The Pickwick Papers is a comic novel. This long Dickens work covers about two years in the life of Samuel Pickwick, English gentleman of independent means. Mr Pickwick is a caricature of a nineteenth century gentleman: pompous and clueless; but also obstinately principled. Many plot elements deal with lawyers and the British legal system, which I found particularly funny. Highly recommended. 

For years, I’ve been reading a Dickens novel more or less annually, usually in the winter months. I’ve worked through all of his novels this way; The Pickwick Papers was my last one. I put it off for two years (see “more or less annually”, above), partly because it’s very long even for Dickens and partly because I was under the impression it would be vignettes instead of a fully plotted novel, and silly to boot. How wrong I was! It starts out vignette-ish, to be sure, but a plot kicks in after too long; you can actually see it begin to happen around chapter four, which is rather exciting, as young Dickens (twenty-four when he wrote this) starts to rev his engine and commit to his characters. It’s very funny, and in some places farcical or satirical, but it isn’t silly. It’s about goodness, and how the fundamental dignity of goodness is unassailable by the minor common indignities of being alive. Pickwick is a wonderful character, but Sam Weller—his omni-capable cockney valet—is better still. (Wodehouse’s Jeeves, although his accent is more couth, and he would shudder at the comparison, surely derives a strand or two of DNA from Weller.) Dialogue and exposition are clear and uncluttered; Dickens hasn’t yet worked himself up into a clotted descriptive style, so all the actual writing is fresh. And the interpolated stories are just brilliant, moving and surprising and atmospheric, themselves Dickens plots in miniature: the Tale of the Queer Client, for instance, who pursues vengeance on his cruel father-in-law through the courts unto the old man’s death, or the proto-Christmas Carol tale of the goblins who steal a curmudgeonly sexton on Christmas Eve and return him to Earth a better man. I was so pleasantly surprised by all of it; it was an absolute joy to read. Now I have to decide what to do next: the nonfiction and journalism, starting with Sketches By Boz, or begin a reread of the novels? Source: Bromley libraries

Deservedly a comic classic and a fascinating insight into the development of Dickens; you can see his grasp of the form expanding practically page by page.  This is easily my 5th or 6th reread and it won’t be the last