The Pickwick Papers

• 1. Introduction

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  The Pickwick Papers arrived in British readers' hands not as a novel but as a commission to explain a set of comic drawings. Charles Dickens was 24 years old, working as a parliamentary reporter and roving journalist, when publisher Chapman and Hall came to him with an unusual request. They had a series of "cockney sporting plates" by illustrator Robert Seymour, depicting a fictional club whose hapless members suffered mishaps with guns and fishhooks in the English countryside. They needed someone to write descriptive text to stitch the pictures together. Dickens protested that he knew nothing of sport. He accepted the job anyway.

  What followed became one of the most unexpected publishing phenomena in the history of English literature. The book generated bootleg copies, theatrical spin-offs, joke books, and merchandise before Dickens had even finished writing it. A critic writing in The Atlantic would later argue that "literature" was simply not a big enough category for what Pickwick had become. The questions this story raises are worth sitting with: how does a commission to caption sporting cartoons turn into a cultural force that changes how stories are told and sold? And who, in the end, actually invented it?

• 2. The Commission and Its Complications

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  Robert Seymour had already drawn the first plates when Dickens took the job. The original plan gave the pictures primacy: Seymour's illustrations were to come first, and the writer would follow behind, explaining what the images showed. Dickens dismantled that arrangement almost immediately. He led each instalment with his own prose, and Seymour found himself illustrating scenes that had already been written for him. The words had become the main event; the pictures were secondary.

  Seymour completed work on the first two instalments and then died by suicide. His place was taken briefly by Robert William Buss, whose work Dickens rejected. The remaining instalments, the bulk of the novel, were illustrated by Phiz, the pen name of Hablot Knight Browne. Phiz went on to illustrate most of Dickens's subsequent novels, making this a partnership that outlasted its origins by many years.

  After Dickens died, Seymour's widow entered the dispute over who had really conceived the project. Her claim was that the original idea belonged to her husband. Dickens had addressed this question directly in his preface to the 1867 edition of the novel, stating in his own words: "Mr Seymour never originated or suggested an incident, a phrase, or a word, to be found in the book." The argument has never been fully settled. Stephen Jarvis's 2014 novel Death and Mr Pickwick revisits the controversy at length, and its narrator concludes that the accepted account given by Dickens and publisher Edward Chapman was untrue.

• 3. Publishing as Performance

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  Nineteen issues over twenty months is how The Pickwick Papers reached its readers. Each instalment was typically released on the last day of its given month, beginning in April 1836 and closing in November 1837. The final double-length issue cost two shillings. One gap appeared in the sequence: there was no issue in June 1837 because Dickens had missed his deadline while in mourning for his sister-in-law Mary Hogarth.

  The format itself was new enough to need proof. Serialised fiction had existed before, but The Pickwick Papers turned the monthly instalment into a popular habit. It popularised the cliffhanger ending as a structural device, training readers to wait and want more. That combination of affordability, regularity, and suspense opened fiction to audiences who might never have purchased a whole volume at once.

  The cultural runoff from the novel was remarkable even before the final instalment appeared. Bootleg copies circulated. Theatrical performances sprang up. Joke books collecting the sayings of the character Sam Weller were sold. Merchandise tied to a serialised novel was not a concept that had existed before Pickwick made it one. Nicholas Dames, writing in The Atlantic, put it plainly: "'Literature' is not a big enough category for Pickwick. It defined its own, a new one that we have learned to call 'entertainment'."

• 4. The Characters Who Stuck

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  Samuel Pickwick, the novel's protagonist, is described in the text as a round-faced, clean-shaven, portly gentleman who wears spectacles. He is the founder and perpetual president of the Pickwick Club, a kind and wealthy old gentleman who grows bored with ordinary club activities and proposes that he and three companions travel the English countryside reporting on what they encounter. The misadventures that follow are more comic than heroic: his companion Nathaniel Winkle presents himself as a sportsman but proves dangerously inept with horses and guns; Augustus Snodgrass calls himself a poet though none of his poetry appears anywhere in the book; Tracy Tupman is middle-aged and portly but fancies himself a romantic figure.

  The character who generated the most independent cultural life was Sam Weller, Pickwick's valet, whose idiosyncratic proverbs and advice gave Dickens material for an entire parallel genre of joke books. His father Tony, a loquacious coachman, and the disreputable actor Alfred Jingle, who speaks in a distinctively fragmented and extravagant style, rounded out the gallery that readers recognised and imitated.

  One supporting character left a mark beyond fiction. Joe, called "the fat boy", consumes enormous quantities of food and falls asleep in any situation at any time of day. His condition became the origin of the medical term Pickwickian syndrome, now formally identified as obesity hypoventilation syndrome, a condition that often accompanies obstructive sleep apnea. A comic grotesque from a serialised Victorian novel gave modern medicine one of its diagnostic names.

• 5. Bardell v. Pickwick

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  The legal case at the heart of the novel begins with a misunderstanding. Mr Pickwick's widowed landlady, Mrs Martha Bardell, interprets his behaviour as a marriage proposal and brings a lawsuit against him for breach of promise. The case of Bardell v. Pickwick is among the most famous fictional legal proceedings in English literature.

  The counsel for prosecution is Serjeant Buzfuz, described as fat and red-faced, a gifted rhetorician who uses his mastery of courtroom theatrics to construct an apparently damning case from almost no evidence. Dickens was drawing on his years as a parliamentary reporter; he understood how performance and procedure could overwhelm the truth of a matter. The satire is direct: the legal system here is a machine for producing outcomes regardless of innocence.

  Both Pickwick and Mrs Bardell end up in the Fleet Prison for debt. The resolution is equally pointed: the only way Pickwick can relieve Mrs Bardell's suffering is by paying her costs in the case brought against himself, which simultaneously secures his own release. The novel situates the action in 1827-28, though Dickens wove in material from his own present: critics have noted that the novel satirizes the case of George Norton suing Lord Melbourne, which actually occurred in 1836.

• 6. Clubs, Translations, Adaptations

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  Real clubs formed in the name of the fictional one. As early as December 1836, before the novel had even finished publication, a Pickwick Club was meeting in the East of London. Another gathered at the Sun Tavern in Long Acre. Dickens wrote to the secretary of that club in 1838 expressing his wish to attend a dinner. He had written to William Howison in Edinburgh the previous year about a Scottish club, offering encouragement and signing off with a message about the character he had created: "Mr. Pickwick's heart is among you always."

  The Pickwick Bicycle Club of London was established in 1870, the year of Charles Dickens's death. It operates today, and its rules still require each member to adopt the name of a male character from the novel. The Dickens Pickwick Club was founded in 1976 by Cedric Dickens, the author's great-grandson.

  Translations followed quickly. A French version by Eugenie Niboyet appeared in 1838 under the title Le Club des Pickwistes, roman comique. In 1868, Benito Perez Galdos, who is sometimes described as the Spanish equivalent of Dickens, published a Spanish translation, Aventuras de Pickwick.

  Adaptations arrived before the ink was dry. A theatrical version with songs by W.T. Moncrieff, entitled Samuel Weller, or, The Pickwickians, appeared in 1837. A stage musical by Sir Francis Burnand and Edward Solomon premiered at the Comedy Theatre on the 7th of February 1889. The most successful stage musical, simply titled Pickwick, by Cyril Ornadel, Wolf Mankowitz, and Leslie Bricusse, premiered in Manchester in 1963 with Harry Secombe in the title role and Roy Castle as Sam Weller. It ran for 694 performances in London before failing on Broadway in 1965. The 1969 BBC television film of that production featured the song If I Ruled the World, which became a hit for Secombe and for other singers including Tony Bennett and Sammy Davis Jr.

  On the 13th of November 1936, less than two weeks after the BBC began regularly scheduled television broadcasts, the British Music Drama Opera Company presented what was billed as the world's first televised opera: Pickwick by Albert Coates, directed by Vladimir Rosing. Orson Welles adapted the novel for his Mercury Theater on the Air radio broadcast on the 20th of November 1938.