Book info

• Title The Pickwick Papers
• Author Charles Dickens
• Year 1837
• Genre Classic

Few first novels have created as much popular excitement as The Pickwick Papers - a comic masterpiece that catapulted its twenty-four-year-old author to immediate fame. Readers were captivated by the adventures of the poet Snodgrass, the lover Tupman, the sportsman Winkle and, above all, by that quintessentially English Quixote, Mr Pickwick, and his cockney Sancho Panza, Sam Weller. From the hallowed turf of Dingley Dell Cricket Club to the unholy fracas of the Eatanswill election, via the Fleet debtors' prison, characters and incidents spring to life from Dickens's pen, to form an enduringly popular work of ebullient humour and literary invention.

Thoughts

My travels through some of the more popular works of Charles Dickens have found him to be a bit hit and miss, but this was a definite hit. Although I was less interested in the stories that Pickwick and his friends were gathering, it was a good ruse to get them travelling around and finding themselves in scrapes.

At the start, there are more boys-will-be-boys style adventures where somehow Pickwick is kidnapped in a wheelbarrow, or Winkle suffers a near-fatal case of mistaken identity, but gradually the topics turn to love, marriage and all the fun and games that brings with it. I particularly enjoyed Pickwick’s stubborn-ness with regards to Ms Bardell, and his servant Sam’s subsequent loyalty.

It’s a nice, if slightly long, read, a journey with these chaps as they mature (although Pickwick is old enough to begin with!) and work out their place in life. Top stuff.

Rating: 4 / 5