This unexpected development turns The Pickwick Papers, by degrees, from a series of raucously funny sketches, into a full-blown novel that is as emotionally powerful, at its climax, as almost anything Dickens wrote.įull of stories and songs, ridiculous descriptions of social foibles, and the awesome presence of Pickwick’s cockney servant Sam Weller, this book falls into the literary category (here I go again) known as picaresque. Browne, and the two wrote and sketched under the respective pen-names of Boz and Phiz.Īs for the novel itself, it gradually coalesced into a true novel with an actual plot, and characters that developed into more than they were at the beginning. And as a result, the illustrator literally blew his brains out after only one “number.” A few months after this tragedy Dickens established his lifelong creative partnership with illustrator Hablot K. He soon found that the literary genius of Charles Dickens wanted an illustrator to cater to it, not vice versa. Well, the illustrator soon found out how wrong he was.
And each piece was supposed to be written to go with an illustration by a certain artist who was well established in the trade, and thought that he was in control of the creative collaboration. There wasn’t supposed to be a real plot line running through the series the thread connecting them would be simply a set of farcical characters centered around Samuel Pickwick, a well-to-do amateur anthropologist who goes out into the countryside to observe different kinds of recreation such as shooting, cricket, journalism, and Parliamentary elections. He had published a number of articles in various magazines, and a publisher approached Dickens with the proposal of doing a series of satirical “sporting pieces” that would, essentially, pull the nose of all the gentlemanly pastimes of contemporary (1836-7) England. The idea came about in an interesting way. Some would argue that his first real novel was, say, Nicholas Nickleby, but let’s not split hairs. The actual title is The Posthumous Papers of the Pickwick Club.
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