Our Ten Favorite Moments in the Dickens Chronological Reading Club, from Pickwick to Pictures from Italy

By Rach and Boze

Yo-ho, fellow Dickensians! To celebrate the birthday of the world’s greatest novelist and Day 400 of the Dickens Club, your co-hosts have compiled a list of our favorite moments in the books we’ve read thus far, roughly comprising the first half of Dickens’s career as a novelist. This includes all the novels from Pickwick to Martin Chuzzlewit, along with Sketches by Boz, American Notes, Pictures from Italy (criminally underrated!) and the Christmas Books. At this stage of his career—as he prepared to write Dombey & Son—Dickens was only just beginning to experiment with plotting his stories in advance. What’s remarkable is that so many of the memorable moments on this list seem to have been invented on the fly, from the overflow of his remarkable imagination. What a name he had already made for himself!

“Making a Night of It” (From Sketches by Boz)

If you need a laugh-filled bromance with comic blunders of Pickwickian proportions, “Making a Night Of It” is the Sketch for you. At the time I commented: “Many laugh-out-loud moments; the piece is brilliantly written, as witty as all get-out, and I positively had to stop reading–due to laughter–when we came to ‘five door knockers’ among the possessions ‘feloniously obtained’ by our dissolute partners in plastered crime.”

In his Sketches, published between 1833-36, Dickens was in what our member, Lenny, called his “writing lab,” toying with characters and scenes of London life in these shorter pieces, written for Bell’s Miscellany, the Morning Chronicle, and other publications. Many themes, images, settings, and even characters from his novels can be glimpsed in embryo throughout these years. Even then, there is plenty to delight in, with his wit and incomparable observational powers; nothing escapes his notice, and he even gets to give a nod to his obsession with door-knockers! —Rach

The First Appearance of Mr Jingle

For a book that would revolutionize English literature, The Pickwick Papers—which opens with a droll parody of a Parliamentary meeting—doesn’t immediately grab the reader’s attention. Things begin to pick up in the second chapter, when the Pickwickians find themselves traveling by coach with a curious gentleman in a green coat and a top hat, and a habit of speaking in dashes and fragments (“not worth splitting a guinea… I call; you spin—first time—woman—woman—bewitching woman!”). Robert Douglas-Fairhurst notes that Dickens was likely cribbing Jingle’s staccato delivery from a comic actor named Charles Mathews, but in Boz’s hands Jingle becomes a completely unique character, and one of the most memorable eccentrics in a career full of them. — Boze

The First Appearance of Mr Samuel Weller

–and by this I mean, pretty much ANYTHING SAM WELLER. I don’t know how often I’ve employed a Wellerism myself this past year—and even had a little dialogue in Wellerisms with Boze and the Dickens Fellowship on twitter. Sam has been a highlight of our first year reading together. I loved Dr. Christian’s video lecture that he shared with us, with its emphasis on the importance of Sam in Dickens’s career, calling June 1836 (the month he first shows up at the White Hart Inn), the most important month in Dickens’s life. But learning about how his character catapulted Dickens into celebrity status, a “household word,” was only a proof of what every reader already knows: Sam is an incomparably brilliant creation. Everybody needs a Sam. —Rach

Christmas at Dingley Dell

The subject of Christmas seemed to awaken something in Dickens—an energy, an “enthoosymoosy”—that yielded some of his best work. The three chapters comprising the Christmas sequence in Pickwick Papers—the arrival at Dingley Dell, the story of Gabriel Grub, and the Pickwickians attempting to ice-skate, with nearly fatal results—demonstrate the young Dickens’s love of the holiday and his delight in writing festive scenes. The slow accumulation of detail—the blowing of key-bugles, the cracking of whips over frost, barrels of oysters, hot brandy-and-water, pub windows ornamented with sprigs of holly and red berries—conjures an atmosphere that presages the Christmas celebrations in his later books. And in “The Story of the Goblins Who Stole a Sexton,” Dickens rehearses the events of A Christmas Carol, six years early. — Boze

Pickwick Meets Mr Jingle in the Fleet Prison

Jinglism is a recurring theme here, apparently! I’ll just add that, with every reread of Pickwick, I am more and more moved by Pickwick’s encounter with Jingle in the Fleet prison. It never fails to make me cry—unlikely thing, for a man who has conned our heroes and ruined several prospects for their happiness (Mr Tupman, Miss Wardle). Nonetheless, you must admit, Jingle is like a light in a dark room—albeit, a flashing reflective light, unlike the Pickwickian “sun”–and he can’t help but illumine your world. So, when we unexpectedly encounter our favorite trickster in the Fleet prison, where he is hungry and ragged and has pawned all he owned, it is downright heartbreaking to see that light squelched. He hasn’t lost his personality, but he has lost heart and energy—and nearly his life, most likely. Pickwick’s ability to overcome his just anger in order to help lift Jingle and job out of the situation—becoming almost fatherly in his care of them—is one of the most beautiful moments in literature. —Rach

For a heartbreaking moment from the ‘80s adaptation, here’s the brilliant Patrick Malahide:

The Dissolution of Fagin’s Gang

In Pickwick Papers the twenty-four-year-old Dickens had written what was, by some accounts, the bestselling novel of the nineteenth-century. Wanting to prove that he was more than just a comic novelist, for his second book Dickens went in the opposite direction, writing a story of youthful degradation and urban squalor. What’s remarkable about Oliver Twist is that, for much of the story, Dickens didn’t know where it was going—when a theater manager asked him how the book, then being released in monthly installments, was going to end, Dickens allegedly said he had no clue. Which makes the climax of the story—one of Dickens’s best—all the more impressive. Dickens has used every storytelling trick in his bag of tricks to make us care for Fagin, Bill, Nancy and the rest, and as they meet their seemingly foredoomed fates, he conjures an emotional catharsis to rival Breaking Bad. — Boze

The Wooing of Mr Cucumber (Nicholas Nickleby)

For his third novel, Dickens, like a mad inventor in a lab, attempted to combine the comic foibles of the Pickwick gang with the drama and pathos of Oliver. The result is one of his longest, baggiest, funniest novels, a book where it sometimes feels as though Dickens is sitting at his desk inventing new ways to keep himself awake and amused from scene to scene. Nicholas Nickleby reaches its comedic high point in chapter 41, in which the widowed Mrs Nickleby is accosted by a strange gentleman in a black velvet cap who tosses cucumbers over the wall into her garden. Mr Cucumber (never named in the story but what else would you call him?) proceeds to woo Mrs Nickleby by boasting of his imagined fishing fleets and oyster beds in the Indian Ocean. Sort of a forgotten character even in the longer adaptations, the leek-throwing gentleman seems to prefigure the taloned shopkeeper (“Oh my lungs and liver! Goroo! Goroo!”) in David Copperfield. — Boze

“Who Calls So Loud?”: The Final Episodes of the Rees/Petherbridge Nicholas Nickleby

I talk about the unsurpassable 8.5-hour filmed stage adaptation of Nicholas Nickleby any chance I get, so here goes, again! (Spoiler free.) I enjoyed the entire journey that the group made with Nicholas, Kate, Noggs, and Smike: from Marnie’s diaries to the group chats. Some of us watched (or rewatched) the stage adaptation, but Boze was waiting to finish the last two episodes until he came out to Oregon in December, and what a joy it was. The way they pay off one of the funniest scenes in any adaptation (the Crummles’ fast & loose, happy-ending rendition of Romeo and Juliet) with a heart-rending scene near the finale, is perfect; the way the final tableau ends is…beyond perfect. That slight deviation from the book that makes it, somehow, even more faithful to the original. Something for which Dickens himself would have leapt out of his seat in tears to give a standing ovation. —Rach

Murders, Bells, and Corpse Candles: The Gothic Opening of Barnaby Rudge

Barnaby came as such a surprise–to me personally, and to the group. It was the one with which I was least familiar, having read it so long ago (while obsessed completely with another Dickens), that I’d all but forgotten the plot and characters. But with the opening chapters, we realize we’re not in typical Dickensland here, but in the realm of the historical gothic, with its zig-zagged-roofed old inn, full of personality; a mysterious stranger; a clerk’s story about a ghost connected to a double-murder of twenty-two years before. All this, with talking ravens and revolution…what’s not to love? —Rach

The Dream World of A Christmas Carol

Harry Stone has persuasively shown how A Christmas Carol combines the fairy-tale plots of Dickens’s childhood reading with his own youthful memories of abandonment and neglect. Much of the story—like Andrew Lloyd Weber’s Cats—takes place in a single night, in a liminal space, in a sort of dream world that operates on dream logic. Dickens deftly prepares the reader for the arrival of Jacob Marley’s ghost with a series of ghostly events—the ringing of a bell, a phantom carriage—that makes the apparition, when it finally appears, seem wholly credible. The scene after Marley’s departure in which Scrooge awaits the coming of the next ghost, peering through his chamber window at a London shrouded in spectral fog, is one of Dickens’s eeriest and most evocative. At this stage in his career Dickens could work the fantastical and numinous into his stories effortlessly, but never at the expense of his core message about the importance of looking after society’s most vulnerable. — Boze

What are some of your favorite moments, friends?