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Pickwick Papers

Dickens’ first novel, 1837, it shows the evolution of a journalist writing vignettes into a social activist/novelist: the end of the jolly picaresque, beginning of homilitic lit

Folks

• Mr. Pickwick, a jolly old man who’s completely innocent—and whose innocence leads to awful rows and muddles. He is depthless and our Everyman.

• Sam Weller, truly the most interesting character, with tons of wit and resourcefulness

• Snodgrass, the poet

• Tupman, the great romantic

• Jingle, the swindler who keeps showing up to scam them out of money, seduce the female servants, etc. His telegraphic speech: “as quick as I can – crowds of people – full room – hard work – very” (209) takes out verbs from the English language, ruins syntax, shows the very minimum of communication. It breaks language up into nouns with adjectives: very capitalist because it turns language itself into a series of discrete objects, instead of seeing language as a system. Efficient and imagistic. (“Sarcophagus – fine place – old legends”). Turns people and places into series of objects, a collection: very positivist. He’s the capitalist who sees everything as an object, puts them into relation as objects (equalizing dash)

Themes

• Amorphous Middle Class
  • Mr. Pickwick and his friends are not nobility, not lower class, but instead from the growing middle class
  • They can go absolutely everywhere, almost going up to the highest classes (ie, the election) and almost to the lowest (debtor’s prison)
  • Middle class seen as undefined, amorphous
  • Shows middle class’ significance as the interpretant, the go-between, of British society
• Bath
  • The modern pastoral
• The Club
  • Begins as a scientific enterprise, but then degenerates into fun traveling
• Violence
  • Dickens “pulls up” when the scenes start to suggest violence
• Eating and Drinking
  • Associated with revelry
  • Related to archetypal origin of art: festivals
  • Emphasis on the cyclical: eat to stay alive
    • Comedies are about replication and continuation
• Comedy
  • No consequences: they always seem to come out of scrapes just fine
  • Comedy always approaches violence,, the grotesque
• Interiority v Weight
  • Pickwick is large, so is the book
  • But he has no interior, no depth or complexity
    • He is a kind of jolly Everyman, not specific, but could be our Neighbor
  • We learn quantitatively a lot, but not qualitatively
    • We don’t know his background or his thoughts
    • We don’t know enough about his finances or his source of wealth
    • We only know what happens to him
  • He’s a summation of events: an episodic surface
    • He’s a reaction, not a real creation
• Prison
  • Remarkably permeable: people, money, goods flow freely back and forth (servants, friends, family, prisoners, merchants)
    • Another micro-economy, like gambling in Mirth, for capitalism is inside these walls, not just outside it
    • No wonder, either, for they’re in jail because of debt!
  • About community, not isolation
• City to Suburbs
  • He ends up moving to suburbs to get outside the hubbub

Style

• As a transition text from 18th century picaresque novels (Fielding, Sterne) into Victorian novels
  • 18th c: truth claim; episodic form; outrageous, fun, out-of-the-ordinary events to real-ish seeming folks
    • Episodes: going to wedding, to election, to the country, a trial; trip to Bath; with lots of embedded narratives (people telling stories completely unrelated to the “story” itself, called “intercollated tales”)
    • At this time, “novel” not codified enough for this not to count as a novel: everything counts now
    • Historical Note: Dickens didn’t actually start out as a novelist: started as sketches to give a view of London
  • Victorian: leads into a real story with a moral
  • Preface:
    • “constant succession of characters and incidents; to paint them in as vivid colours as he could command; and to render them, at the same time, life-like and amusing.”
    • Says that plenty of the best English works only give you a bunch of events, without much more to offer, so he won’t be slow to admit that’s what his work is: “they claim to be nothing else”
      • Values: verisimilitude, entertainment, novelty
    • Says that he wanted each of the twenty “numbers” to be “complete in itself,” yet the whole thing “should form one tolerably harmonious whole, each leading to the other by a gentle and not unnatural process.” (60
      • Values: Progress and episodes
  • After all, writing of Pickwick’s end overlapped with writing Oliver’s beginning, so Oliver affected Pickwick
• The first serialized novel
• Episodic form, yet corrupted by the end: it turns into this moral tract about prison
  • You can see the happy-go-lucky text morph into something completely different
  • Far from having unrelated anecdotes, each of which is self-contained and hilarious, you start to have a consistent story that progresses and has a lesson to teach
• Intercalated tales
  • Everyone has a tale to tell: democratizing
  • Sensational, exciting: no real morals at all here
  • Later books will juxtapose tales that resonate on levels of theme and morals, but not here
  • They stop when Pickwick himself goes to jail: the ghastly becomes a real part of life, so no reason to import it in by adding a tale about it