Cheap and free e-books from sources like the Gutenberg Project are increasingly becoming the public libraries of our time. The ability to acquire them for our electronic readers at no charge has (I suspect; I haven’t done a survey) caused an uptick in readership for classic books. And so it is that I finally came to read Charles Dickens’ The Pickwick Papers.

In 1836, the first installment of The Posthumous Papers of the Pickwick Club appeared. It began as an example of a kind of publication which was very popular at the time, and for which I can’t find a technical name. Such books were published in booklet form chapter by chapter, and were a little like comic books. An artist would produce a series of humorous engravings, and a writer would be hired to pen a brief comic description of that action. The idea for The Pickwick Papers was that a group of Londoners would take trips out into the countryside to participate in sporting activities like hunting, fishing, and ice skating, getting shot at, hooked, and dunked for their pains. The artist retained for the project was a prominent illustrator named Robert Seymour, and the writer they hired was a young up-and-comer named Charles Dickens.

Dickens had entirely different ideas for the project than what Seymour had counted on. Dickens wanted fewer pictures and more text, and he wanted the pictures to follow the text instead of the other way around. Seymour was very unhappy with this plan, and expressed his views through the eloquent means of committing suicide with a shotgun. But publishing is publishing, and another artist was secured, and then another when he didn’t work out. This third artist was Hablot Knight Browne (better known as “Phiz”), who would forever after be the artist most associated with Dickens’ work. As the episodes in the series appeared, it became more and more an illustrated novel, and a bestseller, and Charles Dickens became an international celebrity.

The evolution of the project is very apparent as the reader proceeds. The first chapters are “funny” in a dated sort of way, but the reader (or at least this one) finds himself wondering whether this is all there is to be to it. Dickens clearly felt the same way, and as the story goes on the comedy of character comes to replace the comedy of slapstick. Gradually we see the development of the classic Dickens story, in which the emphasis is on exaggerated characters with funny names, and social criticism.

When Mr. Pickwick comes to hire Sam Weller, a Cockney bootblack he meets at an inn, as his personal valet, the story finds its footing. Pickwick and Sam are very different characters from Bertie Wooster and Jeeves, but I think we could call them their ancestors, in terms of the nature of their master-servant relationship. Though Pickwick is no idiot like Bertie, his areas of innocence concerning the world make it necessary for Sam, who genuinely loves him, to act as a sort of rough-hewn nursemaid and counselor.

The great crisis of the story is the prosecution of Mr. Pickwick for breach of promise, due to a misunderstanding. In a few harrowing chapters, Dickens gets the opportunity to describe the hellish world of the English debtor’s prison of that time, a world he himself knew too well from his childhood.

In Call Each River Jordan, one of the novels in Owen Parry’s (Ralph Peters’) Abel Jones Civil War mystery series, Abel meets an English valet who praises The Pickwick Papers to the skies. It is the only novel in the world, as far as he is concerned. He reads it constantly, over and over again, and no other novel. Abel, a strict Methodist, rejects such worldly amusements. And it’s just as well, because Methodists don’t come off very well in Pickwick. The Methodists described here are pure hypocrites, drinking heavily while preaching abstention, and leading flocks of silly women astray. In a particular section of the book, the chief Methodist “shepherd” berates Sam’s father in an offensively self-righteous way, simultaneous with an act of genuine Christian grace to an old enemy on Mr. Pickwick’s part. All of this is entirely in line with Dickens’ known opinions on religion, but I think it’s a little hard on Methodists.

Still, a book worth reading, for the reader who can work through an older style of writing (and of humor).