Pickwick Papers

I had tried this novel before and this time around I took awhile to warm up to it, but then I enjoyed it greatly. Well, I enjoyed the Wellers immensely anyway.

The plot was intentionally mishmash, if you could even say that the book had a plot. The tone varied from the lightest type of humor to rather serious at times to more sophisticated humor and many blends of all these tones.

I could feel that this was Dickens' first novel; his deep characters could be a little stock and his caricatures a bit shallow. I suppose he had not gotten into his characterization stride yet. Mr. Pickwick himself was rather a sanctimonious, pompous prig who was often rather rude to poor Winkle. Winkle's cowardice and ineptitude could be funny at time but painful at other times. Mr. Snodgrass was my favorite of the quartet but received the smallest attention. Dickens rather abruptly dropped and picked up characters in this novel.

In the Wellers Dickens gets very near to his later greatness. "Samivel" "Veller" and his father were definitely both the most excellently created and developed characters and my favorite ones. Often I find lower class accents in Dickens' novels irritating (that could be because the characters are usually irritating people), but I enjoyed the Wellers' accents.

This novel is not superb compared to Dickens' later works, but for a young man in his mid-twenties it is a brilliant first novel. And there dies any mercy for all the so-called "writers" that are all over the home-schooled/ Christian fiction internet world.

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