Charles Dickens meets Stan Lee

Back in March, at the end of Pickwick Week, I promised one last post on Dickens and Pickwick. It's taken me nearly three months, but I'm here today to make good.

Having come to Pickwick backwards, as it were, with almost all the rest of Dickens's novels under my belt, what struck me most was its quality of vibrant, youthful invention. The early numbers betray their origins as sketches commissioned to accompany illustrations: they are little more than fleshed-out versions of the "Sketches by Boz" that Dickens had been turning out for the Morning Chronicle, the loose links between the episodes offering little of the narrative pull that would lead a reader eagerly to seek out the next month's installment. Very quickly, however, it becomes apparent that Dickens has realized that he's stumbled onto something greater than he'd anticipated.

As John Lucas writes in Charles Dickens: The Major Novels (1992), from the satirical opening pages of the book, wherein Pickwick is presented as "a bumptious fool," Dickens quickly

comes to realize that his post of gentlemanly disdain for the Club members simply won't do. They may not be shabby-genteel but a twist of fortune would make them that . . . and anyway, they and their experiences are not to be despised. What this means is that for the first time in English literature a very large section of the population ceases to be invisible except as caricatural material. Just as it had recently won the right to vote, so, some four years later, it finds itself present in the pages of a kind of novel, not treated as a joke or an object of contempt, but with (albeit comic) respect.

Dickens is essentially making up the rules of this new type of novel as he goes along, and the rapidity of invention from that point is such that we can almost imagine him, pen in hand, exclaiming with delight as he hits upon new ideas. The character of Sam Weller, who becomes Pickwick's faithful, if irreverent servant, is the first of Dickens's countless unforgettable portraits, and the pleasure he takes in generating Weller's oddities of speech and logic is palpable. Once he begins to string out a rudimentary plot, the basic ground of a Dickens novel--which he would plow with increasing skill, inventiveness, and (sometimes to his detriment) moral seriousness for the next three decades--is apparent.

Oddly, in reading The Pickwick Papers I'm reminded of nothing so much as the early days of the Marvel Universe, when Stan Lee, Jack Kirby, and Steve Ditko, having decided to ignore all the rules of superhero comics, found their unfettered imaginations spiraling out in unexpected--and unexpectedly fruitful--directions. For anyone who grew up reading comic books, to turn back to the early years of The Fantastic Four, The Amazing Spider-Man, The Avengers, or The Incredible Hulk is astonishing: month after month, almost casually, the writers and artists are making stunning creative leaps--all while working on multiple titles and being constantly pressed by deadlines.

Which of course was always the case for Dickens as well, who continued to feel the press of monthly deadlines until near the end of his life. In fact, recently when I was flipping through the very satisfying Oxford Reader's Companion to Dickens (1999), I was reminded of something truly astonishing: Dickens turned out a number of Pickwick every month from March 1836 to November 1837--but November of 1836, Dickens also took on the editorship of Bentley's Miscellany, and in January of 1837 he graced its pages with the first installment of Oliver Twist. From there on, for nearly a full year, Dickens wrote both novels simultaneously, a task which, the Companion rather flatly notes,

he accomplished by devoting the first two weeks of each month to the Miscellany and the latter half of the month to Pickwick.

It does make the whole "holding down a job while blogging" thing seem rather unimpressive, doesn't it?

"He has mapped the coordinates of the city firmly in his mind," or, Pickwick Week continues!

{Photos by rocketlass.}

One of the most interesting aspects of The Pickwick Papers, for a reader who comes to it with the whole of Dickens before him, is the bits of later Dickens that we see in this, his earliest extended production. An interpolated tale of a heartless sexton, for example, is a first assay of the idea that would blossom into A Christmas Carol, while Mr. Pickwick's sojourn in the Fleet Prison offers the first real hint that Dickens's agenda might extend beyond entertainment.

But what I find most fascinating is how attuned Dickens already is to the reality of the city--and how its bustle and excitement are markers of its most salient characteristic, constant change.


Here, in the opening of Chapter 10, he reflects on the losses necessarily entailed by that change:

There are in London several old inns, once the head quarters of celebrated coaches in the days when coaches performed their journeys in a graver and more solemn manner than they do in these times; but which have now degenerated into little more than the abiding and booking places of country wagons. The reader would look in vain for any of these ancient hostelries, among the Golden Crosses and Bulls and Mouths, which rear their stately fronts in the improved streets of London. If he would light upon any of these old places, he must direct his steps to the obscurer quarters of the town; and there in some scluded nooks he will find several, still standing with a kind of gloomy sturdiness, amidst the modern innovations which surround them.

The nostalgia seems awfully rich for a twenty-four-year-old, who could not have known the coaching inns for long (though now that I think about it, I suppose I tended more towards unearned nostalgia at that age than Ido these days--I hope!).

As Robert Alter notes in Imagined Cities: Urban Experience and the Language of the Novel (2005), from which the title of this post is taken, Dickens

was, as many testimonies by his contemporaries suggest, a passionate Londoner. All his life, he loved exploring London's nooks and crannies, usually on foot, undeterred by the filth and stench and threat of disease of its slums, and he could amaze his friends with his minute knowledge of its most obscure neighborhoods and byways.

But what lover of the secret and obscure areas of a city, no matter how much he understands that their prized obscurity is a result of their obsolescence, doesn't at the same time risk falling victim to nostalgia, hating the change whose earlier expression resulted in the very places whose eventual loss he stands ready to deplore?



For even as Dickens grasped, as well as any other novelist before or since, the incredible generative powers of the city--the possibilities of serendipity, boundary-crossing, and surprise among them--he railed against its disruptions and destructions. Pickwick is a novel of coaches and relative quiet, even in its London scenes; by the time of Dombey and Son, we are in the railroad era, when whole neighborhoods are being destroyed, and whole ways of life with them. I don't really mean to find fault with Dickens here--the coming of the railroads does seem to have been truly horrible, whatever its overall benefits. It's more that I'm surprised at his awareness already, at such a young age, that he is in the midst of perpetual change, and that one of his duties as a novelist will be to take note and preserve. At his best, his response to that is righteous anger; at his worst, it's cloying sentiment.

The ultimate recourse for Dickens, time and again, was to family, and to small groups bound, not by ties of commerce or tradition--for those were perpetually liable to external breakage--but by friendship, loyalty, and love. As Franco Moretti explains in his Atlas of the European Novel, 1800-1900 (1998),

It is a further instance of the tentative, contradictory path followed by urban novels: as London's random and unrelated enclaves increase the "noise," the dissonance, the complexity of the plot--the family romance tries to reduce it, turning London into a coherent whole.

It is in the teeming drama of the city that the individual can find his destiny, but it is by the fireside, surrounded by loved ones, that he can find his home. In that, too, Dickens was prescient: what is the Pickwick Club if not a forerunner of the much-discussed "urban tribes" formed by relative newcomers to the contemporary city who, lacking either the obligations or the guidance of family or tradition, render the vastness of the city manageable by reimagining it as a small network of trusted friends?

Charles Dickens doesn't want your Fanfic!, or, Pickwick Week continues

The Pickwick Papers was first published in monthly installments, many of which opened with a direct prefatory address from Dickens to the reader. The fifteenth chapter carried this note:

Notice to Correspondents

We receive every month an immense number of communications, purporting to be "suggestions" for the Pickwick Papers. We have no doubt that they are forwarded with the kindest intentions; but as it is wholly out of our power to make use of any such hints, and as we really have no time to peruse anonymous letters, we hope the writers will henceforth spare themselves a great deal of unnecessary and useless trouble.

Dickens's claim that he had no time to read anonymous letters was undercut a bit, however, by an earlier statement, in the postscript he had appended to Chapter Three:

Always anxious to amuse our readers by every means in our power, we beg to present them with the following verbatim copy of a letter, actually addressed and sent by an anonymous correspondent to the Editor of the Pickwick Papers, a fortnight since. Our correspondent's notions of punctuation are peculiar to himself, and we have not ventured to interfere with them.

Sir,
In times when the great. and the good are. largely association for. the amelioration of the Animal Kingdom, it seems remarkable. that any writer should. counteract their. intentions. by. such careless paragraphs as. the one. I. inclose!

if it is carelessness. only. it may be corrected if it is. bad taste. I am afraid it. will be more difficult. but perhaps you could. in another paper. point out, to the obtuse, like myself, the wit or humour, of depicting. the noblest of animals faint, weary, and over driven,

When the Knees Quiver and the Pulses beat!

Subjected. to a. Brute; only to be. tolerated because he at least is ignorant, of. the Creature and his Creator. to whom he is responsible, and whose. 'admirable frolic and fun' consists in his giving. his brutal history of his horse. in bad English!

And then follows an extract from a newspaper, containing hte Cabman's description of his Horse, from page 6 of our first number.

This is evidently a very pleasant person--a fellow of infinite fancy. We shall be happy to receive other communications from the same source--and on the same terms; that is to say, post paid.

I suppose it's a comfort to know that, no matter how much the world may change, the public mailbox remains a strongly held redoubt of the monomaniacal and the off-center.

Pickwick and Plum and Fielding, oh my!

{Photo of my hat at risk by rocketlass.}

I've always thought that the primary influences on P. G. Wodehouse's gloriously funny work are fairly easy to spot: Shakespeare and the Bible provide most of his references and many of his cadences, while musical theatre, particularly Gilbert and Sullivan, inspire the energetic joking and intricate plotting. Reading The Pickwick Papers makes me realize, with some surprise, that hitherto I've missed a quite obvious one: Dickens.

Take this scene, which finds Mr. Pickwick chasing his hat, which has blown off his head and is "gambolling playfully away in perspective":

There are very few moments in a man's existence, when he experiences so much ludicrous distress, or meets with so little charitable commiseration, as when he is in pursuit of his own hat. A vast deal of coolness, and a peculiar degree of judgment, are requisite in catching a hat. A man must not be precipitate, or he runs over it: he must not rush into the opposite extreme, or he loses it altogether. The best way is, to keep gently up with the object of pursuit, to be wary and autious, to watch your opportunity well, get gradually before it, then make a rapid dive, seize it by the crown, and stick it firmly on your head: smiling pleasantly all the time, as if you thought it as good a joke as anybody else.

There was a fine gentle wind, and Mr Pickwick's hat rolled sportively before it. The wind puffed, and Mr Pickwick puffed, and the hat rolled over and over as merrily as a lively porpoise in a strong tide.

A narrator pausing the action to deliver a brief analysis, followed by seriously given instructions for an utterly unserious action--can you get more Wodehousian? Dickens's humor is so through-and-through lighthearted in Pickwick that its place as an ancestor to Wodehouse's work is much more clear than in the later novels, with their surrounding darkness.

In fact, to draw out the chain by one more link, the same is true for Dickens's own debt to the narrative verve and mock-seriousness of Henry Fielding--it's much more obvious in the playfulness of Pickwick than in the seriousness, of, say, Dombey and Son. Not that Dickens's admiration for Fielding is any sort of secret: he did, after all, name his eighth child Henry Fielding Dickens.

Visiting with Dickens

{Photo by rocketlass.}

Earlier this week, while I was still weighing the dozens of unread books in the house against my desire for the comforts of an old favorite, About Last Night's Carrie Frye quoted from Dickens, in a post about Martin Chuzzlewit and a bear (Really--go read her post!). What better way to satisfy both urges than to read one of the three Dickens novels I'd never read! For opening a Dickens novel, even one whose plot and characters are unknown, is like visiting an old friend: from the first page, we recognize that familiar, effervescent voice, and that world of cultivated eccentricity and urban bustle that only he can conjure up.

I chose The Pickwick Papers (1837), leaving The Old Curiosity Shop (1841) and Hard Times (1854) for later. The Pickwick Papers was Dickens's first novel, and it made him a star at twenty-four. A ramshackle picaresque, it doesn't offer the masterly plotting that we would come to expect from Dickens's later novels, but the many characters who populated its loosely connected stories are so lively and comic that it's easy to see why it became such a sensation. Take this exchange between the oddly charming (but wholly untrustworthy) Alfred Jingle and a couple of members of the Pickwick Club:

[Jingle said,] "English girls not so fine as Spanish -- noble creatures -- jet hair -- black eyes -- lovely forms -- sweet creatures -- beautiful."

"You have been in Spain, Sir?" said Mr Tracy Tupman.

"Lived there -- ages."

"Many conquests, Sir?" inquired Mr Tupman.

"Conquests! Thousands. Don Bolaro Fizzgig -- Grandee -- only daughter -- Donna Christina -- splendid creature -- loved me to distraction -- jealous father -- high-souled daughter -- handsome Englishman -- Donna Christina in despair -- prussic acid -- stomach pump in my portmanteau -- operation performed -- old Bolaro in ecstasies -- consent to our union -- join hands and floods of tears -- romantic story -- very."

"Is the lady in England now, Sir?" inquired Mr Tupman, on whom the description of her charms had produced a powerful impresion.

"Dead, Sir -- dead," said the stranger, applying to his right eye the brief remnant of a very old cambric handkerchief. "Never recovered the stomach pump -- undermined constitution -- fell a victim."

"And her father" inquired the poetic Snodgrass.

"Remorse and misery," replied the stranger. "Sudden disappearance -- talk of the whole city -- search made everywhere --- without success -- public fountain in the great square suddenly ceased playing -- weeks elapsed -- still a stoppage -- workmen employed to clean it -- water drawn off -- father-in-law discovered sticking head first out of the main pipe, with a full confession in his right boot -- took him out, and the fountain played away again, as well as ever."

Though I have no reason to think this is actually how Dickens constructed this passage, I love imagining him writing Jingle's lines in more normal cadences, then one by one stripping away verbs, prepositions, and other markers until he'd stepped right to the verge of incomprehensibility--and thus knew he'd allowed Jingle's voluble eccentricity its full play.

In the thirty-odd years that followed this debut, Dickens would greatly refine not just his plotting, but his language and his understanding of character as well. But while The Pickwick Papers may display a talent that's not fully formed, at the same time, the sensibility behind it is already, obviously, lovably Dickensian--and reading it feels like coming home.