Pickwick Papers

Charles Dickens is among the most well-known authors of the Western canon, yet his own body of work forms a canon of its own with a distinct “Dickensian” style. Many Dickens novels are in some respect autobiographical or influenced by his own experiences. Dickens often draws on the experiences of his family’s struggles with debt and his father’s imprisonment in the Marshalsea Prison as well as his own subsequent time in a workhouse as a child. In his adult life, Dickens was a legal clerk and journalist before his career as a novelist began, and this along with his childhood experiences made Dickens a strong supporter of court and prison reform, especially as it impacted the working class. These ideas often appear in Dickens’s novels, including The Pickwick Papers, which details both the superfluous nature of the courts and the inequity of life in a debtors’ prison.

While working as a journalist, Dickens began to write and submit short stories known as “sketches” under the pen name “Boz,” and their popularity led to his writing The Pickwick Papers and helped establish the style of his later serials. All his novels were serialized. In addition, he edited magazines that published serialized literature, eventually starting his own periodical called All the Year Round, and thus the serial format significantly influenced his writing. Novels in the Dickensian canon are known for their many small, interwoven stories, which together form a longer cohesive plot, and characters who form a tangled web of relationships. Dickens’s novels often rely on coincidence and an air of over-the-top ridiculousness that the short, episodic structure of serial publishing enhanced. Nevertheless, Dickens adhered to the conventions of Victorian literature as much as he invented them, and his novels often ended by foregrounding traditional Victorian themes related to morals, divine providence, and character growth.