The Pickwick Papers

I'm on p. 112 of The Pickwick Papers. The jovial title man has just been involved in a high speed horse and "chaise" chase. No one - man or beast - was hurt. A couple of times during the action Dickens referred to the carriage traveling at an unsettling speed of 15 miles per hour. I imagine the same scene today as the equivalent of two Cadillacs racing over mud at 100 miles per hour. Someone - or something - would have died in the updated version. While reading, this is one example that illustrates how the material aspects of life have completely changed since Pickwick's time, but human interactions, human idiosyncrasies and human idiocy remain exactly the same.

I love the premise of the book; four men travel around the country and record their observations of British life. Simple and something I would quiet happily spend my time doing. As Dickens first book, I like to imagine that he turned a love of people watching into the entry point to his writing career. So far the antics of the characters in Pickwick, like Scoop and Lucky Jim, are annoyingly juvenile, but the description is sumptuous. Dicken's characterization is like portraiture; he shows you every angle of every person. For example, Sam's first impression of Wardle's lawyer Mr. Perker of Grey's Inn: "He was a little high dried man with a dark squeezed up face, and small, restless black eyes, that kept winking and twinkling on each side of his little inquisitive nose, as if they were playing a perpetual game of peep-bo with that feature..." (p. 118) We know immediately that we are to dislike this man (there is something very unsettling about small dark eyes). Dickens doesn't like lawyers and makes this very clear with those few withering lines.