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Page 5
The introduction of Sam Weller into the fourth number of Pickwick Papers (1836-37) launched the most popular literary career in the history of the language. Pickwick Papers became a publishing phenomenon, selling forty thousand copies of every issue. Published in twenty monthly installments, Pickwick took England by storm: Judges read it on the bench, doctors in the carriages between visiting patients, boys on the street. Carlyle tells Forster the story of a clergyman who, after consoling a sick person, was alarmed to hear the patient exclaim, upon the clergyman's leaving the sickroom, "Well, Thank God, Pickwick will be out in ten days anyway!" People named their pet animals after characters in the novel; there were Pickwick hats, cigars, and coats, and innumerable plays and sequels based on the original.
The Posthumous Papers of the Pickwick Club chronicle the amusing misadventures of Mr. Pickwick, a lovable innocent who seeks to discover the world with his youthful companions, parodies of the lover, the sportsman, and the poet. While the Papers begin as a hilarious romp parodying the eighteenth-century novels Dickens had pored over as a child, they eventually assume a shape rising to the mythic level of great literature. Pickwick's education, under the guidance of Sam Weller, his streetwise, Cockney manservant, leads him to the discovery of the world of shyster lawyers, guile, corruption, vice, and imprisonment. The comic exuberance of Pickwick dominates this dark underside, though, and the sheer energy and wonderful good humor of the Papers carries the sunny day.
