A Halfway Point in Dickens' 'Pickwick Papers', and How I got There in the First Place

As someone who's just begun to rediscover Dickens and his work, reading Pickwick Papers has been an unbelievable joy. Making such a comment isn't something I can do lightly or without taking a pause: Can this book bring about so much joy? Indeed it can, and even a cynical boring bastard would say the same if left in a room with the book for more than ten minutes.

In my discovery of Dickens, I wonder why my collective years of his work has been mainly through British-made mini-series and adaptations? Well, it's far easier to watch film than to read. I'm awfully lucky that my mom read as much as she did, because it was passed on to my brother and I. I may have thought of Dickens in terms of A Christmas Carol, or the musical adaptation of Oliver Twist, but wasn't quite willing to go through the books. This in itself is surprising because I devoured far more difficult writers such as Dostoevsky and Tolstoy without a pause for breath.

I became reacquainted with Dickens under odd circumstances. After my strange 2-year interlude of living in London, and my subsequent and abrupt departure from that country, I was more or less stranded back in the US, despite having spent nearly all my adult life here. One way to keep in touch was Dickens. One of Boston's most beautiful assets is the Public Library on Boylston Street. In my first return job as a security guard on 3rd shift, I took some library loanings with me to pass the long nights away. One of those books was Dicken's Little Dorrit. Because so many things changed so rapidly in my new surroundings, Little Dorrit was left unfinished within a few readings, and my literary needs moved into different places.

Jump along with me through time to today, and now you will find me where this entry began, in the middle of Pickwick Papers. In the interim period, I have read The Old Curiosity Shop and finally finished Little Dorrit. Both of these books are extraordinary, vivid, hysterically funny and deeply tragic. I shall be considering these novels in subsequent posts, but for now, they serve as my springboard into the delights of Pickwick Papers.

Pickwick is a remarkably delightful creature, a 50-something determined bachelor with an eager scholar's view of the world, who is the president and founder of a London society of adventurers in early/mid nineteenth century England. What we soon find out is that Pickwick and his small band of friends tend to have adventures which are rather tame and comically insignifigant compared to actual adventurers. While other Britons of the period were chasing the source of the Nile, and traversing Antarctica, the Pickwickians attempt to ride horses (unsuccessfully), attempt to shoot game (unsuccessfully), attempt romantic affairs (unsuccessfully), and find themselves constantly at odds with the law.

Our co-hero (since there can be no other name for the wonders of this character) is Sam Weller, manservant to Pickwick who is the perfect compliment and contrast to Pickwick. Young, uneducated (but brilliant) Sam is a bright and thoughtful man who becomes Pickwick's right hand as they travel from one London suburb to the other, and it is Sam who most often knows when something is amiss. Sam speaks with an amazing accent, one which I cannot trace to a particular 'current' accent from London, but seems to be an old cockney, characterized by interesting features. He pronounces his W's as V's, and vice versa. This makes for some remarkable miscommunications, since his own surname, Weller, is pronounced as Veller by both himself and his father. Also aparent are the dropped initial consonants, as in the word woman, (rendered as ooman), and the contractions of words, such as wot'll (what will). True to form in so much of Dickens' work, the actual speech of characters reflects so much of their true meaning, intentions and thoughts. Sam never questions the questionable efforts by Pickwick to make good in the world, but simply takes Pickwick aside now and again to offer a different point of view; and Sam's view is always shrewder and more true-to-life than Pickwick's idealised fancies.

So far, Mr. Pickwick and friends have gotten themselves out of many scrapes, usually in situations that had begun as innocently as possible. Pickwick's primary concern at the moment is the outcome of his trial, as brought forth by his previous landlady. She had been led to believe (by a hysterical miscommunication) that Pickwick was in the manner of asking her to marry him. All the while, he'd actually just been mentioning to her that he'd hired a new servant (Sam), which would bring some relief to her. After realising later that Pickwick had never intended to marry her, she sues him for a false proposal of marriage. Pickwick has lost the case (no thanks to his bumbling friends Tumpan, Winkle and Snodgrass) and escapes the full 1,400 pound fine thanks to quick thinking by Sam during the witness examinations. During the trial, Dickens speaks of the problem with witnesses in a legal dispute:

Lawyers hold that there are two kinds of particularly bad witnesses: a reluctant witness, and a too-willing witness; it was Mr. Winkle's fate to figure in both characters.

Characteristic with all the Pickwickians, they are very human men, full of virtue, complexes, and an over-eagerness to be what they can't.

I smile broadly when thinking about Pickwick and the Pickwickians, and the further adventures they'll encounter over the next 400 pages of reading. I'm sure to be back at the blog to relish in the fun.