The Pickwick Papers.

My wife has long told me that I am afraid of long books. I think she’s right. Since college, I’ve only read a few books that were as long as 600 pages (not counting Harry Potter books – I’m just talking literature here), and I’ve been pretty selective about starting any book of more than around 400 pages. This does limit one’s options, especially in the realm of serious literature.

The flip side, however, is that I get great satisfaction from actually reading a book of that length. I’ve built reading long books up so much in my mind that completing one – especially doing so in a relatively short length of time – feels like a great achievement. As a result, I was very pleased to find Charles Dickens’ The Pickwick Papers to be a great read, and, with some help from a too-long travel day and a stomach virus, managed to knock it off in just two weeks.

The Pickwick Papers (#76 on the The Novel 100) was Dickens’ first novel and is unique in his canon as both a comedy and a picaresque novel, making it much more readable than that scourge of all of our high school years, Great Expectations. Pickwick follows the four members of the “Pickwick Club,” a sort of traveling social group of four men, led by the elder Samuel Pickwick, and his three followers. Like most picaresque novels, the book is structured around a series of stories, and was in fact sold in monthly installments as it was written, but the stories last longer and are more interconnected in Pickwick than in other classics of the genre, like The Adventures of Roderick Random. The central storyline, emblematic of Dickens’ later subject matter, is a lawsuit, allowing Dickens to satirize the justice system, crooked lawyers, and greedy people, but threaded through it are the romantic follies of his followers and his loyal servant, Samuel Weller, as well as the Pickwick Club’s run-ins with the fraudster Alfred Jingle.

The novel is a masterpiece of plot construction and comic invention. Dickens weaves the subplots together and deftly paces the stories to keep them fresh in the reader’s mind without revealing too much of any one subplot at once. Although the story relies heavily on coincidences – mostly characters running into each other – it was a common plot device of the time. And the wit in his prose is tremendous, from Dickens’ descriptions of some of his fringe characters (“his forehead was narrow, his face wide, his head large, and his nose all on one side, as if Nature, indignant with the propensities she observed in him in his birth, had given it an angry tweak which it had never recovered”) to satires large and small on all manner of persons.

If you’re up for the 840-page read, I recommend the 2004 Signet Classics edition (linked above) because of the presence of a short afterword by Jasper Fforde, who sings the novel’s praises and also mentions the fate of some of the landmark buildings mentioned in the book, a few of which survive to this day. And if you’re not up for it, I suggest that you hop over to Project Gutenberg, download the free e-text, and read Chapter 49. It’s a self-contained story that is just brilliantly delivered, and a good taste of what the best parts of The Pickwick Papers have to offer.

Next up: Darkness at Noon, by Arthur Koestler.

Comments

  1. I actually quite enjoyed reading Great Expectations in high school. It was when I decided that I should read A Tale of Two Cities that I found myself cursing Dickens. I just couldn’t get into that book at all.

  2. Come, Keith. Join us in the Club of Appreciators of Ridiculously Long and Ludicrously Complex Novels. Your application for entrance will be approved when a notary public verifies that you have completed Gravity’s Rainbow. And also, as a note to the previous commenter, if you cursed out Dickens over A Tale of Two Cities, you should probably be careful to never risk direct exposure to Bleak House. I enjoy Dickens, but that was a half-formed nightmare.

  3. I am also a Dickens fan, but Bleak House did me in, as well. Very tough read, and I put it down, at least for now – someday, I shall return. At least that’s what I tell myself. I can make a Lost reference here regarding Our Mutual Friend, but I won’t, as most readers probably won’t get it. I personally love A Tale of Two Cities, and Great Expectations, though. David Copperfield is my favorite of his books.

  4. This is just a pet peeve of mine, but in what way is something like Harry Potter not “literature?” The American Heritage definition of literature is “imaginative or creative writing, especially of recognized artistic value.” The fact that a 5th grader can read it and that it actually reads quickly doesn’t have anything to do with whether or not it’s literature.

    Anyway, sorry for the mini-rant; I know you didn’t mean it pejoratively here, but this point of view has trickled down from (what I consider) a deplorable intellectual snobbishness/elitism (for some reason, the people who seem to be the strongest proponents of this way of thought are the ones who always end up making all these lists of the “greatest” books). I do appreciate the review, as always.

  5. Ignatius J Reilly

    One of the many good lessons on life from Mr. Pickwick:

    “…replied Mr. Pickwick in the same tone, ‘Hush. Don’t ask any questions. It’s always best on these occasions to do what the mob do.’

    ‘But suppose there are two mobs?’ suggested Mr. Snodgrass.

    ‘Shout with the largest,’ replied Mr. Pickwick.

    Volumes could not have said more.”

    And one of my favorite lines from the star of the novel, Sam Weller.

    ” ‘Does this person want me, Sam?’ inquired Mr. Pickwick.

    “He wants you particklar; and no one else’ll do, as the Devil’s private secretary said ven he fetched avay Doctor Faustus,’ replied Mr. Weller.”

  6. For me, David Copperfield was the scourge of high school. I still haven’t been able to get through it. Darkness at Noon is fantastic, I’m sure you’ll enjoy it.

  7. I really need to go back and re-read (okay, okay… actually read and not skim) a lot of books from my high school days. I can honestly say, though, that I managed to avoid Great Expectations. Instead, I had the pleasure of plowing through Hard Times. If memory serves me correctly, it took me a while to get into it, but ultimately I enjoyed it quite a bit.

    My most fond memory of a book I read in high school, aside from Vonnegut’s “Cat’s Cradle,” is Emile Zola’s “Germinal.” Another rather bleak read, but I can’t recommend it highly enough.

  8. Oooo, Darkness at Noon is an underrated classic. He takes the contemporary dystopias of Orwell and Huxley and reminds the reader that they are not in some distant future.

    Koestler is an intriguing person all around. If you ever get a chance, look into his theories about the Khazar Jewish kingdom of early medieval times. They don’t hold up well to history or anthropology, but they make a great read in speculative history.