What in the Dickens?

Inspired by my brother Dave's foray into The Old Curiosity Shop I decided to read some Dickens for the first time in probably 30 years or more. Although my high school reading of David Copperfield and Great Expectations were half-hearted efforts at best I decided to read one that I hadn't read before, and finding in Wikipedia that his first novel was The Pickwick Papers (the full title is "The Posthumous Papers of the Pickwick Club"), I decided to read that one. At the risk of making you feel less than accomplished like it did me, I found that he wrote it in 1836 when he was 24 years old. It, like Oliver Twist and a few other of his early novels, originally came out serialized in a monthly magazine.

I think that one of the reasons I like Dickens so much is that there is never any doubt about his characters. Their names often give a hint as to their basic character. Think of Ebenezer Scrooge, Tiny Tim, Fagin, and Pip. In Pickwick you have characters such as Joe "the fat boy," who can fall asleep anytime, anywhere, the beautiful Arabella Allen, the unscrupulous lawyer, Serjeant Buzfuz.

As in many of his works, in the Pickwick Papers, Dickens weaves some very entertaining story lines and plots with an obvious condemnation of aspects of life in England, and especially in London. You can tell by reading just about any of his books that he held a healthy disrespect for lawyers (sorry Dave). His detailed description of the English debtors prison system in this book made me wonder if he had ever spent any time at "The Fleet" himself. In early 19th century London, if you couldn't pay your bills, they threw you into prison until you could pay them, or until someone else paid them for you. If your family had nowhere else to go, they went to prison with you, kids and all. And, after I finished the book, I looked up Dicken's biography in Google and found that, indeed, his father had spent time in debtor's prison.

Samuel Pickwick is a very likeable character. He is a well-off, past-middle-age, Englishman who has never married and who decides to travel throughout England and write about his adventures with the other members of the Pickwick Club. Along the way he hires Sam Weller as his manservant and the bond of loyalty and friendship that develop between the the naive, gentlemanly and innocent Pickwick and the down-to-earth, streetwise (and very funny) cockney, Weller, is reminiscent of Don Quixote and Sancho Panza.

I highly recommend the Pickwick Papers, and Dickens in general. If you ever wondered what life was like in pre-Victorian and Victorian England, good and bad, delightful and ugly, sublime and despicable, you'll get a good taste of both sides by reading Charles Dickens.

Thanks for the nudge Dave.

Scott