Question 1

Is The Pickwick Papers a novel or a collection of stories?

Accepted Answer

It is a novel in the loosest sense — it has recurring characters, a continuing frame narrative, and a loose overall shape (the innocent Pickwick is gradually educated in the realities of the world) — but it also contains several interpolated tales (short stories told by characters encountered along the way) that interrupt the main narrative and have no connection to it. This was a common convention of the picaresque tradition that Dickens inherited from Smollett and Fielding. The interpolated tales are generally the weakest parts of the novel; the frame narrative, particularly after Sam Weller joins the party, is among the finest comic writing in English.

Question 2

Who is Sam Weller, and why is he so important?

Accepted Answer

Sam Weller is Mr. Pickwick's manservant, who joins the party about a quarter of the way through the novel and immediately transforms it. Sam is a London working-class man — sharp, witty, loyal, and possessed of an inexhaustible supply of aphorisms ('Weller's Wellerisms') in which familiar observations are attributed to improbable sources ('As the vicar said to the bishop...'). Sam became the most popular character in the novel and the first fictional character to generate a genuine celebrity culture: 'Pickwick' merchandise, Sam Weller hats, Pickwick clubs, theatrical adaptations. His father Tony Weller (a coachman who enters the novel later) is nearly as funny. Together the Wellers represent the first time Dickens gave the English lower classes full comedic dignity — they are wiser, warmer, and more capable than almost any of the middle-class characters.

Question 3

Is the Fleet Prison episode the most serious in The Pickwick Papers?

Accepted Answer

Yes — the Fleet Prison episodes, in which Mr. Pickwick is imprisoned for contempt after refusing to pay damages in the Bardell lawsuit (a brilliant satire of legal venality), are the darkest sustained section of the novel and the point at which it most directly prefigures the later Dickens of Bleak House and Little Dorrit. The Fleet was a real debtors' prison that Dickens knew from his childhood (his father had been imprisoned in the Marshalsea, a similar institution), and the portrait of its conditions — the degradation, the economy of favors, the social stratification among prisoners — is based on direct observation. The Fleet episodes show that Pickwick is not simply a comic entertainment but an examination of the systematic cruelties of English society beneath its comedy.

Question 4

In what order should I read Dickens's novels?

Accepted Answer

There is no required order — all Dickens's novels are self-contained. The most common starting points are The Pickwick Papers (for the comedy) or Oliver Twist (for the social reform) for early Dickens, and Great Expectations or A Tale of Two Cities for the later work. David Copperfield, which Dickens called his 'favorite child,' is an excellent introduction to the full range of his abilities. The most admired of his mature novels are generally Bleak House, Little Dorrit, and Our Mutual Friend — ambitious, dark, and structurally complex works that reward patient reading. The shortest and most perfectly formed is probably Great Expectations. The most immediately entertaining is probably The Pickwick Papers itself.

The Pickwick Papers Reading Order

Complete Pickwick Papers Book List