Mr. Pickwick's Innocence

Mr. Pickwick's InnocenceAuthor(s): Philip RogersSource: Nineteenth-Century Fiction, Vol. 27, No. 1 (Jun., 1972), pp. 21-37Published by: University of California PressStable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/2933035 .

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Mr. Pickwick's Innocence PHILIP ROGERS

IN RECENT YEARS many critics have come to agree that the central action of The Pickwick Papers is best described as a quest. In this view of the novel the questing hero emerges from the naive eccen- tricity of the Pickwick Club and the innocent pleasures of Dingley Dell and discovers, under the guidance of the worldly Sam Weller, the real nature of the world-the deception of Jingle and Trotter, the corruption of Eatanswill, the machinations of Dodson and Fogg, and finally, the injustice of the Fleet. But in accounting for the most important aspect of Pickwick's quest, his response to the tests im- posed by his journey, critics present widely divergent interpreta- tions. Some believe that Pickwick undergoes a significant transformation.' In this interpretation Pickwick's travels educate and humanize him; his quest is an initiation. Others, however, who recognize the motif of the quest in Pickwick, find no evidence to support the view that Pickwick is changed by his experience.2

1 The best example of this interpretation is W. H. Auden's "Dingley Dell and the Fleet," The Dyer's Hand and Other Essays (New York: Random House, 1962), pp. 407-28. Auden sees Pickwick as a "part-time Knight Errant" who becomes conscious of the real world and thus loses his innocence. Extending Auden's thesis, James R. Kincaid in "The Education of Mr. Pickwick," NCF, 24 (1969), 127-41, maintains that Pickwick, like Lear, "must undergo a reductive questioning of identity," an initiation that renders him "less bland and more fully human" (p. 129). Robert L. Patten in "The Art of Pickwick's Interpolated Tales," ELH, 34 (1967), 349-66, also views Pick- wick's adventures as educational. Less detailed arguments supporting this view ot Pickwick may be found in H. M. Daleski, Dickens and the Art of Analogy (New Yorh: Schocken, 1970), pp. 17-48, and Sylvia Bank Manning, Dickens as Satirist (New Haven: Yale Univ. Press, 1971), pp. 41-51.

2 J. Hillis Miller in Charles Dickens: The World of His Novels (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard Univ. Press, 1958), pp. 1-35, describes the structural axis of Pickwick as a quest (p. 5) and maintains that the novel represents "a definitive exit from innocence"

[ 21 1



22 Nineteenth-Century Fiction

Does Pickwick's innocence survive the tests of experience, or is he changed by his travels? Dickens' reply to readers who remarked an apparent change in Pickwick provides, I think, the basis of an answer to this fundamental question. In the 1847 preface he ex- plained:

It has been observed of Mr. Pickwick, that there is a decided change in his character, as these pages proceed, and that he becomes more good and more sensible. I do not think this change will appear forced or un- natural to my readers, if they will reflect that in real life the peculiarities and oddities of a man who has anything whimsical about him, generally impress us first, and that it is not until we are better acquainted with him that we usually begin to look below these superficial traits, and to know the better part of him.3

Dickens' account of apparent changes in Pickwick avoids the most obvious explanation-that Pickwick becomes "more good and more sensible" because he learns from experience. On the contrary, Dickens is reluctant to admit the possibility of change in Pickwick himself: the transformation takes place in the narrator and the reader, who penetrate the false appearance of superficial peculiarity to see "the better part of him" that was present in his essential nature from the first. Dickens' own view of Pickwick, then, suggests that the novel dramatizes not the education of Pickwick, but rather the gradual revelation of Pickwick's true nature.

Dickens' interpretation of Pickwick's character is, in my view, true to the novel, but the process by which Pickwick's nature is dis- covered and manifested is more complex than Dickens' implausible

(p. 35). Miller insists, however, that "Pickwick himself does not really change from episode to episode" (p. 24). Edgar Johnson in Charles Dickens: His Tragedy and Triumph (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1952), 1:157-75, also sees Pickwick as a knight who remains "innocently guileless" (p. 173) in spite of all his adventures. Barbara Hardy's view of Pickwick in The Moral Art of Dickens (New York: Oxford Univ. Press, 1970), pp. 81-99, is closest to my own. She argues that Pickwick shows neither "enlargement of mind" nor "improvement of understanding" (p. 83), that Pickwick inhabits a "charmed circle" which protects him from reality (p. 90), and that in contrast to Dickens' later novels, Pickwick "comes to terms with the real world . . by separating the harsh from the sweet" (p. 99). Although I accept this general

view of Pickwick, my interpretation of Dickens' use of Pickwick's innocence and my analysis of the means by which Dickens sustains Pickwick's innocence differ from hers.

3 The Posthumous Papers of The Pickwick Club (1837; London: Oxford Univ. Press, New Oxford Illustrated Dickens, 1967), p. xii. Except where separately noted, all citations to Pickwick and other Dickens novels refer to this edition.



Mr. Pickwick's Innocence 23

appeal to "real life" suggests. The apparent change in Pickwick results not from his education, nor from our becoming better acquainted with him, but rather from a change in Dickens' esti- mation of Pickwick's innocence. In the early chapters Pickwick is presented as the type of the bumbling enthusiast; his naivete is the butt of Dickens' satire. But as Dickens exposes Pickwick to ever darker scenes, he comes to see his hero as the redeeming center of innocence in an evil world, and the satire of naivete yields to the celebration of Pickwick's innocence. And as Dickens' love of Pick- wick's innocence deepens, he becomes increasingly reluctant to permit his hero to be changed by his experience. The Pickwick Papers is thus more than Pickwick's quest for reality or the narrator's quest to discover the true Pickwick. The central action of the novel is double: through Pickwick's travels Dickens himself ex- plores a precarious, fallen world, but simultaneously creates, in the character of Pickwick, a steady foothold in a prelapsarian existence.

No questing hero is more elaborately protected from suffering the consequences of his journey than Pickwick. For each of the evils 'Pickwick encounters, Dickens provides a corresponding remedy. The most obvious of these supports to his innocence is his wealth. Late in the novel Pickwick explains to Tony Weller what the reader has known from the first: "I assure you, my good friend, I have more money than I can ever need; far more than a man at my age can ever live to spend.... (785). The structure of The Pickwick Papers is built on the juxtaposition of its contrary worlds; thus, in what is surely the most demanding test of Pickwick's innocence, his imprisonment for debt in the Fleet, Dickens exposes Pickwick to the suffering of the poor, but simultaneously assures the reader that Pickwick can purchase his freedom whenever he chooses to pay costs to Dodson and Fogg. Pickwick's tour of the poor side of the Fleet shows him more of the unpleasant realities of life than any of his other experiences, but the prison episode also demonstrates Pickwick's own invulnerability to the evils he sees there. He learns that "money was, in the Fleet, just what money was out of it; that it would instantly procure him almost anything he desired; and that, supposing he had it, and had no objection to spend it, if he only signified his wish to have a room to himself, he might take possession of one, furnished and fitted to boot, in half an hour's




time" (592) . And if Pickwick at first refuses on principle to impli- cate himself in the affairs of Dodson and Fogg by purchasing his freedom, he does not scruple to use his fortune to insulate himself from "the coarse vulgar crowd" (579) in a private room with "a carpet, six chairs, a table, a sofa bedstead, a teakettle, and various small articles, on hire" (594).

What Pickwick learns in the Fleet of the power of his wealth to satisfy human desires he puts to frequent use after he leaves prison. The last installments of the novel crackle with the distribution of bank notes as Pickwick arranges the world to his satisfaction and Dickens prepares to leave his characters comfortably free from the shadow of debt and the memory of the Fleet's poor side. The re- formed villains, Job and Jingle, are given enough to begin virtuous lives in America. A legacy is bestowed on Tony Weller. The domestic security of Sam Weller and Mary is guaranteed by Pickwick's offer to establish them in a small business. Long before the reader has begun to worry about the future of the newlywed Winkles, should Mr. Winkle disinherit Nathaniel, Pickwick has assured the young lovers that he has already "thought of half a dozen plans, any one of which would make you happy at once" (740). In the course of the novel Pickwick's wealth exerts an increasingly talis- manic power to assure the well-being of the good people in his charmed circle of friends. Within the limits of this world Pickwick's fortune acts as the unfailing agent of his benevolence and gives him the kind of power asserted by the Cheeryble brothers when they guarantee the absolute safety of the Nickleby family in Nicholas Nickleby: "Nobody belonging to you shall be wronged. They shall not hurt a hair of your head, or the boy's head, or your mother's head, or your sister's head. I have said it, brother Ned has said it.... (596-97).

The effect of Pickwick's money on his friends is unclouded by the moral ambiguities of Harmon's dust-heap fortune in Our Mutual Friend or the legacies of Little Dorrit and Great Expectations. Like Pickwick himself, his followers are incorruptible and do not grasp for his money. Indeed, they hardly need it, so generous is Dickens in providing them with handsome settlements. Mr. Winkle's pre- dictable change of heart makes Pickwick's generosity unnecessary. Sam Weller refuses Pickwick's offer, preferring the spiritual reward of faithful service to his master. Tony Weller, dismayed at the




bounty of his fortune, rushes to give it all to Pickwick. The idyllic vision of the novel's conclusion, in which bank notes become the morally unambiguous agent of benevolent love, cannot, of course, efface the reader's knowledge that Pickwick's wealth, in spite of his benevolent intentions, has corrupted Mrs. Bardell and tempted Dodson and Fogg to further crime. Pickwick himself is undeniably implicated in the affairs of Dodson and Fogg when he sacrifices principle to gain his freedom from the Fleet. Dickens' Eden, it appears, can be preserved only by an expedient buying off of the Evil One. Yet even though Pickwick compounds with Dodson and Fogg on their terms-an implicit admission of guilt-Dickens shields Pickwick from the full awareness of his complicity by per- mitting him to interpret his act as benevolence to Mrs. Bardell and the Winkles rather than a concession to the unscrupulous lawyers. Pickwick departs from the Fleet in a glory of benevolence rather than under the shadow of having compromised with principle. Armed with Mrs. Bardell's letter proving his innocence, he is sur- rounded by a crowd of grateful debtors in which he sees "not one which was not the happier for his sympathy and charity" (666).

Dickens' treatment, twenty years after Pickwick, of William Dor- rit's departure from the Marshalsea provides an instructive contrast in moral perspectives. In Pickwick Dickens basks in the warmth of Pickwick's benevolent smile; his compromise of principle is forgotten in the glow of universal gratitude and "five-and- twenty gallons of mild porter" (666), provided to celebrate his release. In Little Dorrit, Dorrit's assumption of fatherly benevolence parodies Pickwick: "Mr. Dorrit, yielding to the vast specula- tion how the poor creatures were to get on without him, was great, and sad, but not absorbed. He patted children on the head like Sir Roger de Coverley going to church ... he condescended to all present, and seemed for their consolation to walk encircled by the legend in golden characters, 'Be comforted, my people! Bear it!' " (400). Just as Pip, according to Shaw, is Dickens' apology for con- doning David Copperfield's snobbish rejection of Mealy Potatoes,4 Dorrit represents Dickens' amends for his bland effacing of moral ambiguities in Pickwick.

Pickwick's departure from the Fleet is not, of course, a completely

4 "Preface," Great Expectations (Edinburgh: Limited Editions Club, 1937), p. vi.




cheerful scene. Like Dorrit, Pickwick is saddened by his experience. As he leaves the prison he is "far more sad and melancholy, for the moment, than when he had first entered it" (667). But this implied change in Pickwick is subtly qualified by "for the moment." His sad moment is no more than a moment; his awareness of evil here and throughout the novel is limited in duration. In Pickwick, time as well as money sustains the hero's innocence. The next paragraph erases Pickwick's memory of the "unhappy beings" he has left behind and announces the restoration of his characteristic mood: "A happy evening was that, for, at least, one party in the George and Vulture; and light and cheerful were two of the hearts that emerged from its hospitable doors next morning" (667). The "light and cheerful" conclusion of the prison episode suggests that Pick- wick's stay in the Fleet is only an episode in an episodic novel, not a formative stage in a continuous, cumulative process of moral Bil- dung. As J. Hillis Miller points out, a sound night's sleep suffices to revive Pickwick and to prepare him for a new cycle of adventures.5 At no point in the novel does Dickens permit the psychological effects of one adventure to impinge on Pickwick's consciousness in his next episode.6 When, for example, Pickwick spends a cheerful Christmas at Dingley Dell, he never thinks of his impending trial. The reader, of course, knows that Pickwick will soon come to trial and is conscious of the contrast between the looming threat of Mrs. Bardell's suit and the innocent revels at Manor Farm, but in Pick- wick's consciousness they remain discrete.

The episodic structure of the novel makes it possible for Dickens to introduce the innocent Pickwick to the evil world and then, at the conclusion of an episode, to expunge the acquired knowledge of evil and restore Pickwick to his original innocence. Thus Dickens is able, as he put it, to keep Pickwick "perpetually going on beginning again, regularly, until the end of the fair."7 Pickwick's ability

5 Miller, pp. 20-21. I am indebted to Miller's analysis of the relation of episodic structure to Pickwick's consciousness and memory (pp. 20-27), but I disagree with his conclusion that "the true dramatic center of Pickwick Papers . . . is Pickwick's gradual discovery of the real nature of the world" (p. 27).

6 The purely physical effects of Pickwick's adventures do at times carry over into later episodes. References to Pickwick's rheumatism extend from chapters 16 to 20, and he remarks in chapter 48 that his stay in the Fleet (Chs. 40-47) has made him vulnerable to fatigue.

7 "Address from Part X," The Pickwick Papers, ed. Arthur Waugh, Walter Dexter,




to begin again is suspended during his prolonged imprisonment in the Fleet. Here the cyclical pattern that governs the rest of the novel seems to break down, and Pickwick appears to be trapped by his vow not to pay damages to Dodson and Fogg. The vow, as W. H. Auden observes, is Pickwick's "first step out of Eden into the real world, for to take a vow is to commit one's future, and Eden has no conception of the future.... "8 But when Pickwick breaks his vow and leaves the Fleet, Dickens permits him to step lightly back into Eden. If Pickwick's imprisonment has been an initiation into experience, its effect is not at all apparent in his behavior after his release. The termination of Pickwick's involvement with Dodson and Fogg makes it clear that his complicity will have no permanent effect on his nature. He makes reparation for his broken vow simply by informing the lawyers that they are "mean, rascally, pettifogging robbers." And even in his extreme anger Pickwick remains innocent: he attempts "for the first time in his life" to "call up a sneer," but fails "most signally in so doing" (750) . This failure of his self- control, like his outbursts when provoked by Jingle and Dr. Payne, is not the resentment of a vindictive adult but the indignant anger of the wronged child. Like a child, Pickwick is satisfied merely to scold Dodson and Fogg. When he has told them off he is himself again: "his countenance was smiling and placid . . . he declared that he had now removed a great weight from his mind and that he felt perfectly comfortable and happy" (751).

It is not a sadder and a wiser Pickwick who travels to Birmingham in his next adventure to plead the case of the eloped Winkles before Winkle's father. Pickwick's last major journey is, in fact, identical in spirit to his earlier escapades. Comforted by the mollifying influence of milk punch, Madeira, bottled ale, and port, accompanied by the singing of duets, Bob Sawyer's jubilant imitation of a key bugle, and the waving of red handkerchiefs, Pickwick arrives in Birmingham half-fuddled and fails ludicrously in his attempt to placate Mr. Winkle.9 Pickwick's experience in the Fleet may perhaps resemble Lear's ordeal but in his release and new beginning

and Hugh Walpole (Bloomsbury: Nonesuch Press, 1937-38), p. xiii. The Oxford II- lustrated Dickens does not include Dickens' addresses to the reader.

8 Auden, p. 424. 9 Abundant food and drink, as Barbara Hardy has shown (pp. 90-95), also serve to

insulate Pickwick from the starvation he sees in the Fleet.




Pickwick reverts triumphantly to a bibulous Puck. His farewell speech delivered to the Pickwick Club at Dulwich likewise suggests that all recollection of the prison has been erased from his memory: he trusts that none of his adventures "will be other than a source of amusing and pleasant recollection" to him in "the decline of life" (797).

The episodic structure of The Pickwick Papers, in which Pick- wick goes on "perpetually beginning again" perfectly reflects Dickens' conception of Pickwick's nature. In himself Pickwick represents a triumph over time. Dickens proclaims Pickwick's immortality in the first sentence of the novel and reaffirms it thereafter as Pickwick's epithet. Pickwick is not, of course, literally immortal; he is immortal rather in the fact that his "juvenility of spirit" (801) survives until the last page of the novel. Most of his life has passed, yet miraculously, he has lost neither his innocence nor the vitality of youth. The process of earning a fortune in business has not corrupted him; it appears in fact to have had no effect at all beyond making him wealthy and comfortable. He has not married nor has he any relations to link him to the past. Dickens does not describe Pickwick's earlier life; indeed, in most respects, Pickwick's character is that of a newly born old man. Dickens takes obvious delight in displaying the childlike spirit of his elderly hero: Pickwick dances the minuet, slides on the ice, plays at blindman's buff, scales walls, eats and drinks in astonishing excess-all with "the utmost relish" (392) and "with an ardour and enthusiasm that nothing could abate" (414). Like the rusty blunderbuss that hangs on the wall at Manor Farm, Pickwick is old, but still loaded.10 Sam Weller accounts for Pickwick's youthfulness by supposing that "his heart must ha' been born five-and-twenty year arter his body, at least!" (556). Pickwick's young heart and old body coexist in the perfect harmony of his immortality from which Dickens has scrupulously removed the Struldbrug taint. Pickwick's relation to time is antip-

10 The Pickwickian quality of venerable age combined with enduring vitality per- vades Manor Farm and is celebrated in the song, "The Ivy Green" (72-73). Through- out Pickwick Dickens' appreciation of antiquity emphasizes its enduring sturdiness rather than its fragility. Rochester Castle, for example, lies in ruins but still possesses "might and strength" (57); the White Hart Inn is also valued for the "sturdiness" which has enabled it to preserve its "external features unchanged" and to survive "the rage for public improvement" (118).




odal to that of Yeats's persona in "Sailing to Byzantium," whose heart, "sick with desire," is "fastened to a dying animal." Old age, for Pickwick, is a form of freedom and protection rather than bond- age. Dickens nicely defines Pickwick's age as a condition of body and mind that enables him to bestow chaste kisses on young ladies' foreheads without being "suspected of any latent designs" (387). His old body thus liberates him from desire and simultaneously provides a secure vehicle for his young, innocent heart.

The doggerel verses Dickens composed for the Christmas party at Manor Farm provide an insight into the nature of Pickwick's immortal oldness and define the contrasting temporal modes that form a central axis of the novel's structure of contraries. The persona of "A Christmas Carol" (393-94) considers the merits of each of the seasons in turn and rejects them all in favor of Christmas. Spring is treacherous and inconstant, a lover who woos the blos- soms and buds only to wither and scatter them with a "wry grim- ace." The season of sulking madness and fever, summer is a time of intense, ephemeral love. The mildness of the harvest brings relief from the madness of summer, but the falling leaves portend death. Christmas, however, is the merry "King of the Seasons," a "stout old wight" who inspires the joyous trolling of songs and draining of bumpers. In "A Christmas Carol," all the stages of life except old age suffer the agonies of a world in ceaseless change. Only old Christmas escapes the sensual world of the seasons. For Dickens the King of the Seasons is not winter, the ultimate season of the year and of life, but Christmas, a mythic celebration belonging to liturgical, rather than seasonal, time. Dickens' spirit of Christmas, embodied in the familiar form of a stout old gentleman of jovial disposition, clearly resembles and recalls Pickwick; his mythic status in sacral time complements Pickwick's immortality. The Christmas poem is a paradigm of the novel: the contrast of the comfortable security of old Christmas with the precarious transiency of the seasons is sym- bolic of the contrast of the immortal Pickwick and the world of procreation and temporal process. The rejection of the seasons in favor of Christmas prefigures the final victory of Pickwick in the trials which threaten to change him.

The exposure of the celibate Pickwick to the pains of domestic relationship in the world of the seasons is a central axis of The




Pickwick PaPers; once again, Pickwick's very nature protects him from the evil he confronts. Throughout Pickwick the image of marriage and family life is one of unrelieved gloom. The interpolated tales, which form one part of Pickwick's experience, present a lurid gallery of tortured families, and Pickwick observes the miserable insecurity of family life at first hand when he enters the Fleet. Of all the prisoners he meets it is the families who suffer most. The Chancery Prisoner, whose heart broke when his child died; the "young woman, with a child in her arms, who seemed scarcely able to crawl, from emaciation and misery" (579); the "lean and haggard" prisoner's wife, whose relation to her husband is symbol- ized in her watering "the wretched stump of a dried-up, withered, plant" (596), all reveal to Pickwick the fact that in the world of the seasons love is expressed only in grief.

But to the immortal Pickwick, the unfortunates who suffer under the bonds of marriage and parenthood can be no more than "objects which presented themselves" (596) to his view. His involvement in the world of the seasons is limited to brief moments of awareness of what life holds for those whose relations with others extend beyond the disinterested attachment Pickwick shares with his bache- lor friends. Even the apparent threats to Pickwick's celibacy (his confrontation with the lady in yellow curl papers and Mrs. Bardell's plot to draw him into marriage), rather than initiating him into the mysteries of the sensual world, emphasize Pickwick's invulnerability to temptation. The very humor of the bedroom antics at Ipswich and Pickwick's trial for breach of promise depends on and also reinforces both the reader's belief in Pickwick's innocence and his sense of the absurdity of mistaking a benevolent, elderly gentleman for a dirty old man. A fallen world can suspect Pickwick of latent designs, but Pickwick never doubts the reality of his innocence or its positive value; the reader too knows that Pickwick is innocent, and, moreover, incapable by nature even of contemplat- ing the offense of which he has been found guilty.

Even in prison, Pickwick is not, as J. Hillis Miller claims, "driven by the same forces" that have destroyed the characters in the interpolated tales." His stay in the Fleet tends rather to underscore his essential difference from the other prisoners. The laws which gov-

11 Miller, p. 29.




ern their experience are antipodal to Pickwick's nature. The Chan- cery Prisoner, for example, is in all ways Pickwick's opposite. "Wan, pale, and ghastly" in his "lingering death," he represents the winter of life that Pickwick's Christmas age is designed to resist. The memory of his child's death torments him, whereas Pickwick has no blood ties and lives his life with as little immersion in seasonal time as can be imagined. But the chief source of the Chancery Prisoner's misery is his sense of isolation and abandonment, which Dickens evokes with melodramatic emphasis:

"If I lay dead at the bottom of the deepest mine in the world; tight screwed down and soldered in my coffin; rotting in the dark and filthy ditch that drags its slime along, beneath the foundations of this prison; I could not be more forgotten or unheeded than I am here. I am a dead man...." (594)

In contrast to the deathlike isolation of the Chancery Prisoner, Pickwick enjoys the unfailing companionship of his friends, whose devotion to him is untroubled by the disruptive emotions of kinship. Instead of isolating him from his community of bachelors, Pickwick's imprisonment results in an immediate intensification of their concern and new proofs of their loyalty. Pickwick is too fond of his friends, and especially of Sam Weller, to want them to enter prison for his sake; Sam is too concerned for Pickwick's welfare to leave him willingly. Only by ordering Sam to leave him can Pick- wick be alone at all, and it is with "a very considerable show of re- luctance" that Sam obeys Pickwick's order and leaves him to spend one night "alone in the coarse vulgar crowd" (579). Pickwick's moment of solitude thus bears only superficial resemblance to that of the friendless Chancery Prisoner. Far from initiating Pickwick into the meaning of human isolation, the incident demonstrates most clearly Dickens' desire to protect Pickwick from the terrors that obsess his darker imagination. It may perhaps be "a monstrous absurdity," as Pickwick himself suggests, "for a debtor in the Fleet to be attended by his man-servant" (599), but the absolute, mutual fidelity of Pickwick and Sam is an absurdity that Dickens requires in order to approach at all the idea of the Chancery Prisoner's absolute isolation.

At the end of the novel Pickwick resolves to reward Sam for his fidelity by setting him up in business and resigns himself to the




loneliness he will necessarily feel, as an old man without wife or children, when his servant marries and leaves him: "It is the fate of a lonely old man, that those about him should form new and different attachments and leave him. I have no right to expect that it should be otherwise with me" (782-83). Dickens allows Pickwick briefly to contemplate the fate of a lonely old man, but, once again, he does not permit him to experience it. Pickwick is saved by another "monstrous absurdity." Sam postpones his marriage (the main threat invariably to Pickwickian tranquility) and adamantly refuses to leave his master. Pickwick's awareness of loneliness as the common fate of old men is dispelled in Sam's declaration of perpetual loyalty:

". . . you've the spirit o' five-and-tventy in you still, what 'ud become on you vithout me? ... you should alvays have somebody by you as under- stands you, to keep you up and make you comfortable. If you vant a more polished sort o' feller, vell and good, have him; but vages or no vages, notice or no notice, board or no board, lodgin' or no lodgin', Sam Veller, as you took from the old inn in the Borough, sticks by you, come what come may; and let ev'rythin' and ev'rybody do their wery fiercest, nothin' shall ever perwent itl" (789)

Sam's perpetual loyalty is the necessary complement to Pickwick's immortality: both resist change in the face of the "wery fiercest" trials. In view of Sam's relation to Pickwick it is difficult to accept J. Hillis Miller's assertion that Pickwick learns that "he is depen- dent on himself alone."''2 At times Pickwick does realize, as Miller says, "that much of the world is indifferent or even a positive threat to his life," 13 but between Pickwick and the indifferent world stands Sam Weller, resolutely shielding his master from its threats.

The extent of Pickwick's understanding of the world's indiffer- ence is also questionable, for in addition to providing Pickwick with abundant wealth, personal "immortality," and perpetual community, Dickens also imposes limits on Pickwick's awareness of his experience. Pickwick himself is not obtuse; his response to the world of his travels is often naive, but never stupid. Frequently, however, he does not respond at all. His reaction to the interpolated tales is typical. "The Convict's Return," for example, is told at Pickwick's

12 Miller, p. 29. 13 Ibid.




request to satisfy his curiosity. The tale is a highly colored version of a familiar Dickens theme-the suffering family. The central character, an ill-used son of an improvident father, falls into bad company and evil ways and is sentenced to transportation. His mother dies of grief; he suffers agonies of guilt and loneliness. The tale ends with the returned-convict-son's confronting the father, who shrieks, bursts a blood vessel and dies vividly: "the gore rushed from his mouth and nose, and dyed the grass a deep dark red, as he stag- gered and fell" (81). At some undefined point in the tale Pick- wick's curiosity lapses, for the ultimate effect of the story on Pick- wick's consciousness is simply to terminate it: "the somniferous influence of the clergyman's tale operated so strongly on the drowsy tendencies of Mr. Pickwick, that in less than five minutes after he had been shown into his comfortable bedroom, he fell into a sound and dreamless sleep" (82). "A Madman's Manuscript," a tale of in- sanity, revenge, and guilt, also serves only to stimulate Pickwick's "drowsy tendencies": his response is to scramble "hastily between the sheets" (147) and fall fast asleep. "The Stroller's Tale" presents Pickwick with yet another domestic melodrama: a suffering wife and emaciated child witness the death of the improvident father. In this instance Dickens himself comes between Pickwick and the tale by changing the subject as soon as the tale ends. Dickens' apology betrays, I think, an uneasy awareness of his own impulse to limit Pickwick's response to the tale: "It would afford us the highest gratification to be enabled to record Mr. Pickwick's opinion of the fore- going anecdote. We have little doubt that we should have been enabled to present it to our readers, but for a most unfortunate occurrence" (40-41). The gratification of recording Pickwick's opinion of the tales is a pleasure Dickens invariably forgoes.

The limitation Dickens imposes on Pickwick's response to the tales is seen, too, in Pickwick's perception of the real world. The evils of Chancery, for example, are presented to Pickwick and Sam in the dilemmas of three different characters, yet at no time does Dickens allow either Pickwick or Sam to perceive the injustice of a system he is clearly bent on exposing. Mr. Watty, the first Chancery suitor Pickwick meets, is a thumbnail sketch of Mr. Gridley, the "gentleman from Shropshire" in Bleak House. Watty calls on Mr. Perker twice a week to find out what progress has been made in his case, but because he is a bankrupt no progress is ever made. When




they meet, both Pickwick and Watty want to see Perker. Perker's clerk, Lowten, gets rid of Watty by telling him that Perker is out of town, but asks Pickwick to stay because he has a letter for him. The lies are made more ugly by the sly winks Lowten directs at Pick- wick and Sam, "as if to intimate that some exquisite piece of hu- mour was going forward" (425). Lowten disposes of Watty finally by slamming the door in his face. He then invites Pickwick and Sam into the office to share his joke. Dickens' sympathy is obviously with the unfortunate Watty, but the episode passes without a word of protest from either Pickwick or Sam. Pickwick appears to be not only ignorant of the causes of Watty's misfortune, but also unaware of Lowten's egregious nastiness. Neither Pickwick nor Sam partici- pates in Dickens' criticism of Chancery or shares his indignation at the suffering of its victims. The perversity of Chancery is set forth in greater detail in the case of the cobbler who shares a room with Sam in the Fleet. The cobbler's tale (618-21) obviously anticipates the nature of Dickens' attack on Chancery in Bleak House; he is the victim of quarreling relations, avaricious lawyers, deaf and sleeping judges, an indifferent Parliament, hopeless muddle and delay. Sam Weller's response to the problems depicted in Bleak House shows him to be a true Pickwickian: he is half asleep when the story begins and sound asleep before it ends. The third of Dickens' Chancery victims is a solitary consumptive who dies in Pickwick's presence. Pickwick is suitably moved by the old man's death, but his very ex- pressions of concern reveal his ignorance of the real nature of the Chancery Prisoner's plight. When Pickwick learns that the prison doctor "said, six months ago, that nothing but a change of air could save him" (626), he exclaims, "Great Heaven! ... has this man been slowly murdered by the law for six months?" (626). Pickwick's question is unintentionally ironic. The truth, of course, is that "the iron teeth of confinement and privation had been slowly filing him down for twenty years" (593), not just six months, but once again Dickens lets Pickwick miss the point of his criticism. The answer Pickwick receives and apparently accepts is the jailer's evasive assurance that the prisoner would have "been took the same, wherever he was" (627).

Dickens' persistent limiting of Pickwick's awareness makes it difficult to accept Steven Marcus' claim that in Pickwick Dickens achieves "transcendence . . . a representation of life which fulfills




that vision, which men have never yet relinquished, of the ideal possibilities of human relations in community, and which, in the fulfillment, extends our awareness of the limits of our humanity." 14 The harmony of human relations in Pickwick's community rests ultimately on the artificial support of his wealth, and the Pickwick- ian ideal is achieved at the cost of a drastic circumscribing of human sensibility, the avoidance of sexuality and kinship, and the suspen- sion of time and memory.

Were Pickwick fully to respond to the reality of the interpolated tales or to understand the injustices of Chancery, he would cease to be Pickwick. His function in the novel is not, however, to grow in the knowledge of evil, but to remain himself, an elderly child, hap- pily unaware of the full nature of the world he passes through. It is often pointed out that Pickwick is the first of many Dickens' characters to confront the world of the prison, but it is also true that Pickwick is the prototype of the wealthy and benevolent gentleman whose role it is (especially in the early novels) to rescue the falsely accused heroes from prison and to shelter them from harm in Eden- ic, suburban retreats. Pickwick prefigures both the child-victims and elderly saviors of the novels that followed Pickwick. He is simultaneously Oliver Twist and Mr. Brownlow, Nicholas Nickleby and the Cheeryble brothers, Kit Nubbles and the Garlands: a victim who bears in his immutable identity the certain means of de- liverance from evil. Dickens' relation to Pickwick is similar to that of Jarndyce to Skimpole in Bleak House. When his east-wind awareness of evil becomes too painful Jarndyce takes comfort in Skim- pole's childlike innocence. Skimpole, a corrupted descendant of Pickwick, feigns ignorance of time and money; in years, he is as old as Jarndyce, but, like Pickwick, "in simplicity, and freshness, and enthusiasm, and a fine guileless inaptitude for all worldly affairs, he is a perfect child" (67). To Jarndyce and the other troubled adults of Bleak House, he seems to say, "I am a child, you know! You are designing people compared with me ... but I am gay and innocent; forget your worldly arts and play with me!" (71). Like Jarndyce, Dickens takes obvious satisfaction in the contemplation of innocence. Repeatedly he invites the reader to bask in the warmth of Pickwick's benevolent smiles, to be invigorated by the mere sight of

14 Dickens: From Pickwick to Dombey (New York: Basic Books, 1965), p. 17.




him. To Dickens, it is a "most intensely interesting thing" to watch Pickwick slide on the ice like a little boy and to "contemplate the playful smile which mantled on his face" (414). The prospect of an old man playing at blindman's buff with the enthusiasm of a child is meant to delight the reader: "It was a pleasant thing to see Mr. Pickwick . . first kissed on the chin, and then on the nose, and then on the spectacles ... but it was a still more pleasant thing to see Mr. Pickwick, blinded shortly afterward ... going through all the mysteries of blind-man's buff . . . with a nimbleness and agility that elicited the admiration and applause of all beholders" (392). "The very servants grinned with pleasure at the sight of Mr. Pickwick" (381), for "who could ever gaze on Mr. Pickwick's beaming face without experiencing the sensation?" (132). As the novel unfolds, the praise of Pickwick becomes even more explicit. With "real tears in his eyes, for once," Job Trotter declares, "I could serve that gentleman till I fell down dead at his feet" (642) . And in Sam Weller's view, he is a comic angel: "I never heerd, mind you, nor read of in story-books, nor see in picters, any angel in tights and gaiters . . . but mark my vords. . . he's a reg'lar thoroughbred angel for all that; and let me see the man as wenturs to tell me he knows a better vun" (642).

Dickens' worship of Pickwick at the end of the novel rises to an extravagant height. The vision of Pickwick in suburban apotheosis at Dulwich collapses under its weight of superlative joy. Having delivered his hero from the Fleet, Dickens seems bent on effacing the memory of Pickwick's darker days with an evocation of undiluted happiness:

Everything was so beautiful! The lawn in front, the garden behind, the miniature conservatory . . . and above all the study . . . with a large cheerful window opening upon a pleasant lawn and commanding a pretty landscape . . . and then the curtains, and the carpets, and the chairs, and the sofasl Everything was so beautiful, so compact, so neat, and in such exquisite taste, said everybody, that there really was no deciding what to admire most.

And in the midst of all this, stood Mr. Pickwick, his countenance lighted up with smiles, which the heart of no man, woman, or child, could resist: himself the happiest of the group. . . inspiring everybody with his looks of gladness and delight. (799)




As the contrast of Pickwick and Skimpole implies, Dickens' ar- tistic development from Pickwick Papers to Bleak House is marked by the steady erosion of his belief in the power of cloistered innocence to inspire and heal. In Pickwick Papers, however, Dickens is still strong in the faith.



Documents

Mr. Pickwick's Innocence