bardell, his widowed landlady, that he plans to hire a manservant, and she thinks he’s proposing to her. Ha, ha, very funny… unless… (and this is where you can hear the gears in Dickens’ brain turning) a pair of predatory lawyers convinced Mrs. Bardell she had a legal case and could make herself rich by dragging Mr. Pickwick into court? What if Mr. Pickwick refused to settle the lawsuit and fought the case to the bitter end, knowing he had done nothing wrong and would only encourage the legal sharks by giving in? What if Mr. Pickwick lost a sham trial that exposed the corruption of the British court system, yet he still refused to pay the damages? What if–what if–he were actually imprisoned for this unjust debt, a practice very much alive and well in Britain in the 1830s?

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Now we’re cooking with gas, baby. Now we have tension, stakes, and a central theme: everything you need to write a novel. You know, that thing young Charles Dickens had definitely not been hired to write.

Rereading The Pickwick Papers as an adult, I was shocked by how brazenly political it is. Imprisonment for debt is wrong, and the laws that allow it need to be repealed, and Dickens will be damned if you don’t close the book knowing that. His sheltered hero walks into one of London’s most notorious prisons and is confronted with an army of starving, desperate people whose only crime is being poor. This isn’t a brief nightmare interlude, either. We spend six whole chapters in Fleet Prison. We see a man die there. And we know, too, that while Mr. Pickwick has the freedom to leave this hellish place whenever he chooses, if only he’ll humble himself by paying what he shouldn’t rightfully owe, the rest of the prisoners can’t. Mr. Pickwick has all the money he needs. These other victims of the law don’t. Society doesn’t even extend them the nominal courtesy of a chance to “earn” their freedom, by throwing themselves back into the rat race of 19th-century industrial capitalism. Prisoners are cut off from employment opportunities just as they’re cut off from everything else. They are, as Dickens puts it, quite literally buried alive.

When you remember Charles Dickens’ own father was thus “buried alive,” imprisoned for debt when Charles was only a child, the white-hot anger simmering beneath this entire Fleet plotline becomes even more powerful.

Mr. Pickwick’s choice to face imprisonment rather than compromise his principles, willingly subjecting himself to the same appalling conditions endured by the London poor, cements Sam’s respect for him in a way nothing else could have done. Which, in turn, motivates Sam to follow him to jail, despite all Mr. Pickwick can do to dissuade him. Guys… it’s so good. It’s just so good!!!

“I have felt from the first, Sam,” said Mr. Pickwick, with much solemnity, “that this is not the place to bring a young man to.”

“Nor an old ‘un neither, sir,” observed Mr. Weller.

“You’re quite right, Sam,” said Mr. Pickwick; “but old men may come here, through their own heedlessness and unsuspicion: and young men may be brought here by the selfishness of those they serve. It is better for those young men, in every point of view, that they should not remain here. Do you understand me, Sam?”

“Vy no, sir, I do NOT,” replied Mr. Weller, doggedly.

These scenes of Sam proving his loyalty have big “walking-into-Mordor” energy, and nothing will convince me Sam Gamgee in Lord of the Rings wasn’t inspired (at least in part) by Sam Weller. “Of course you are, Mr. Frodo! And I’m coming with you!” J.R.R. Tolkien may not have been a huge Dickens fan, and allegedly stated he didn’t care for Pickwick, but I’m not the first person to notice similarities between the two works. Which is only natural, since The Pickwick Papers was a beloved literary icon, its characters and imagery woven into the fabric of Victorian and Edwardian pop culture. Weller and Pickwick would have been as familiar to young Tolkien–born in 1891, remember–as Batman or Iron Man could be today. Even if Dickens’ influence on Lord of the Rings was subconscious, it’s unmistakably there. “I don’t like Pickwick,” the man said, christening his own personal fountain of homespun wisdom and undying devotion… “Sam.” Sure, John.

I’ve dwelt on the Fleet Prison storyline at length because I think it’s essential to appreciating Dickens’ burgeoning genius, his radical political consciousness. Yet I don’t want to give the impression the whole book takes place in such dark and dreary confinement. We spend six unforgettable chapters in jail, yes, but Pickwick is fifty-two chapters long. While the threat of Mr. Pickwick’s imprisonment ties the whole story together, we still have plenty of adventures on the way to the Fleet and plenty of adventures after. Dickens soon abandoned his initial premise of the Pickwick Club traveling for “research purposes” (TM), but he never abandoned the theme of travel. In a way, Pickwick feels like one long road trip. As a lover of road trips myself, I think that’s what first drew me to the story as a teenager, and what keeps me coming back to it years later. I can open the book at any point and join Mr. Pickwick and Mr. Weller on their never-ending quest for new scenery, new faces, and new experiences.

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Richard Russo comments in his “Introduction” on this delightful sense of frenetic motion pervading The Pickwick Papers, keeping boredom at bay for all seven hundred pages:

No reader can fail to notice the author’s astonishing energy. He not only creates characters by the dozens, he winds them up and turns them loose. They ride horses and hang off coaches. They pursue one another in the dead of night. They are discovered where they ought not to be, and they challenge one another to duels. They climb garden walls, get locked out of their rooms, get trapped in rooms from which they wish to escape. They eat (we hear about every meal in detail) and drink and blame their hangovers on the salmon, and they seem to rest only in the novel’s space breaks…. Their sheer numbers attest to the fertility of their creator’s imagination.

G.K. Chesterton’s Charles Dickens: A Critical Study has long been considered one of the most insightful analyses of Dickens’ work. In his chapter on The Pickwick Papers, Chesterton argues that Dickens’ true genius was his exploration of the overlooked: of character types whom literature and society had, in one way or another, passed by. Sam Weller is an obvious example of this, a working-class hero in an age which idolized the nobility and gentry. Surprisingly, Mr. Pickwick fits this category of “the overlooked” as well. Who is Mr. Pickwick, after all? He’s referred to as a gentleman, but he isn’t a gentleman in the traditional class sense. He is not a gentleman of leisure. He doesn’t live off the labor of the peasantry; he doesn’t own any land; he doesn’t even own a house. Mr. Pickwick is a retired businessman who made his money through trade and commerce. Mr. Pickwick sleeps in humble lodgings, travels in public stagecoaches, and stays at crowded, chaotic inns. Mr. Pickwick belongs strictly to the middle class, not the gentry. Look through the classic novelists of the early 1800s, your Walter Scotts or your Jane Austens, and you’ll be hard-pressed to find a hero who fits this profile. Eighteenth- and early nineteenth-century authors felt most comfortable sticking with protagonists who at least LIVED IN A HOUSE, rather than renting a plainly furnished room from a poor widow on an obscure street in London.

Remember how I said Mr. Pickwick started out as a stereotype? Naive and bumbling and narrow-minded, too dim to see through the tricks constantly being played on him? This was a stereotype of the middle class–the middle class as seen through the eyes of the upper class, the group largely responsible for shaping early British novels and their character archetypes. The middle class, the tradesmen and businessmen, weren’t supposed to be as smart as their “betters.” They weren’t supposed to be as interesting, sensitive, passionate, or adventurous; all the qualities that make a good hero. They were supposed to be dull and muddling and only interested in earning money. According to Chesterton, Dickens’ greatest revelation while writing Pickwick was his realization that he didn’t have to portray the middle or lower class as he had been primed to see them by his literary predecessors. Instead, he could show them as he had actually experienced them… as real people. As Chesterton so delightfully puts it, “having chosen a fat old man of the middle classes as a good thing of which to make a butt, he found that a fat old man of the middle classes is the very best thing of which to make a romantic adventurer.”

It is odd to recall to our minds the original plan… the author who was to be wholly occupied in playing practical jokes on his characters. He had chosen (or somebody else had chosen) that corpulent old simpleton [Pickwick] as a person peculiarly fitted to fall down trapdoors, to shoot over butter slides, to struggle with apple-pie beds, to be tipped out of carts and dipped into horse-ponds. But Dickens, and Dickens only, discovered as he went on how fitted the fat old man was to rescue ladies, to defy tyrants, to dance, to leap, to experiment with life, to be a deus ex machina and even a knight errant. Dickens made this discovery. Dickens went into the Pickwick Club to scoff, and Dickens remained to pray.

I honestly don’t know what I can say to top that, so I’ll leave you with this final thought. The Pickwick Papers changed British literature forever. If you read only one Dickens novel in your life, make it this one.

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What do you think of Dickens? Love him or hate him?

Let’s chat!