Book Review: Charles Dickens 4 - "Nicholas Nickleby"

A woodcut engraving of Dickens in 1838 

Charles Dickens still had about a dozen monthly instalments left to write of Oliver Twist when he began work on Nicholas Nickleby in February, 1838. He was twenty-five years old and riding the crest of a wave. This new book - his fourth - would be his third novel. It proved to be hugely successful and confirmed his status as the most popular novelist of his generation. The first issue of his Pickwick Papers, published two years previously, had consisted of just 400 copies. Nicholas Nickleby sold almost 50,000 copies on the very first day of its publication (April 1st., 1838).

Dickens had signed a contract with his publisher, Chapman & Hall, to write the new novel back in November, 1837 – so it took him several months to decide on a subject, a theme and a style for the new work. His general idea was to combine the best elements of Pickwick Papers and Oliver Twist, but also to add something new. He wanted some of the humour and picaresque adventure found in Pickwick Papers; but he also intended to provide more of the hard-hitting social satire he’d used in Oliver Twist. His vision extended even further than that - he planned to focus these disparate elements around a plotline that would become essentially his first romance. The novel would tell the story of young Nicholas Nickleby, an aspiring young gentleman, much like himself, struggling against the vicissitudes of the world.

Cover wrapper for the new novel

Like most of his novels, Nicholas Nickleby was written in 20 monthly instalments. Each issue consisted of 32 pages of text and two illustrations done by Hablot Browne (“Phiz”). They cost one shilling. The first issue was published in March 1838; the final instalment (a double-issue priced at two shillings) came out in September, 1839. So, like the ten-month period in 1837, when Dickens was writing both an instalment of Pickwick Papers and Oliver Twist each month, from April 1838 to April 1839 Dickens was writing Oliver Twist and Nicholas Nickleby simultaneously. He seemed to thrive on the pressure of meeting constant deadlines.

The initial idea that fired up Dickens’s imagination was to write a polemical satire - in fictional form - of the so-called “Yorkshire schools”. Following the success of Oliver Twist in bringing the issue of child abuse in parish workhouses to the general public’s attention, Dickens decided to court public opinion again – this time in regard to certain disreputable boarding schools in Yorkshire which were used as dumping grounds for illegitimate and unwanted children. Really, these schools were little more than juvenile prisons. The children were abandoned to horrible situations – suffering near-starvation diets and deplorable health conditions. Dickens had heard and read about these establishments in his childhood and they had been in the news again recently. He decided to investigate. He took his illustrator, Hablot Browne, up North with him and visited the Bowes Academy in Greta Bridge – near Barnard Castle in West Yorkshire. The place was run by a certain William Shaw. His apparent cruelty became the model for the vicious and dishonest Wackford Squeers – the entrepreneurial headmaster of the fictional Dotheboys Hall. Dickens succeeded in his plan; thanks to the lurid description of Dotheboys Hall in his new book, the twenty-or-so Yorkshire boarding schools were gone within a generation, victims of an outraged public.

The "internal economy" of Dotheboys Hall: brimstone and treacle served by Mrs. Squeers

A new element in Dickens’s technique in this new book was to create characters with physical deformities – used to embody their moral depravity and then exaggerated for comic effect. These characterizations often tend towards the grotesque, but Dickens is not essentially providing realistic portraits; the characters’ deformities are worn much like a mask – they represent an attitude, or a state of mind. The one-eyed Wackford Squeers, for example, is blind to his own wickedness. His obnoxious son is obese – and busy tormenting the half-starved waifs in his father’s “school”. But it’s not just the evil characters that are physically deformed – some of the good ones are too: Smike, the pathetic youth who has been oppressed by Squeers for many years in Dotheboys Hall, is lame and half-witted. Newman Noggs, Ralph Nickleby’s servant/assistant, is a bundle of deformities. The physical weaknesses here serve as a sharp contrast to their inner benevolence – emphasizing the cruelty they have suffered. 

Nicholas Nickleby is an uneasy blend of satire, picaresque comedy, romance and melodrama. As such, Dickens continues to exploit techniques and situations that had proved successful in his previous books. And the public seemed to love these epic stories in which Dickens mixes genres and alternates styles. After the early polemic against the Yorkshire schools, Dickens puts Nicholas on the road to Portsmouth, where he encounters a travelling acting-troupe under the jovial leadership of Vincent Crummles. This long episode, in which the young Nickleby takes on the role of playwright and leading-actor [Dickens had toyed with the idea of the theatre as a vocation], is a comic interlude in a story that is primarily a romantic melodrama. The romance involves Nicholas’s struggle to vindicate his self-image as a young gentleman in search of love, career prospects, and a fortune. He works to save his “princess” (the lovely Madeline Bray) from a forced marriage to a despicable old money-lender. Nicholas also struggles against the wicked machinations of his main antagonist - his depraved uncle, Ralph Nickleby. His uncle works throughout the novel to thwart his nephew's plans and to ruin the lives of his widowed sister-in-law and her two children, Nicholas and Kate.  

Fanny Squeers tries to interest Nicholas

It’s the character of Ralph Nickleby that keeps the book alive, because mid-way through the book, Nicholas comes under the paternal care of the unbelievably benevolent Cheeryble brothers, who run a successful business in the city of London and shower love and largesse on whomever catches their fancy. There is no more financial struggle for Nicholas and, like Oliver Twist before it (where Oliver lands safe, mid-novel, in the bosom of the Maylie family), the plot falters and the book goes soft. In another similarity with the previous book - which stretched out a convoluted plot-line to explain the mystery of Oliver’s parentage - this novel also creates a mystery about the secret parentage of Smike, and the people who abandoned the child to the cruel care of the Squeers family.

In a melodrama there is scant little character development - things happen, coincidences occur. And the author gets busy announcing what has happened, telling us what the characters think and feel, and moving his heroes and villains through each plot-point, and on to the inevitable conclusion, with young couples pairing up and ensconcing themselves safely in their comfy homes at the happy conclusion.

What saves Nicholas Nickleby from being mere melodrama - as usual with Dickens - are some interesting and delightful characters. There is the foppish Mr. Mantalini, who is forever disappointing his practical and business-minded wife and blustering his way along with a stream of vapid endearments and alibis. There is the put-upon man-servant Newman Noggs, who seems weak and pathetic, but always turns up at key moments to save the day and thwart his evil employer. There is the vile Sir Mulberry Hawk, who engages in a long campaign of attempting to seduce Nicholas’s sister Kate - assisted by their uncle Ralph. And there is Ralph, himself – a relentlessly malevolent figure devoted to the pursuit of money and the exploitation of everyone within his sphere of influence. In some ways, the driving ambition of this character reveals unwittingly, perhaps, the inner disposition of his author – who wants us to identify him with the ardent and sensitive young Nicholas struggling to make his way in a corrupt world. But there is a lot of the relentless ambition and need for financial security in Ralph Nickleby’s character to be found in the secret world of Dickens’s troubled heart.

And, then, there is Mrs. Nickleby, Nicholas’s and Kate’s mother. She is a feckless woman and, at every key moment, comes to the wrong conclusion and makes a poor judgment about people. It is thought that there is a lot of Elizabeth Dickens, Charles Dickens’ mother, in this portrait of Mrs. Nickleby. She annoys us with her lack of insight and her gullibility at the hands of scoundrels. And she is forever rambling on about some memory from the past – and gets lost in a strange and tortuous string of associations, in which she always forgets what she is supposed to be remembering. But some of these long, rambling speeches of hers are droll and diverting – early examples, really, of stream-of-consciousness-thinking put into monologue form. 

In its day Nicholas Nickleby was immensely popular and consolidated Dickens’s hold on the public’s imagination and heart. If the book strikes us today as rather unshapely and overly-melodramatic, it still manages to compel us with its vigorous description, grotesque and comic characters, funny set-pieces, and drawn-out story-lines. And despite the transparencies seen in some of his techniques and stylistic flourishes, Dickens still draws you in, and leads you on, with the sheer exuberance of his imaginative power. But what is it that stays with you, once the book is back on the shelf? For me, it's those early chapters set in the Yorkshire school at Dotheboys Hall: Nicholas thrashing Wackford Squeers with his own cane and taking poor Smike to safety. He might veer too often towards pathos and sentiment, but Dickens truly knew how to touch the human heart and stir his readers’ sense of compassion.

Nicholas thrashes Squeers with his own school cane

[2012 is the bicentenary of the birth of Charles Dickens. Lots of special events and activities are planned in England this year. Back in 2009, my good friend Tony Grant (in Wimbledon, UK) and I did a pilgrimage to three key Charles Dickens destinations - his birthplace in Portsmouth (the house is a Museum), the house he lived at on Doughty Street in London (now the chief Dickens' museum), and the town he lived in as a child on the north-coast of Kent (Rochester). 

These visits inspired me to begin reading through all Dickens's novels. By last summer I had done six, but stalled in the middle of Dombey and Son. I thought what I could do to mark this special year of Charles Dickens was to start again, read through all 14 of his novels inside the year, and blog about them. I'll give it a try, anyway! So this is the fourth of a series.]



Next: The Old Curiosity Shop

[Resources used: "Introduction" to Nicholas Nickleby by John Carey (1993); Dickens by Peter Ackroyd (1990) ]

Book Review: Charles Dickens 3 - "Oliver Twist"

Dickens in 1837 - a portrait by Samuel Lawrence

1836 had been an incredibly busy year for Charles Dickens.  In February the publisher John Macrone had released a two-volume collection of his Sketches by Boz. A second series was published in one-volume that August. Macrone was also waiting patiently for Dickens to get to work on a promised three-volume novel called “Gabriel Vardon” (which would emerge four years later as the re-titled Barnaby Rudge). By the autumn of 1836, Chapman & Hall had published eight monthly instalments of The Pickwick Papers, but there was still another year to go before its run was complete. Dickens had written a play, The Strange Gentleman, based on one of his sketches; it was running at the St. James Theatre. And he was hard at work writing the libretto for an operetta. In the midst of all of this, Dickens was approached by a third publisher, Richard Bentley, with a proposal to edit a new monthly magazine, to be called Bentley’s Miscellany. Amazingly, the overstretched author agreed to take on yet another project - not just writing, but editing a magazine. He considered himself now truly committed to a literary career,  and ready - finally - to give up his post as journalist at The Morning Chronicle.

In addition to editing the work of the other contributors to the magazine, Dickens would also write a piece of fiction for each instalment. And he would get pride of place, of course – the first piece in each issue. For the first edition of Bentley’s Miscellany - published in January 1837 - Dickens could only manage a farcical tale in the style of his Boz sketches. But then in mid-January, he informed Bentley that he’d hit upon a great idea for a novel. It would be a polemical story aimed at satirising the worst effects of the New Poor Law – a series of measures which had been introduced back in 1834, but whose social repercussions were only now starting to reveal themselves. In the planned novel, Oliver Twist, Dickens proposed to portray the harsh results of the new law by focusing on the life of an infant born in a parochial workhouse.

The first two chapters of Oliver Twist appeared in Bentley’s Miscellany in February 1837, accompanied by George Cruikshank’s steel etching showing “Oliver asking for more”. Dickens had trouble, at first, with the new format. The first instalment was too short. But he soon had the work under control. The problem was that for the first time ever a major novelist was writing and publishing two different novels simultaneously in monthly instalments. And the two novels were not only of a very different style and theme, they were also written to different lengths. By February 1838, The Pickwick Papers was into its twelfth issue (Chapters 32-33). There were seven instalments to come. So, for seven months, Dickens would begin the month writing two chapters of Oliver Twist in 9,000 words; and then switch to an instalment of The Pickwick Papers which was twice as long - 19,000 words. He would write up to the last week of the month, when both novels would be quickly published in the last few days of the month. He would start the month deep in lurid melodrama, and finish with the satiric good-humour of picaresque adventure. And he managed to juggle these opposite assignments with ease. Ideas poured out of him: incidents, characters, and plot-lines. He was digging deep into his imagination.

But suddenly he was thrown off course. On May 7, Mary Hogarth, his wife Catherine’s younger sister, who was living with the family in their new home on Doughty Street, suddenly took ill one evening after they had returned from the theatre. Mary's condition declined rapidly overnight, and she died in Dickens’ arms the next day. He was devastated. She had assumed a special importance in his life. He was thrown into an extended period of grief – revealing later that he dreamed about her every night for nine months! After the funeral, he and Catherine took a two-week country retreat in Hampstead. And, for the first and only time in his writing life - a 34-year career of fourteen novels written in monthly instalments - he missed a deadline. In June there was no new issue for either The Pickwick Papers or Oliver Twist. He was back into the swing of things in July, taking up again the story of Fagin and his gang (Chapter 9); but the tone and focus of Oliver Twist would change significantly. 

The sub-title Dickens gave to Oliver Twist was “the Parish Boy’s Progress”.  As such, it was clearly intended to provoke comparisons with both John Bunyan’s The Pilgrim’s Progress - an allegorical tale of Christian, the protagonist, and his spiritual tribulations in search of the Celestial City - and two William Hogarth moralizing picture-books - A Harlot’s Progress and A Rake’s Progress, which depicted in just a handful of engravings the physical and moral decline of its subjects into sin and debauchery. So what would Oliver’s tale amount to – an uplifting account of spiritual survival, or a depressing slide into depravity?

Oliver Twist is likely the first novel in English which features a child as its central character. In doing this, Dickens was combining the roles of novelist and journalist. There had been recent news of an inquiry into the deaths of workhouse children, who had been “farmed out” into the care of women in private homes. Dickens presents Oliver as representative of these workhouse orphans. Oliver, too, is farmed out, and the treatment he receives from his guardian, Mrs. Mann, is not much better than that he had suffered at the workhouse. The first section of the novel (seven brief, but vivid, chapters) depicts the oppressive treatment Oliver suffers at a parochial workhouse. Dickens writes here with brutal realism, but the polemics are made more effective through the use of dramatic exaggeration and an often savage sarcasm.  Unlike many of his books, which tend toward the prolix, this one moves along briskly.  After famously asking for more food - not just for himself, but also for his fellow starving inmates - he is “sold” to the local undertaker. Again he suffers abuse. He runs away, and walks all the way to London. Arriving in the capital, exhausted and hungry, he is taken in hand by Jack Dawkins, the Artful Dodger, who brings him back to the squalid lair of Fagin, “the Respectable Old Gentleman” – who trains and controls a small team of children working as pickpockets in the London streets.

The opening chapters, focused on the workhouse, have Oliver serving as a tool for Dickens’ polemic. But once the scene shifts to the London underworld, Dickens’ imagination starts to invest the story of his title-character with elements of his own childhood experience. Throughout the novel, Oliver is a passive pawn in the hands of fate. In the workhouse, he merely suffers abuse and neglect. But in the hands of Fagin, he is in a much more dangerous situation. It is not just the threat to his physical survival that faces him now; it is the danger of social and moral degradation. There were perhaps only a very few people in Dickens’ immediate circle who knew how Dickens was drawing on his own childhood experience. When his father was consigned to the Marshalsea debtors’ prison - his mother and siblings would later join his father - Charles was sent to work at the Warren’s Blacking Warehouse. Dickens was left to fend for himself and he found the whole situation a great humiliation. There was a friendly young man at Warren’s, named Bob Fagin, who took Charles under his wing. But Dickens came to see this intervention as a kind of threat – in some sense, he thought Bob was encouraging him to accept his social degradation. And the figure of Fagin in Oliver Twist represents that same danger – he tries to entice Oliver to accept the twisted morals of this criminal gang. He attempts to seduce the boy into accepting life as a thief. Some of the author’s deepest anxieties are reflected in Oliver’s struggle to survive. His protagonist is portrayed as a boy with a deep instinct for human goodness and feeling. It always serves to protect him from the abuse of the uncaring and the machinations of the wicked.

Bill Sikes and his dog, Bulls Eye

And with the sudden death of Mary Hogarth, and the grief that followed, the focus of the book shifts again; it becomes less satirical and more personal. Once Oliver has been rescued from the clutches of Bill Sikes by the Maylie family, his story is pretty much complete. What Dickens gives us now is a kind of parable about the triumph of good over evil; innocence is vindicated in its struggle against moral corruption. Dickens seems to lose interest in the topical and polemical elements of the early section, and focuses instead on the domestic themes of home, childhood and early death. The character of Rose Maylie is introduced as an idealised portrait of the deceased Mary Hogarth - but in this fictional world of wish-fulfilment she survives a serious illness that brings her to the brink of death. And Dickens constructs a complicated - and rather tedious - mystery about the true identity of Oliver’s mother and her family. The concern here is to establish the fact that Oliver deserves his happy fate, because he is not really a waif; he is the child of middle-class parentage. 

Many contemporary critics of the book missed this social conservatism; they were shocked by the lurid depiction of the London underworld. By the 1840s, Dickens’ book was lumped in with the so-called “Newgate novels”, which included William Ainsworth’s Jack Sheppard and Edward Bulwer-Lytton’s Paul Clifford and Eugene Aram. These books were condemned. They were accused of depraving and corrupting their readers by glamorizing the lives of thieves and prostitutes. Dickens was indignant with this sort of criticism – especially the fierce attack of William Thackeray who ridiculed the genre in general, but Oliver Twist specifically. As Dickens points out, though, his criminal characters are not glamorized: Bill Sikes is an unrepentant thug, with no redeeming features; Fagin is sympathetic only in the gross exaggeration of his comic depiction; and Nancy regrets her life of crime, and takes action to save the innocent Oliver. Nonetheless, Dickens did revel to some extent in the melodramatic excess of some of this sordid detail. Famously, in later life, he would give public readings from his novels; and the description of Bill Sikes’ murder of Nancy was one of his favourite choices. It always left the audience emotionally drained, and Dickens physically exhausted.

Fagin awaits execution in Newgate Prison

The depiction of Fagin in Oliver Twist, unfortunately, is tainted by its anti-semitism – typical of its period. Not only does Dickens describe Fagin physically as a repulsive human being – almost bestial, but he refers over and over to this character as “the Jew”. It’s well known, of course, that the prejudice of the time denied Jews access to many areas of social and business life. Those Jewish entrepreneurs interested in business and money were excluded from most elements of finance, and were reduced to the role of money-lender, pawnbroker and usurer – or criminal activities like theft and the fencing of stolen property. The latter activities, of course, were Fagin’s modus operandi. Dickens spares no chance in depicting him as a loathsome individual. Eliza Davis wrote to Dickens to criticise his portrayal of Fagin. She argued that he "encouraged a vile prejudice against the despised Hebrew" - and that had done a great wrong to the Jewish people. At first Dickens reacted defensively to her letter, but he then halted a later edition of Oliver Twist, and changed the text for the parts of the book that had not yet been set - which is why Fagin is called "the Jew" 257 times in the first 38 chapters, but barely at all in the next 179 references to him – where he’s called simply Fagin.

Oliver Twist is one of Dickens’ most popular novels. Because it was published monthly in Bentley’s Miscellany, a magazine that featured a host of other contributors, he adopted the melodramatic, adventurous style typical of those sorts of compendia. Readers respond instinctively to the plight of the innocent young orphan struggling against a host of hypocritical, cruel adults – depicted with trenchant sarcasm and sly humour. It’s also one of his shortest novels – a plus for those daunted by the 800-page length of most of his discursive epics. And the characters of Oliver (the boy who dared ask for more), Mr. Bumble (the parochial beadle who uttered the immortal line: “If the law supposes that, then the law is a ass, a idiot!”), Fagin, Bill Sikes and Nancy have become some of the most-widely recognized fictional characters in the English language. Despite the didactic intention of the novel, Oliver Twist is a surprisingly poetic work. Dickens’ response to the traumatic death of Mary Hogarth gives much of the second-half of the book a dreamlike intensity: full of mystery, visions, and romance. Oliver emerges unscathed from the almost metaphysical struggle between Fagin’s world of seductive wickedness and the secure goodness found in the world of the Maylies and Mr. Brownlow. And if you don’t find it a most captivating read, I’ll eat my head.

Mr. Bumble, the Beadle: "The law is a ass, a idiot".

[2012 is the bicentenary of the birth of Charles Dickens. Lots of special events and activities are planned in England this year. Back in 2009, my good friend Tony Grant (in Wimbledon, UK) and I did a pilgrimage to three key Charles Dickens destinations - his birthplace in Portsmouth (the house is a Museum), the house he lived at on Doughty Street in London (now the chief Dickens' museum), and the town he lived in as a child on the north-coast of Kent (Rochester). 


These visits inspired me to begin reading through all Dickens's novels. By last summer I had done six, but stalled in the middle of Dombey and Son. I thought what I could do to mark this special year of Charles Dickens was to start again, read through all 14 of his novels inside the year, and blog about them. I'll give it a try, anyway! So this is the third of a series.]


Next - Nicholas Nickleby

Book Review: Charles Dickens 2 - "The Pickwick Papers"

Dickens (aged 27) - portrait by Daniel Maclise

Charles Dickens’ first book, Sketches by Boz, was published as a two-volume collection by John Macrone on February 8th, 1836. Two days later, the up-and-coming author received a visit at his Furnival’s Inn lodgings by William Hall, one-half of the London publishing house of Chapman & Hall. He had a book proposal to make to Dickens. Chapman & Hall were planning to publish a book of “cockney sporting plates”, featuring illustrations by Robert Seymour.

They needed a writer to provide a group of sporting stories to accompany Seymour’s sketches. Their concept for the book was an account of a group of like-minded sporting fellows called the “Nimrod Club”, traveling around the country, fishing and hunting, and sharing misadventures in the hinterland outside the capital. The book would be a sort of picture novel, with Dickens providing “letterpress” - extended captions for Seymour’s plates. Seymour was the experienced one; Dickens would definitely be the junior partner in the team. Although he wasn’t too excited by the idea – it was a familiar and rather tired concept – Dickens nevertheless seized the chance to participate in another book.

Chapman & Hall proposed monthly issues consisting of four illustrations by Seymour and one-and-a-half sheets of text. Dickens would be paid 9 guineas per sheet. A sheet was cut into 16 pages; so he would be writing 24 pages for each month’s instalment (12,000 words) – longer pieces than he’d ever tackled before. He began writing on the 18th of February. The writing came easily. The first instalment was published on March 31st - the full title being: The Posthumous Papers of the Pickwick Club - Containing a Faithful Record of the Perambulations, Perils, Travels, Adventures and Sporting Transactions of the Corresponding Members. Just 400 copies. It had green end papers - "wrappers". Each month’s issue was priced at one shilling. Dickens’ name still did not appear on the title page. “Edited by ‘Boz’”, read the credit. He was 24 years old.

First issue's title page - green wrappers

But the early days of this new enterprise were thrown into confusion by the sudden death of the artist, Seymour - who shot himself after the second issue. Robert Buss was brought in to take over as illustrator for the third instalment. Dickens persuaded the publishers to reduce the number of pictures from four to two, and to increase the text by half a sheet – from 24 pages to 32. He was now in full control: the artist was now illustrating the text, rather than the writer captioning the pictures. Buss didn’t work out, so Chapman & Hall hired Hablot Knight Browne, who took over for the fourth issue, and did the engravings for the rest of the book. He took on the pseudonym “Phiz” to match Dickens’ “Boz”. They worked well together, and Phiz would illustrate for Dickens over the next 23 years.

The original title of the work - The Posthumous Papers of the Pickwick Club - gives a sense of the intended tone. Dickens’ narrator was to adopt a kind of lofty, supercilious tone as he described the silly antics of this motley crew of middle-aged bachelors. It took a while for the book to take off; the early sections seem to wander aimlessly as the author struggles to find a settled tone, and a unifying theme (once he had abandoned the publisher’s initial premise for the book). In its own way, the novel is a nineteenth-century ‘road novel’. The Pickwick Club ambles around the countryside by coach – engaged in the sort of amusing exploits of a typical picaresque novel. In this regard, Dickens was paying homage to some of the favourite books of his youth – Smollett’s Roderick Random and Humphrey Clinker, and Henry Fielding’s Tom Jones. And, ultimately, it looks back to that early, seminal, picaresque masterpiece, Cervantes’ Don Quixote – especially in the relationship it draws between the innocent Pickwick and his practical valet, Sam Weller, who, by contrast, and despite his age, is wiser in the ways of the world. They parallel, of course, the friendship between the Don and his sidekick, Sancho Panza.

Sam Weller (right) and his father, Tony Weller

In fact, it was with the introduction of Pickwick’s cockney servant, Sam Weller- in the book’s fourth instalment (Chapter 10) - that the work really began to seize the imagination of the reading public. And this is perhaps one of the most interesting aspects of Dickens’ first novel – the way in which it was delivered to the public, and how that helped contribute to its success. Writing and publishing the book in monthly instalments had several beneficial effects: Dickens could respond almost immediately to the success or failure of individual plot lines, or characters, and adjust the narrative accordingly; he could add incidents and conversation that would hold topical interest; and he could generate future sales by adding elements of suspense to the conclusion of each monthly instalment. And the audience for these monthly issues was growing steadily. Literacy was expanding rapidly – especially amongst the middle-class. Working-class people, who were fascinated by an author who seemed to understand their lives and their concerns - and who loved characters like Sam Weller - could combine resources and share a monthly issue. They would sit around in extended family groups, as one of them read the latest issue to the rest. And advances in technology and transportation meant that these sorts of weekly and monthly publications from London could be dispersed rapidly across the country to an eager audience. The first instalment of The Pickwick Papers was a run of some 400 copies; by the time they got to the fifteenth, Chapman and Hall were printing 40,000 copies per month. And if you really want to know whether the book was successful, check the advertising; just like a modern magazine, these periodicals included paid advertising. By the ninth instalment, there were more pages of ads (39) than there were of text (31)! Dickens and his publishers had a phenomenon on their hands.

It’s evident fairly soon into the work, that The Pickwick Papers is a shapeless mess. He throws stuff into the book quite wantonly – whatever seems to suit his fancy and interest. The style and demeanour of the opening chapter (reflecting the publishers’ original idea for the book) is quickly abandoned. He jumps precipitously into the melodrama of a duel in only the second chapter. And he begins to insert now and then, quite artificially, melodramatic tales which interrupt the story and bear no relation at all to theme or plot-line. It’s like he’s not quite sure how to move away from the familiar world of his Sketches (and their Tales) and into the reasonably well-structured plot of a novel. And, really, this continues through the book, but it comes to matter much less as he proceeds - as he gains better control of the material and creates a deep human sympathy for his two central characters, Pickwick and Weller.

Mr. Samuel Pickwick addresses the Pickwick Club

Samuel Pickwick - names were always important to Dickens – is based loosely on a coaching proprietor from Bath, called Moses Pickwick. The central character of the book – the esteemed leader of his eponymous club – is merely humorous in the early sections. He is a retired businessman, with plenty of money to fund his adventures and to support the activities and travels of his club – it’s really just three others who stick with him as they venture out into the English countryside. As the book progresses, it takes on a more serious tone; and by the end, Pickwick morphs from a rather silly buffoon into the embodiment of benevolence. He suffers tribulations: the landlady at his digs in London, Mrs. Bardell, is under the mistaken impression that he has proposed marriage; and when the marriage fails to happen, she sues him for breach of contract – egged on by the unscrupulous London law firm of Dodson & Fogg. There is a marvellously satirical set-piece describing the ensuing court-case. Pickwick loses and he is ordered to pay costs and provide damages of £1,500 to Mrs. Bardell. He is incensed by the behaviour of the conniving lawyers and refuses to pay a penny – even though he is then incarcerated at Fleet Prison for three months. The seven chapters that tell the story of Pickwick’s experiences in Fleet (about three-quarters of the way through the book) shift the focus from humour and picaresque adventure to social realism. Dickens here is remembering the experiences of his own father, who was consigned to the Marshalsea debtors’ prison in 1824, when Charles was just 12 years old. He brings to bare here some biting satire about the legal system of the day – many elements of which he had a deep knowledge about. The whole episode adds some gravitas to the tone of the book as it winds towards its close.

Coach travel in the Regency era

The Pickwick Papers is set in the 1820s – the last decade before the arrival of the railways. The Pickwick Club moves around the country by coach; and the novel is of particular interest for its detailed portrait of the hospitality on offer by the coaching inns dotted around the country. Their days were numbered. They were there to provide fresh teams of horses for coaches making long-distance journeys, and to provide food and lodging for those breaking those long trips with overnight stays. As the Club moves from London to Rochester, to Bath, to Bristol, to Birmingham – we learn all manner of things about coach travel in this Regency era – before Victorian railways swept it all away. And every pause along the way of these coach journeys seemed to require a hearty meal and several rounds of potations.

The book provides a lot of colour and incident about the social activities of the day. We get an idyllic account of a snow-bound Christmas celebration at the Wardles’ Manor Farm in Dingley Dell. We read of a military tattoo at a bivouac. We are taken to Bath and learn how the gentry imbibe the health-restoring waters of the spa, and how they socialise of an evening at dinners and dancing Balls. We join picnics and shooting parties and hear of duels and card parties. And the book is full of merriment (a hallmark of Dickens) - lots of eating and drinking: parties, pub-visits, picnics, dinners, feasts, and toasts.

Mr. Samuel Pickwick, Esq.

This is a comic novel, with lots of funny set-pieces, What stays with you as you reach the end of your time with the Pickwick Club is a sense of well-being - that all is right with the world. Dickens throws up a contrast between the seamier side of life in his day (the Fleet Prison) and the idyllic world he longed to see. Many familiar themes are present here - themes that would appear again and again in the books to come: the struggle between law and justice (seen sometimes as comedy, sometimes as farce, sometimes, even, as tragedy), the essential value of family life, and the need to reform the legal system and social institutions. But the sunny side wins out; good feelings triumph; different social classes (represented by the middle-class Pickwick and the working-class Sam) live in mutual harmony and respect; fathers and sons become reconciled. Old-fashioned virtues of kindliness, friendship, honour and conviviality win out. The image of Mr. Pickwick remains: a middle-aged man full of youthful enthusiasm; a middle-class businessman outraged by social injustice; a generous patriarch bestowing his kind attention and concern on all those he loves and cares for. This was Dickens first novel and, despite some weaknesses in the structure and some flabbiness in the content, it remains a defining masterpiece. For many decades after its release, it was one of the most popular and best-loved books in the English language.

[2012 is the bicentenary of the birth of Charles Dickens. Lots of special events and activities are planned in England this year. Back in 2009, my good friend Tony Grant (in Wimbledon, UK) and I did a pilgrimage to three key Charles Dickens destinations - his birthplace in Portsmouth (the house is a Museum), the house he lived at on Doughty Street in London (now the chief Dickens' museum), and the town he lived in as a child on the north-coast of Kent (Rochester). 

These visits inspired me to begin reading through all Dickens's novels. By last summer I had done six, but stalled in the middle of Dombey and Son. I thought what I could do to mark this special year of Charles Dickens was to start again, read through all 14 of his novels inside the year, and blog about them. I'll give it a try, anyway! So this is the second of a series.]

Next: Oliver Twist