The Light Side of the Soul

on Charles Dickens' Pickwick Papers

illustration by Joseph Clayton Clark (“Kyd”), 1890

Comedy is necessary, restorative, sacred, and transformative.

By “comedy” I don’t necessarily mean the jokester on the stage, plying his wit before a guffawing audience, the hijinks of two clowns making themselves stumble around and look silly, but rather the happy endings in Shakespeare where mix-ups resolve themselves and true lovers are restored to one another; the cheerful, easeful relief, the glow cast over the next hour or so, that the end of a rom-com brings; the spirit of a sunlit summer afternoon, the sky blue and cloudless, nature in all her full-throated glory; the sense, walking home from a soirée with old friends, that “God’s in his heaven— / All’s right with the world!”¹

This orientation towards life might be referred to by what people call “good humor,” and only lately have I come to appreciate its importance. Good humor makes possible all positive social relationships; it makes possible that best relationship to the self, where one can take in the vista of oneself with an honest, forthright eye, without illusions and yet without despair, without egotism and yet without self-loathing, sending out warm rays from the heart equally to the highest bird that soars above and the humblest worm that crawls in the dirt below.

At one point or another, everyone comes to that crossroads where a sudden spiritual directive, a divine injunction like the voice of God comes out of the woodwork of the everyday and tells you you must change your life. But it is impossible to change one’s life if one does not change oneself, and it is impossible to change oneself if one cannot laugh at oneself. That reminds me: I have a picture of myself at the age of about two. In it I am looking at myself in the mirror and pointing. My hair sticks up riotously. I am saturated in an eye-splitting pink. On my face in the mirror is an expression of absolutely unhinged, uproarious laughter. I think my two-year-old self knew instinctually what my two-decade-old self would have to falter towards in the difficult darkness of intellectualization, overanalysis, painful firsthand experience.

To make us laugh at ourselves: this is what comedy does at its best and—make no mistake about it—it is an important task. To laugh at yourself means that you know yourself, that you can look into the nooks and crannies of yourself, the cobweb-covered corners, the dusty attic and the drafty basement, without trembling in fear of what army of spiders may scuttle out, what cloud of bats swarm out. Dictators and tyrants cannot laugh at themselves, and there you plainly see the consequences; they have little good humor and less good will.

True comedy is never mean-spirited; as the popular saying goes, it laughs with you, not at you, for what it laughs at is the world and everyone—the million little absurdities of life and of people, the daily foibles, the quirks and peculiarities, the inconveniences, the ridiculous mishaps, the scoundrelism of the politician, the fog (or Fogg) of the legal system, the vanity of this old woman, the foolishness of that young man: in short, that such-and-such is such-and-such, that so-and-so is so-and-so, and so the world spins merrily on.

All the quarrels in the world, all the strife and the anger and the wars and the division—might not this tension be solved, one wonders, if only someone were to crack a joke or fall victim to some harmless but hilarious peccadillo? Then enemy would laugh with enemy, the stiff mask of indifference fracturing under the pressure of an irrepressible smile, and all would be forgiven, all would be well again.

Good humor is the attitude in which one feels that life is essentially meaningful and that people are essentially good. Were the faults too deep, the conflicts irredeemable, then we would not laugh, we would put our heads down and weep. But good humor says, “None of that, now, sweep away the tears, it is really not so bad as you imagined,” and pats you on the shoulder and stokes the hearth fires in your heart.

Most comedy rests on a foundation of wit (even in certain kinds of stupidity there is a sort of wit), and wit tends to have a humorous air about it. But say something witty with a bad attitude, make a mean comment cleverly, and you will probably receive very little in the way of ha-has. Wit is a knife, and it can be cruel, biting, stinging, cutting to the quick. But humor, good humor, is like a butter knife. It could never kill anybody. It spreads, it shares the richness and extends the sweetness. It is the spirit that unites families and forgives foibles, that makes lasting friendship possible and love and romance, too, that bends parent and child in a common kinship of the soul and forms the bedrock of long, healthy, happy, ever-renewing marriage. From it flows a fount of goodness; it waters the garden of the light side of the soul.

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All this is a long prelude to Charles Dickens’ Pickwick Papers, his first novel, in which the seeds—no, I should rather say the fruitful crop, the wide-arching, full-flourishing branches—of that attitude of good humor are wonderfully, delightfully present. It is a humor without sharp edges, a rounded humor, a humor that rounds us out.

Dickens was commissioned to write The Pickwick Papers by publishers Chapman & Hall, who wanted text to accompany a series of illustrations (“cockney sporting plates”) by Robert Seymour. Seymour blew his brains out after the second week of Pickwick;² he was replaced by artists who learned quickly to suit image to text, rather than expecting the 24-year-old novelist, quickly expanding into the contours of his own genius, to suit text to image. Correlation does not imply causation, but Pickwick would also be the death of Dickens: Seymour shot himself, Dickens chose suicide by reading, lending voice and fire to his own creations as he exhausted himself from stage to stage. Pickwick was the most popular of his works during his lifetime; the Pickwick trial received prolonged applause when he read it before a rapt audience in the year of his death 1870.

It works in Dickens’ favor that The Pickwick Papers really is more a heap of papers than that well-organized, carefully plotted, more likely than not scrupulously arranged thing we call a novel. A novel—though its path may wind and twist and curl and make any number of curious loops—can generally be trusted to take us from A to B. But The Pickwick Papers picks us up here and wicks us away like a mere drop there. “Wick” comes from the German Wieche, “yarn,” and Dickens has yarns of many fibers to spin here, not all of which assimilate into the larger fabric.

Dickens, after all, began literary life as a sketch artist. From disparate delineations of omnibuses and gin shops, pawnbrokers and hackney cabs, dinners and Christmases (even early on, Dickens was good at Christmas), men and women, garden parties and parish elections, he progressed to a series of related drawings, loosely stitched together. Nevertheless we get frequent interruptions—stories-within-a-story—as though Dickens had tugged on a little stitch, pulled and pulled, and, spinning it out into a yarn, knitted it after an entirely different pattern. The gothic, the melodramatic, the romantic, and the ghostly perch for a moment like black birds in this sunny, Pickwickian landscape, bringing us some tale of a curmudgeonly, goblin-beset gravedigger or the swashbuckling saga of an uncle who rescues an impossibly beautiful maiden from two scoundrels, then—the maiden disappearing in a chimera puff—resolves never to marry, ever faithful to his dream damsel.

It is as if our author has suddenly gotten bored in the middle of the story—the ball and chain of having to produce a chapter of the same serial every week over the course of 20 months sometimes chafing, one imagines—and invented an escape hatch, his imagination too capacious, too expansive, too tendrilling out in a hundred opposite directions to be so confined. Pickwick & co. leave their usual haunts frequently and escape to Dingley Dell, to Bath, to Ipswich, even to Fleet Prison, one suspects not because of the exigencies of the plot but simply because its creator wanted a change of scenery.

In his later novels Dickens learns to weave subplots within subplots, to unite comedy with darker strands of pathos, tragedy, realism. Here what we have instead is a kind of witches’ brew from which you might scoop out with one ladling a shoe, with another a wrinkled ear. You can see Dickens improving as a novelist over the course of it: what begins as a series of farcical adventures by a club of stock types ends with the touching episode of Mr. Pickwick in prison; characters are inflated from flat to well-rounded, taking on body and heft.

The four principal characters we begin with are the four members of that incomparable consortium, the Pickwick Club. There is Mr. Snodgrass, a poet who—as far as we can see—has little literary talent. There is Mr. Winkle, a sportsman who fails disastrously—move out of the way!—every time he is invited to go shooting. There is Mr. Tupman, a lover whose prospects in romance are sadly thwarted, who ends the novel single while Snodgrass and Winkle exit having yoked themselves to counterparts of the fairer sex and tied themselves in the sweet bonds of holy matrimony. Then there is Mr. Pickwick himself, the Club’s eponymous founder.

Mr Pickwick is the kind of man every young person would like to have as a grandfather, every no longer young person as a father. Indeed he is older than his three friends; retired, unmarried, and childless, his friendship more often than not melts into a kind of paternal benevolence. Nobody better could have been dreamt up to fulfill the responsibilities of in loco parentis; under his auspices, you may be assured that things will turn out well, that people will be happy, that all will be settled, dignified, moral, joyous. However hard he is pressed upon by fate—harried by lawyers, given the runaround by scoundrels, drawn into the “widder’s” web—he always acts with uprightness and virtue. He is ever benevolent, ever compassionate, ever gallant, ever honest, ever quick to bristle at deception and trickery, ever ready to come to the aid of a friend, ever willing to defend the honor of a woman, ever wanting to intervene on behalf of a couple whose love lines are tangled and mangled, smoothing over improprieties and putting himself in the way of disapproving parents so love and laughter can prevail at last.

“First Appearance of Mr Samuel Weller,” by Phiz

But it is not Mr. Snodgrass, not Mr. Winkle, not Mr. Tupman, not even Mr. Pickwick to whom The Pickwick Papers owes its success. It is Sam Weller. We can divide Dickens’ life into two ages: B.W. (Before Weller) and A.S. (Anno Sameulis). Before Sam the circulation of Pickwick was about 400; after Sam, it steadily ballooned up to 40,000. Sam Weller is to Dickens what Falstaff was to Shakespeare: the soul of his comic genius. Strange, then, that he arrives in the novel ten chapters in, an unobtrusive boot blacker, a personage little to be taken notice of, one first thinks, only a cog to keep the mechanism of the episode ticking.

Until he speaks. Then unfurls one of the best comic speeches in literature. I cannot describe it; you will have to read it. It concerns Sam Weller’s father, who encounters a “touter” of marriage licenses:

‘Licence, sir, licence?’—‘What’s that?’ says my father.—‘License, sir,” says he,—‘What licence,’ says my father.—‘Marriage licence,’ says the touter.—‘Dash my veskit,’ says my father, ‘I never thought o’ that.’—‘I think you wants one, sir,’ says the touter. My father pulls up and thinks a bit—‘No,’ says he, ‘damme, I’m too old, b’sides I’m a many sizes too large,’ says he.—‘Not a bit on it, sir,’ says the touter.—‘Think not?’ says my father.—‘I’m sure not,’ says he; ‘we married a gen’lm’n twice your size, last Monday.’—‘Did you, though,’ said my father.—‘to be sure we did,’ says the touter, ‘you’re a babby to him—this way, sir—this way!’—and sure enough my father walks arter him, like a tame monkey behind a horgan, into a little back office, vere a feller sat among dirty papers and tin boxes, making believe he was busy. ‘Pray, take a seat, vile I makes out the affidavit, sir,’ says the lawyer. ‘Thank’ee, sir’ says my father, and down he sat, and stared with all his eyes, and his mouth vide open, at the names on the boxes. ‘What’s your name, sir,’ says the lawyer.—‘Tony Weller,’ says my father.—‘Parish?’ says the lawyer.—‘Belle Savage,’ says my father; for he stopped there wen he drove up, and he know’d nothing about parishes, he didn’t.—‘And what’s the lady’s name?’ says the lawyer. My father was stuck all of a heap. ‘Blessed if I know,’ says he.—‘Not know!’ says the lawyer.—‘No more nor you do,’ says my father, ‘can’t I put that in arterwards?’—‘Impossible!’ says the lawyer. ‘Wery well,’ says my father, after he’d thought a moment, ‘put down Mrs. Clarke.’—‘What Clarke?’ says the lawyer, dipping his pen in the ink.—‘Susan Clarke, Markis o’Granby, Dorking,’ says my father; ‘she’ll have me, if I ask, I des-say—I never said nothing to her, but she’ll have me, I know.’ The license was made out, and she did have him, and what’s more she’s got him now…”

Impossible for both writer and reader to let such a character go. Sam Weller becomes Mr. Pickwick’s faithful servant, and master and man trot on together congenially for the rest of the novel, as the old song goes, like horse and carriage. Mr. Pickwick plays the straight man to Sam Weller’s funny man, Mr. Pickwick old, Sam Weller young, Mr. Pickwick naïve, Sam Weller worldly, Mr. Pickwick respectable and educated, Sam Weller educated on the streets—“the only way to make a boy sharp,” as his father says.

The ages of Pickwick and Sam seem to suggest a father-son relationship, but Sam Weller has a father, who is brought in frequently, to great comic effect. As master and servant, they cannot exactly be friends, though there is something over and above amicability in their relationship. Neither is their relationship hierarchical, domineering, superior on one side, slavish, servile, obsequious on the other. They simply love each other, and depend on each other, and that is why Sam cannot leave Pickwick, even when Pickwick, with all the care and love and solicitation in the world, entreats him to.

Samuel Weller and Samuel Pickwick are the two presiding daemons, the two sides of the coin of good humor.³ Pickwick embraces the world because he does not know it; Sam embraces the world because he knows it thoroughly. It is entirely because of Mr. Pickwick’s good humor that he is able to roll through a series of ridiculous, exasperating, sometimes embarrassing misadventures and emerge unscathed. It is entirely because of Sam Weller’s good humor that he can make such statements as “There; now we look compact and comfortable, as the father said ven he cut his little boy’s head off, to cure him o’ squintin’” without so much as batting an eye. It is with this aura of good humor that is so thoroughly the substance of Dickens as a comedian that Sam Weller and his father contrive to have Sam put in prison so that he can remain with his master, that Mr. Pickwick abandons his so firm, so stubborn resolution to not hand over a single shilling to the corrupt lawyers Dodson and Fogg so poor Mrs. Bardell, his onetime persecutor, does not have to endure the dismal debtors’ dump.

The most touching part in all 800 pages of Pickwick is when Mr. Pickwick encounters his old enemy, the unscrupulous Alfred Jingle, and his servant Job Trotter. Because Mr. Pickwick is in debtor’s prison on the grounds of principle, not finance, he can afford to better his situation a little. But Jingle and Job can do no such thing. They are dirty and hungry, desperate and dejected, as most who found themselves in debtor’s prison must have been, as Dickens’ own father was when he was incarcerated in Marshalsea in 1824, when Dickens was 12. “As the world runs,” Dickens tells us, given what he has suffered from Jingle and Job, it would be within Mr. Pickwick’s rights to hand him a sound blow. But instead he hands him something which “clinked” and “somehow or other imparted a sparkle to the eye, and a swelling to the heart.” More aggressively, with as much love and goodness, does Sam march an empty-stomached Job into the kitchen, give him a pot of porter, and order him to “drink that up, ev’ry drop on it, and then turn the pot upside down, to let me see as you’ve took the med’cine.”

Here are love and goodness personified. Here is what we would like to be in our best moments; here is how we would like to be treated in our worst. Bad characters (except unscrupulous lawyers, who are irredeemable), with a sudden reversal in fortune, with compassion and kindness, can reform; bad situations can be resolved. What Dickens writes, Northrop Frye says, “are not realistic novels but fairy tales.”⁴ The older we get, the more we tend to scoff at fairy tales. They are too unrealistic, too dreamlike, too woven of moonbeams and gossamer. In the 19th century literary realism reached its apex; critics have often focused on Dickens’ social commentary and critique of Victorian society.

But why should the two—fairy tale and realistic novel—be opposed? Why should the fairy tale of Pickwick and Sam not also be at one and the same time delightfully, eminently real? Why should we not believe that such people are all around us everywhere, washing the world with the healing waters of their good humor, their kindness, their love?

Some of my happiest memories with my father are of reading Dickens together, he reading out loud in his slow, sweet voice, I resting on his chest, feeling the vibrations as he went from word to thrilling word, sentence to wonderful sentence, sometimes following along with the text, sometimes content to simply drift along with the aural stream. In Pickwick we find Dickens not at his best, perhaps, but at the purest of his comic spirit. It is a comedy that embraces, unites, enlightens, ennobles. It never fails to impart “a sparkle to the eye, a swelling to the heart.” It clinks.

1. Robert Browning, “Pippa’s Song.”

2. G. K. Chesterton: “It mattered little now whether Seymour blew his brains out, so long as Charles Dickens blew his brains in.”

3. after writing this I read in Northrop Frye: “Most of the people who move across the pages of Dickens are neither realistic portraits, like the characters of Trollope, nor ‘caricatures,’ so far as that term implies only a slightly different approach to realistic portraiture. They are humors, like the characters in Ben Jonson… The humor is a character identified with a characteristic…”

4. “Dickens and the Comedy of Humors,” from Northrop Frye’s Writings on the Eighteenth and Nineteenth Centuries, 2005.