If Dickens moved on to profounder
and better organized works, he never left behind him the qualities he
demonstrated in Pickwick. He never lost his touch for burlesque or for
satirical comedy, his feeling for the eccentric, his sense of the inn as a
symbolic as well as a literal crossing of the ways. And there is another quality
in this book which points forward to the later Dickens. In the latter part,
where Dickens brings Mr. Pickwick into the Fleet prison and turns him, perhaps
unwittingly, from a comic figure to a saintly character presiding over a house
of the wretched and persecuted, we get for the first time a glimpse of the
tremendous well of sentimental compassion which Dickens was always able to draw
on. How to reconcile this unphilosophic and sometimes almost hysterical view of
human suffering with his great gifts as an ironist was always a major problem
for Dickens, and the falling apart of Pickwick at the end-with the escape
of its hero from any touch of the comic spirit and the unconvincing conversion
of Mr. Jingle-is a symptom of a deep cleavage in the author's own mind and
attitude which was again and again to threaten the integrity of his novels.
