Why Did I Think Pickwick Wasn’t a Favorite?

Ten years ago, when I drew up my current ten-year Reading Plan, I decided that since I had read and reread all of Dickens’s novels, I could just stick with my favorites this time around. So I picked ten for the new schedule, one for each year: A Tale of Two Cities was there, of course, along with other obvious choices (obvious for me, anyway) like David Copperfield and Dombey and Son. The Pickwick Papers didn’t make that initial cut, but at some point I had a space on one ten-item list of miscellany and decided to throw Pickwick in. So I’m reading it now and wondering, How did I not think this was a favorite?

First of all, it's making me laugh out loud over and over. Its humor is silly, but I’m no snob. Mr. Winkle, for instance, brags about being a sportsman but scares all of his friends on their first hunt when he doesn’t know how to carry his gun without pointing it at parts of his friends or himself. That’s no highbrow joke; it’s the kind of humorous story one would tell about a family member again and again over the years. But I laugh at tried-and-true family jokes, and I laugh at this one. The humor in this first novel often reminds me that Dickens is firmly in the English comic tradition that spawned Monty Python; Mr. Jingle’s habit of stringing short phrases together without forming sentences, for instance, may have had a direct influence on Eric Idle’s “Say no more” character (Mr. Jingle lacks the bawdy inuendoes). I laugh at the Ministry of Silly Walks, and I laugh at Mr. Pickwick getting pushed in a wheelbarrow.

Then it’s so memorable. Before I started, I thought, “OK, this is the one where the hero is considered a great social scientist when he actually can’t tell a road sign from an ancient carving, where there’s a nice Christmas dinner, and where Pickwick goes to debtor’s prison.” That was about all I remembered at the moment. But after just a few pages, twenty more details and characters from the rest of the book came rushing to mind: the fat boy who says, “I wants to make your flesh creep”; Mr. Pickwick getting thrown over a wall and standing in the rain; Tony Weller spelling his name in court (trust me, it’s funny); and more. If I remember that much from it, I must have enjoyed it before.

In an old post on these pages called “Dombey Redux,” I list my favorite comic characters from the Dickens canon. At the end I say, “I know I’m forgetting someone obvious and important.” At last I can say that that obvious and important omission is Sam Weller. G. K. Chesterton says somewhere that Dickens became Dickens when he first put Sam Weller on a page. Sam’s most famous humorous trait is a form of speech known in the dictionary as a Wellerism, in which he says what he would naturally say and then claims his utterance as a quotation from someone in a different situation altogether. “Out vith it, as the father said to his child, when he swallowed a farden.” “That’s what I call a self-evident proposition, as the dog’s-meat man said, when the housemaid told him he warn’t a gentleman.” It doesn’t seem that the respectable Mr. Pickwick would hire such a volubly volatile servant, but to his credit and to our delight, he does. Like Holmes’s Dr. Watson, Sam is unexceptionally loyal and ready to lend a little muscle when a dangerous situation calls for it, and his sometimes embarrassing banter can usually be repressed with a quick, “Not now, Sam.”

Dickens hasn’t quite mastered his distinct art of naming characters yet. Mr. Winkle, Mr. Wardle, Mr. Jingle, and Mr. Trundle, all introduced in the first few chapters, offer a potentially confusing sameness barely broken by the arrival of Mrs. Bardell. But Pickwick is a great name, as are the names of Mrs. Bardell’s lawyers: Dodson and Fogg. Either of those names on its own would have far less than half the impact of the pair; together, the names of Dodson and Fogg give us a quintessentially Dickensian moniker for a law office.

But much of the mature Dickens is here, if in slightly less than polished form: the humor, the sentiment, the love for Christmas, and the pathos (more of that in a future post). One element that pervades Pickwick that doesn’t make much of a showing in later books is all the playful kissing between couples not married or even engaged. The frequency of kissing in Pickwick might be explained by the concurrence of Dickens’s marriage to Catherine Hogarth and the serial publication of the novel. Its relative absence in later books might be explained by the author’s grave nuptial disappointment.