Casting:
Mr. Pickwick - Mark Williams
Sam Weller - Nick Moran
Mr. Weller Sr. - Sting (because I'd already mentally cast Nick as Sam, and my only notion of a father to Nick is his movie-dad Sting in Lock, Stock and Two Smoking Barrels)
Mr. Winkle - Ben Whishaw
Mr. Jingle - Russell Brand

Annnnd that's about it. I'm more than three quarters of the way through these adventures, but some of the characters just don't stick. Mr. Tupman? Mr. Snodgrass? They're supposed to be just as important members in the Pickwick Club as Mr. Winkle, but they're very much in the background. And anyway, I find it difficult to mentally-cast Dickens, especially when he's being so damned satirical about everyone and everything. Everyone becomes a caricature. It's like a Monty Python sketch half the time. Granted, when the plot moves into the Fleet debtor's prison, it's not as much of a lark, but even with this grim shift, interactions continue to be ridiculous in the main.

Pickwick Papers is a travelog for those who like a slurp or two, and food. Alcohol is imbibed pretty much any time of the day, in various forms, many times accompanied with slap up meals, being in debtors prison doesn't even hinder the quenching of thirst, with porter, gin, rum, brandy, or whatever else. Of course there are the tales of travels, relationships, adventures and misadventures as well. Great humour, great stories. I was a fan of Dickens as a teenager but I had never read The Pickwick Papers, and as always with Dickens, it gives you a feel of how different, bad and good, the 19th century was, and unfortunately how undifferent it was to modern times.

surprisingly funny for dickens.

Just bought this from the library used book store. It is a 1964 reprint edition. Gorgeous, has a nice heavy feel to it. I look forward to reading it.

I learned while reading this that this was Dickens’s first full book, although it had been produced as most of his books as a serial being published in periodicals. What I also realized with this book is that while writing very amusing characters with amusing lines, Dickens was clearly paid by the word. I also think that in writing in serial format, he needed to both tell the overall story of Pickwick and his friends’ adventures, but also provide smaller stories they could be begun and completed in each week’s piece. For this reason - and the fact that I have also read that Dickens did not have an overall arc of the book when he began - the real story (the arc of the dtory) was difficult to understand and piece together.