I attempt to read Dickens' The Pickwick Papers (1836), this is what happens.

As you might have noticed, I have yet to post anything on anything read recently towards my major historical field, The Long Nineteenth Century of Britain. This is because I am currently reading The Pickwick Papers (1836) on audio book, and I hate Dickens.

As a Victorianist, this is a hard thing for me to say, or – rather – it is a career threatening thing to say, given C.D. is so major to the field. However, I think the reasons I don’t like reading his work, especially the early Dickens, has a lot to do with why he is so important. For one, as Raymond Williams observes in The Country and The City, Dickens is one of the first to capture the city as a heterogeneous whole; Dickens effectively communicates the city as a sense-deluge of different voices, textures, sounds, and lights that somehow hang together as one thing. I find the orchestra of different voices confusing and miasmic as a whole, and when I focus on any one – like I did reading Oliver Twist – I find them limp, stereotypical, and un-compelling. Though The Pickwick Papers is less urban than, say, Oliver Twist or A Tale of Two Cities (duh), it takes place in small towns, manor houses, and farms as much as in London proper, the plotless-ness of the serial-made-into-Dickens’-first-novel is dizzying to read and impossible for me to invest in. It’s value, however, as an artifact of the history of the novel (also perhaps the graphic novel), and – as Eve Sofosky Sedgwick points out – a key example of a pre-Gothic homosocial milieu unmolested by homophobia – I begrudgingly accept.

            Dickens was twenty four when he got the commission to write the The Pickwick Papers. He was still writing under the pen name, Boz, and had hitherto written slice-of-life-in-London-pieces. The commission that would become Pickwick was to write copy for sporting illustrations by illustrator Robert Seymour, to create what was then called “a picture novel.” Long story short: Dickens flipped the switch on Seymour, took over the book and wrote whatever he wanted, regardless of what was going on in Seymour’s illustrations. The sportsmen of the pictures, in Dickens’ text, became a society of pseudo-intellectuals who follow the teachings/meanderings of their most pre-eminent member, Samuel Pickwick. The picaresque style adventures of the fraternity of buffoonish eccentrics, an effective lampooning of bourgeiose masculinity, caught on with readers; Dickens’ character, Sam Weller, especially, became something of a publishing sensation. Seymour killed himself, and other illustrators were hired, much like in contemporary comic book publishing (not using “The Marvel Method”), to illustrate Dickens’ story.

            The Pickwick Papers is all about an anxiety, or mild discomfort with male homosociality. It is very much a whimsical double of the very dark, very serious Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde (1886), whose plot is really about the corruptive – sexual, moral, physical, and chemical - potential of professional males bonding with one another rather than wives and children. Other than the tone – the two novels differ in class focus, Stevenson’s novel seems to be about working, professional men (doctors and lawyers) while the members of the Pickwick club seem more or less highborn. The attitude toward homosociality in the two novels differs as well. In Dr. Jekyll the male characters are seemingly innervated by a secret relationship that, although never stated or expressed, manifests in the degeneration of their clique of professional males. In Pickwick, the homosocial bonds are very much above board, only border line erotic, and – as Sedgwick notes – don’t incite any homophobic panic. Instead of physical and psychological break down, the homosociality results in a lot of slapstick buffoonery.