My favourite scene / chapter in The Pickwick Papers was chapter 34 – the courtroom scene, and it is my fondness for this chapter that honestly saves my opinion of the entire novel. What Nicholas Nickleby did where The Pickwick Papers didn’t – was pull it’s head in and decide that it wanted to tell a story – perhaps not to the same degree that the bildungsroman David Copperfield did, but a coming-of-age story nonetheless. I found a lot of similarities between this and the first half of Nicholas Nickleby, which I remember finding somewhat scattered with little direction. But like Oliver Twist and Nicholas Nickleby – The Pickwick Papers exhibits a writer who is less controlled and altogether less serious. The actual style of writing was of course very good and in this novel I see the potential that eventually led to the extreme accomplishments that were Great Expectations, David Copperfield and A Tale of Two Cities.
With the exception of the Mrs Bardell breach of promise storyline and the subsequent trial and imprisonment of Mr Pickwick – plus a few loose interwoven love stories – there really was no core story keeping the novel together – it was really just a series of vignettes detailing the Pickwick Club’s shenanigans.Īlthough I really didn’t enjoy the book very much, I can appreciate it’s comic genius, and the fact the Dickens wrote and published this when he was 24-25 years is incredibly impressive. The lack of any real serious plot was definitely it’s major failing in my opinion. I know it was his first novel and that it was written chapter-by-chapter for over a-year-and-half and that it was initially written by Dickens as an accompaniment to a popular illustrator’s comic cartoon series, but I just didn’t find any of the characters that endearing or interesting.
I don’t know what it was about this particular Dickens’ novel – but I just didn’t feel it.
I found myself wishing I was reading something else – something more exciting and interesting. I averaged anywhere between 5-10 chapters of The Pickwick Papers a week and I won’t lie – it did get pretty tedious. It took me about 8 weeks to read The Pickwick Papers . I had every intention of writing some mid-read reviews about The Pickwick Papers, but for the past two months I’ve suffered from a lack of free time to sit and actually think, let alone write. Started reading: 14 July 2014 – Finished reading: 24 September 2014
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