Title: The Pickwick Papers
Author: Charles Dickens
Type: Fiction
Page Count/Review Word Count: 801
Rating: 3/5
This is Dickens’ first book, and I’d have to say that you can tell.
I think that’s because of the way that throughout his early career, Dickens often wrote with newspaper serialisation in mind. That worked okay for some of his later attempts, but here at least you can definitely tell, and it doesn’t do the story any favours.
Don’t get me wrong, there are little glimmers of genius here and there, and we can definitely see the early signs of a formidable writer at the start of his career. And, as you’d expect with Dickens, it’s really the characterisation that shines the most. It turns out that human nature doesn’t really change, even when early Victorian society can be difficult to reconcile with the world we see around us today.
The problem is that the plot is lacklustre at the best of times, and most of my enjoyment came from the way that the characters interacted with each other, rather than anything that actually happened. That’s okay for some readers, but it’s not quite right for me. Although I will concede that it’s pretty typical for Dickens.
That now leaves me with a bit of a problem, because I have a standing rule of making sure that each of my reviews consists of the same number of words as the book has pages. The Pickwick Papers is a hecking chonker, a beast of a novel, and so that also means that I still have another 500 words to write. And very little to say.
Weirdly, I think that the story behind the Pickwick Papers is more interesting than the book itself. From what I understand, Dickens was asked to write a novel that strung together a bunch of different illustrations by a guy called Robert Seymour, and that was how the book was born. Dickens and Seymour later argued, which led to Seymour committing suicide by shooting himself in the head.
I wish I’d been able to see those illustrations, but I listened to this bad boy via audio book and so I was out of luck. But then, I only found out the backstory after I finished reading, and I probably wouldn’t have paid too much attention to them at the time if I hadn’t known their significance.
Speaking of the audio book, I used the free version from Librivox, and that always makes for an interesting experience. It essentially meant that the recordings were made by random people with a passion for making royalty-free and out-of-copyright books more accessible, with all of the variations in quality that you might expect because of it.
Okay, so the plot. Well, it basically revolves around protagonist Samuel Pickwick and the club he creates with a couple of his friends. The idea is that they’ll travel around the country, get involved in various shenanigans and then report back to the others upon their return.
The problem is that their shenanigans aren’t particularly interesting, and so that leaves the reader feeling as though they’re trapped in a room with someone who insists on showing them all of their holiday photos. I suppose one of the good things about social media is that in today’s day and age, the Pickwick Club wouldn’t exist. The members would just have set up a group chat somewhere instead.
But I’m rambling again, like Dickens did. I also think that even though this book isn’t the best, it served an important purpose. It’s essentially the bridge between Sketches by Boz and Dickens’ later work, and I find it quite frankly amazing that the same guy that wrote The Pickwick Papers would then come out with Oliver Twist as his next book. That’s crazy.
They say that every writer’s first book isn’t worth publishing, and I think that’s what happened here. I wouldn’t go so far as to say that this one shouldn’t have been published, because we might not have had the Dickens we know and love without it. If nothing else, I can appreciate how this book would be of interest to you as a Dickens reader even if you didn’t like it, purely because of what it represents.
Would I read it again? I doubt it, although I’ll never say never. I also wouldn’t recommend it, unless you’re already a Dickens fan and you’re determined to read everything that he ever did. It’s a shame, really, because the title has always been evocative to me and I’d consider this to be one of his better known works. It makes me worry about how I’m going to find some of his other, more obscure works.
But I guess that’s a problem for another day, right?
