The Papers of the Pickwick Club.

  The Papers of the Pickwick Club were written in 1837.  The world of Pickwick Papers, however, is not simply the world of Dingley Dell and Eatanswill, neither is its total effect as disjointed as its loosely-constructed technique would perhaps imply. The novel is given shape both by a subtle development in the character of Pickwick himself and by the way in which its thematic concerns, most notably in the sequence of events involving Pickwick and the law, have the common element of an attack on inhumanity and selfishness. The affair with Mrs Bardell begins as a typically Pickwickian episode, but as Pickwick becomes more deeply involved with the legal process, described as an instrument for 'the torture and torment of his majesty's liege subjects' and 'the comfort and emolument' of its practitioners, there is an increasingly serious edge to the comedy. Ultimately, in the Fleet prison, Pickwick is brought face to face with misery and the effect is not compromised in any way. When the 'Chancery prisoner' dies of consumption, a note is introduced into the novel that its readers have been prepared for over a series of scenes but which its earliest numbers hardly anticipated. In his solicitor's office Pickwick reflects that 'When a man bleeds inwardly it is a dangerous thing for himself; but when he laughs inwardly, it bodes no good to other people' (ch. 31); the thought has an intensity that indicates the development of Pickwick himself from a myopic comic butt to a figure of wisdom and sensitivity. He himself may not be aware of the development, which was perhaps to some extent subconscious on the part of his creator, but it is consistent with a gradual process of unification that is apparent in Pickwick Papers as a whole. If we still remember the novel primarily in terms of its superb range of comic incident and character we cannot re-read it and remain unaffected by its social concern and above all by its ultimate affirmation of the pre-eminence of human charity.

   The narrative devices of Pickwick Papers, its loosely- connected sequence of events, its interpolated stories and its mildly mock-heroic set-pieces, are techniques that Dickens had learnt from his eighteenth-century predecessors; from them also he inherited the comic amplitude and boisterous humour that is typical of much of the book. Pickwick drinks himself to sleep in Mr Wardle's wheelbarrow and is deposited as a vagabond in the village pound, there to be pelted with rubbish; when Mr Winkle goes shooting, Mr Tupman 'saved the lives of innumerable small birds by receiving a portion of the charge in his left arm.' Pickwick himself comments on the source of much of the comedy: