Customer Reviews: Read 38 more reviews...
 Put this one in the pantheon October 23, 2008
1 out of 1 found this review helpful
This book proves that you don't need organization, theme, or even a plot to write one of the great books of English literature when you're one of the greatest novelists the world has ever known. There are many excellent reasons to read this book, chief among them the fact that even if you only read a few chapters you'll get more pleasure, humor, and great writing than if you read hundreds of pages from other authors.
The Pickwick Papers starts out as if the story comes from records taken down from the club itself. This allows Dickens as author to comment as a reader of someone else's chronicles, and accounts for much hilarity in the early goings. Since the book was written in monthly installments, originally intended as comic vignettes to accompany humorous sketches, there is little to connect the early chapters in terms of theme or even coherence.
This turns out to be irrelevant, because strung together each chapter becomes a crazy quilt of eccentric activities with implausibly funny situations that bring forth the basic 19th Century English difficulty of being respectable while still trying to have fun. Pickwick's problems, and those of his club members, revolve principally around courting women, getting into scrapes, and drinking...constant, incessant, over-the-top drinking. If The Pickwick Papers bears any resemblance at all to the real life of English gentlemen, they were simply never sober.
As the story evolves, Dickens chucks the device of relating these stories from the records of the club and gets down to earnest storytelling in a true narrative. One of the great characters of all time, Sam Weller, makes his appearance and literally carries the rest of the book on his humor, loyalty, philosophy, and pugilistics. If anyone is funnier than Sam, it's his father, Tony Weller.
The Pickwick Papers is also rife with the best names, names that match exactly the personality of the person. Dodson & Fogg the lawyers, Winkle the wimpy lover, Jingle the con man, Job Trotter his accomplice, Nathaniel Pipkin the parish clerk, Miss Nupkins the spoiled young lady, the Porkenhams, nemeses of the Nupkins, and of course Lady Tollimglower from the previous century. The names alone are a reader's feast.
The story takes Mr. Pickwick through a lawsuit for breach of promise to marry, time spent in debtor's prison, time spent helping his young friends get married, and more or less continuous bouts of drinking. By the end Dickens has revealed his warmth, optimism, and love of happy endings. The ending is as heartwarming as the corpus of the book is rollicking and funny.
Enjoy the humor, skim the longer story asides August 26, 2008
Not quite as good as Great Expectations (Oxford World's Classics), still a classic. Mr. Pickwick is the titular head of the Pickwick Club, who run around England getting into various humorous adventures, most involving women, and most of those involving widows.
Apparently at that time and place widows were considered avaricious vultures (or "wultures" as Sam Weller would say) ready to latch on to any available man with money. This might say more about the life expectancy of women in their child-bearing years than anything else, but it was enough of a problem for Dickens to make it the butt of basically a running joke throughout the book.
The characters, except for Sam, are not as memorable as Pip and Joe from Great Expectations, and the device Dickens frequently uses of inserting totally unrelated short dramatic stories (as spoken or written by one of the characters) into the main flow of the story is distracting at best and irritating at worst.
But still a classic.
Amazing July 19, 2008
1 out of 1 found this review helpful
How could Dickens have written this book--so wise, balanced, informed, witty, tender, loving, and intelligent--at such a young age? I'm glad to have finally gotten around to reading it.
 I liked it May 28, 2008
PP is a joy; in that it was written when CJHD was 24, it is also a wonder. I don't have much to add that has not been said. One sees the author grow as a writer as the book develops; by the end he is in top form. The plotting is thin, and the chapters episodic, while the details are vivid, and the language rich. By the end, the reader feels at home in early Victorian England. I enjoyed the spectrum of characters. The bad ones are able to be polished a little, and develop redeeming quality. The good ones sparkle, but have their shortcomings. There are also plenty in the scrum who are just ordinary, albeit singular, human beings. Recommended.
Dickens' Magic January 1, 2008
A friend of mine said that she loved the Harry Potter books because they returned her, as an adult, to the mesmerized delight in reading that she felt as a child.
That's what The Pickwick Papers did for me. Think of it as a sort of prose nineteenth century Decameron or Canterbury Tales. A group of friends, which make up the Pickwick Society, go traveling the English countryside. Along the way, they experience many adventures, and these adventures are punctuated by the telling of tales, sometimes fabulous, by various characters. And of course, seasoning it all is Dickens' unparalleled eye for the idiosyncratic and ear for dialect.
This is a charming and magical book. The fact that it was conjured by a man still in his early twenties makes it all the more astonishing.
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