Perennial Mr. Pickwick

New Zealand Listener, Volume 30, Issue 755, 8 January 1954, Page 4

Perennial Mr. Pickwick

HE radio version of The Pickwick Papers, described on "page 8, may seem at a glance to be too heroic an abridgment, Can a book which generally runs to about 800 pages be condensed to seven parts, each one requiring only half an hour for broadcasting? The answer is that it can, and that it can also be greatly expanded without much gain for listeners. The Oxford Companion to English Literature names 11 principal elements in the story, opening with the Rochester visit and the meeting with Jingle, and énding with the affairs of Bob Sawyer and Benjamin Allen. Some of the episodes-and all the interpolated short stories-can be omitted without losing the flavour of the book. The indispensable conditions for any adaptation (to which the NZBS production conforms) is that Sam and Tony Weller should be brought together, that the action of Bardell against Pickwick should be included, and that in this famous case the address to the jury by Serjeant Buzfuz should be given as fully as possible.Dickens used the lightest of frameworks for his vast and rambling story. He simply let it grow from one adventure to another, delighting in his inventive power, introducing new characters, and allowing the older ones to change imperceptibly. The result is untidy, with the sort of untidiness in which only genius can afford to indulge. Dickens was 25 when the novel ended as a serial and appeared as.a book; and if he had done nothing more he would have had his name on a masterpiece to be wondered at as the work of so young a man. But Pickwick was also a beginning — "a kind of wild promise," as G. K. Chesterton described it, of what ‘was to come. "It was a vision of the Dickens world-a maze of white roads, a map full of fantastic towns, thundering coaches, clamorous market-places, uproarious inns, strange and swaggering figures."

Edmund Wilson, a more recent critic, has taken this view a little further: "... We are surprised to find rising to the surface already the themes which were to dominate his later work." Some of these themes can be found in the interpolated stories, and Wilson points out that even while Dickens was finishing the last instalments of Pickwick he had begun to write Oliver Twist, the first of his books in which the darker side of his vision was to come forward. Never again, after Pickwick, would the comedy be undiluted. Dickens was a universal genius. His laughter may not have had a note of hysteria (as Wilson suggests), but it was often a necessary relief from the tragic themes of his later books, and the two moods were closely related. As the vision deepened he was led into excesses, so that his pathos became sentimentality, and his humour leaned towards the grotesque. The sombre vein in Dickens has drawn modern critics into a hunt for obsessions. Perhaps they were there from the beginning; but the darkness might have been no more than the sadness which the comic spirit never entirely conceals, and — which breaks through more often as a man is worn down by living and writing. No matter how convincing the critics may be while we read them, a conviction returns that this mind was too turbulent with life to be enclosed by a theory. Pickwick, of all Dickens’s books, can be enjoyed most completely for its own sake. There are people who cannot read Dickens, but it is hard to believe they cannot listen to him. His dialogue, supremely suitable for broadcasting, has an unfailing gusto; and in Pickwick the comedy is without blemish. The flaws came later, as Dickens tried to broaden sorrow into pathos when it should have been left to speak in low tones for itself. Pickwick can be enjoyed like the morning, the strength of the day unspent, but already pouring across the hills froma rising sun.