The Pickwick Papers
by Charles Dickens · first published 1800
8% recommend92% neutral
Dickens’ first novel was originally written and published as a serial. It is a comedy relating the misadventures of the members of The Pickwick Club, whose main purpose is to discover and relate quaint and curious phenomena of social life and customs throughout England. This quest takes the members to all parts of the country, travelling by coach and sampling the comforts or otherwise of various coaching inns.
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…I think this list is terrible. It won't help you understand this country except for the narrow section of opinion that went mad after the Brexit vote. I won't make an alternative list but reading The Pickwick Papers will give more profit than this whole list.
on “The Great British Reading List” ↗…That style is a slog. I enjoyed a year of intense study in literature back in 1977. I don't have the literary chops anymore, or the patience to get through Infinite Jest, let alone re-read Moby Dick or Pickwick Papers. But, you do know better: dense is a much better word than verbose, or my rather harsh purple prose. You are kind. Still, do you think it's okay to end a sentence with bygone? I'm going to check the…
on “The Dying Art of Being a Bum” ↗…filed, and numerous other ingenious machines put in motion for the torture and torment of His Majesty's liege subjects, and the comfort and emolument of the practitioners of the law." (Charles Dickens, The Pickwick Papers)
on “Science writer Simon Singh wins libel appeal” ↗…about the 'sarcasm quotient'. Coming from Ireland, every time I hear someone say "There's no end of this boom in sight ... it's not going to happen this time", I get scared. To quote Charles Dickens's Pickwick Papers(1837) "Never say never."
on “This Bubble's Got Legs” ↗That resource says he was paid for every 32 pages. In any case, it seems like for at least some of his early books like The Pickwick Papers, he was paid proportional to volume of output and not to sales/quality. (For some of his later works he earned a percentage of sales.) It's a perfectly fine model for people who aren't already as famous…
on “How a Tech Billionaire Created Two Fortunes and a Software Sweatshop” ↗…published from roughly 1830 through the first quarter or half of the 20th century, driven by falling publication costs and rising literacy. Charles Dickens on particular developed the model, with The Pickwick Papers, published in 1836. Another notable work, the Sherlock Holmes series debuted in 1887 ("A Study in Scarlet"). Earlier novels (relatively few in number) tended to appear as their own works in whole form,…
on “Bestselling books have never been shorter” ↗> I just give you two books that you've read and you tell me which is better. I can't wait to compare The Pickwick Papers against The Unfolding of Language.
on “Goodreads was the future of book reviews. Then Amazon bought it” ↗For my generation (just post-Boomer), it was the TV. For my parents, it was the radio. For their parents, reading out loud for everyone to enjoy ("Mr. Dickens has published another episode of The Pickwick Papers!"), or playing instruments.
on “NY school phone ban has made lunch loud again” ↗Have you read the Pickwick Papers? It wouldn't surprise me if Dickens did speak that stuffily.
on “Charles Dickens on being unhappily married (1858)” ↗…rip along with regular cliffhangers. His single volume works were mostly less popular and less well known today with the exception of A Christmas Carol. He wasn't alone either - his success with The Pickwick Papers led many others to follow, including Sir Arthur Conan Doyle with Sherlock Holmes stories originally serialised in The Strand magazine. This model of quality fiction being in magazines never really entirely…
on “Writing books is not really a good idea” ↗Suttree is maybe my favorite of all his novels. If, as others here have suggested, you regard Blood Meridian an epic. Suttree is a picaresque, like reading Pickwick Papers on salvia.
on “Cormac McCarthy, Novelist of a Darker America, Is Dead at 89” ↗Hmmm. FWiW that was another literary jest, you know, what with Dickens famously: Dickens's literary success began with the 1836 serial publication of The Pickwick Papers, a publishing phenomenon that sparked Pickwick merchandise and spin-offs. ... His novels, most of them published in monthly or weekly instalments, pioneered the serial publication of narrative fiction,…
on “Why are debut novels failing to launch?” ↗…to read Dickens with certain level of focus, and there are often so many characters that I had to reread to memorize them and picture them in my mind, for instance the party of friends we meet in The Pickwick Papers or the diverse set of people and locations in the first few chapters of A Tale of Two Cities - it’s the use of in media res maybe contributing to my off balance (and this was a book I already read once…
on “Why I'm Skeptical About Efforts to Revolutionize Schooling” ↗