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From, David Daiches, A Critical History of English Literature, v. 4: The Romantics to the present day, ch. 26
Page 4
Dickens began with a great sense of life and little sense of form, capturing the individual oddity, the extravagant moment, with remarkable skill, and then marking time, as it were, until he could introduce another such oddity and another such moment. Sketches by 'Boz' (1836) is lively journalism merely, but with the Pickwick Papers (issued in monthly parts in 1836 and 1837) we can see him feeling his way from humorous journalism to something more. The full title is significant: The Posthumous Papers of the Pickwick Club containing a Faithful Record o f the Perambulations, Perils, Travels, Adventures and Sporting Transactions o f the corresponding Members.This reminds us not only that the Pickwick Papers were originally planned as a series of sketches to accompany a set of sporting prints, but also of the picaresque tradition in which Dickens began his career as a novelist. Pickwick began as burlesque, but soon moved into a more substantial kind of picaresque comedy, where the interest lies not only in particular absurd incidents but also, and more significantly, in the way in which given characters react to new kinds of environment. Each of the characters soon develops his own moral, physical, and emotional qualities, and the interest is kept up by showing how these qualities reveal themselves in new and unexpected situations. The simplicity, benevolence, and harmless egotism of Mr. Pickwick are placed in ever more testing circumstances, and the benign character who sets out in order to observe the world which he thinks he understands is faced again and again by situations which affront all his assumptions, threaten his status as benevolent observer, and lead him in the end, after the most violent experience of the indifference and intractability of the world of other people, to retirement and the closed circle of his friends, followers, and dependents, on whom he can confidently turn his benevolent observation. But the interest does not lie merely in our watching the behavior of Mr. Pickwick and his friends as they react to different environments: the characters themselves are drawn with lively humor, and the individual traits of Alfred Jingle or Sam Weller are pleasing and amusing in their own right. Further, in taking his characters through various parts of England, Dickens is able to give us a sense of the early nineteenth-century social scene, a feeling of English town and country just before the Industrial Revolution changed its face so startlingly, in the last phase of the great coaching days before the railways put an end forever to that phase of English life. Everybody in the book travels, and traveling means coaches and horses and-perhaps most of all-inns and innvards. Inns are focal points, where characters meet, ways cross, and different kinds of conviviality can be illustrated. Moreover throughout Pickwick there runs a steady vein of incidental satire-of electioneering methods, in the famous Eatanswill election, or political journalism, in the two Eatanswill editors; of lawyers and the law; of social convention, and innumerable other phases of English life, caricatured with rich comic effect through such characters as Mrs. Leo Hunter, Mr. Nupkins, Dodson and Fog, and so many more. Burlesque, caricature, satire, comedy, the presentation of the English scene, the panoramic view of life-these different aspects of the book are never fully drawn together; they do not always rise out of each other but exist side by side, so that Pickwick remains episodic, a bedside book to be taken up and put down at any point, a picaresque novel which stops simply because the author can think of no more to say.
