Pickwick Club Research Articles

Dickens and the Bible: "What Providence Meant" by Jennifer Gribble

Reviewed by: Dickens and the Bible: "What Providence Meant" by Jennifer Gribble Winter Jade Werner (bio) Jennifer Gribble. Dickens and the Bible: "What Providence Meant." Routledge, 2021. Pp. x + 215. $160.00. ISBN 978-0-367-50865-4 (hb). In an oft-cited 1859 letter to Wilkie Collins, Charles Dickens compared the construction of a novel to the "ways of Providence": "I think the business of art is to lay all [the] ground carefully, but with the care that conceals itself–to show, by a backward light, what everything has been working to–but only to suggest, until the fulfilment comes. These are the ways of Providence" (qtd. in Gribble 2). Far too often, literary critics have taken this–and other Victorian references to "providence"–as signaling an investment in teleological plots with tidy resolutions, animated (they imply) by naïve optimism in God's beneficent design. Take, for instance, Tina Young Choi's recent argument (drawn from critics such as Thomas Vargish and George Levine) that the "providential aesthetic" of the period was characterized by a sense of the "meaningfulness of narrative structure and closure," which itself was underpinned by a "comprehensive sense of order and purpose [that] necessarily discouraged the imagining [of] alternative courses" (Choi 65). Here, "providentialism" and "contingency" are figured as mutually exclusive. While such a binary is useful for thinking through the mid-Victorian novel's seemingly split nature–its attraction to an almost totalizing coherence, on the one hand, and its accommodation of the counterfactual or the radically contingent, on the other–it has tended to rely on a tired and facile understanding of "providence." It is in this capacity that Jennifer Gribble's Dickens and the Bible: "What Providence Meant" makes one of its most profound contributions. It reminds literary critics that "providence" as a living theological concept regularly amounted to something more than the belief that all events happen for a reason, that all history is happily and divinely preordained. In fact, Gribble points out, Dickens participated in the mid-Victorian questioning of natural theology and the accompanying revaluation of "what Providence meant" precisely to counter contemporary discourses that posited a supposedly "normative 'Nature' and its 'eternal laws,''' including utilitarianism, the "physical sciences," and millenarianism (94). In this sense, at the heart of Dickens's understanding of providence–not unlike those [End Page 215] advanced by thinkers such as Mikhail Bakhtin and Paul Ricoeur, Gribble suggests–was precisely the recognition of contingency in the human enactment of the Judeo-Christian grand narrative: that is, the recognition that "'the passionate unanswerable needs of human beings,' together with anarchic and unpredictable natural process, require a different way of thinking about 'goodness,' and how it might be enabled to prevail" (96). Her six chapters demonstrate Dickens's use of this grand narrative as the "master-plot from which the intricate and inventive plotting [of his novels] takes its bearings" (196). A brief introduction is followed by a chapter on "contexts," which helpfully outlines broad religious dynamics in Victorian society, its shifting understandings of providence, and the "generic conventions and concerns" of the providential novel (21). Chapter 2 focuses on The Pickwick Papers and A Christmas Carol. Here, Gribble shows that "the picaresque adventures of the Pickwick Club" not only register the "Judeo-Christian narrative of Creation, Fall, and Redemption," but also allow Dickens "to engage with the truth claims of other contemporary narratives" (42). An impressive reading of A Christmas Carol argues that the ghost story captures how the Judeo-Christian narrative complicates linear temporality, attending to Dickens's interest in the Incarnation and the doctrine of anamnesis in particular. Chapters 3, 4, and 5 consider Dombey and Son, Bleak House, and Little Dorrit respectively, showing how "biblical intertextuality informs the moral trajectory" of each novel (14). In a series of careful readings, these chapters examine Dickens's many allusions to the Beatitudes, the Sermon on the Mount, the parables, Revelation, and so on, in conjunction with the ethical insights of Bakhtin and Ricoeur. Of particular note in these chapters is Gribble's forceful effort to explain and clarify the complex view of moral agency embodied in three of Dickens's most controversial heroines, Florence...

Plagiarizing the Victorian Novel: Imitation, Parody, Aftertext, by Adam Abraham

Reviewed by: Plagiarizing the Victorian Novel: Imitation, Parody, Aftertext by Adam Abraham Lisa Rodensky (bio) Plagiarizing the Victorian Novel: Imitation, Parody, Aftertext, by Adam Abraham; pp. v + 282. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2019, £75.00, £22.99 paper, $99.99, $29.00 paper, $24.00 ebook. "This book offers a new kind of reception history," promises Adam Abraham in his prologue to Plagiarizing the Victorian Novel: Imitation, Parody, Aftertext—a promise he fulfills in the five illuminating chapters that follow (19). That said, the book's title is a bit misleading, since Abraham is not that interested in plagiarism itself. The book's subtitle is a more accurate description of its topic. Here Abraham identifies two familiar subgenres and a third that he invents. Acknowledging Gérard Genette's earlier use of "after-text" (Palimpsests: Literature in the Second Degree, translated by Channa Newman and Claude Doubinsky [University of Lincoln Press, 1997], 399), Abraham loses the hyphen and widens the term's meaning to take in not just authorial versions/revisions, but also the varieties he specifically names in the title and subtitle (18). Moreover, Abraham renames the original-text-plus-aftertext(s) as the "work" which encompasses "the totality of a literary existence" (19). Rather than sideline what many see as mere rip-offs of an original text, Abraham argues that scholars should recognize aftertexts as significant "source[s] of literary knowledge" (20). Charles Dickens, Edward Bulwer Lytton, and George Eliot are the novelists around whom Abraham situates the aftertexts. The authors of the decidedly noncanonical productions are either anonymous or long forgotten, with the exception of William Makepeace Thackeray (a premier Bulwer Lytton parodist), along with the somewhat less exceptional Rosina Bulwer Lytton, and Edith Simcox, George Eliot's longtime devotee. Although I have reservations about Abraham's new definition of the so-called work, his analysis constitutes a significant contribution to reception history and to a deeper understanding of the marginal texts that circulated around the canonical originals. Like the Victorian period itself, Abraham begins with Dickens's The Posthumous Papers of the Pickwick Club (1836–7), a text which launched a thousand aftertexts, not to mention Pickwick cigars, breeches, and chintzes. Focusing on Pickwick imitations, Abraham examines two varieties: club imitations and prostheses (plagiaristic extensions of original characters and plots). While current Pickwick readers might have little or no interest in the club part of Pickwick (Dickens himself lost interest in it), the club imitators made it their raison d'etre. Abraham exhumes three such imitations and gives an engaging account of the ways each imagines club scenes that they believe Dickens "was going to write, meant to write, advertised in the prospectus, or neglected to write" (30). It is not that Abraham thinks these imitations give the real Pickwick a run for his money (he does not), but rather that in them we witness how another group of Dickens's readers actually read the book; in short, they become an untapped resource for reception studies. Not surprisingly, these aftertextual authors try their hands at Dickensian hyperbole, dialect, and interpolated stories, and Abraham takes them seriously—but not too seriously. Instead of trying to elevate these imitations, Abraham helps us to see Dickens through their eyes and to consider (more specifically) how they tune in to the undercurrents of racism, anti-Semitism, and sexuality that later critics have identified in the novel. So, for instance, examining the more anti-Semitic outgrowths, Abraham argues that they are derived "from the repressed Jewish origins of Samuel Pickwick"; Abraham supports his argument by adducing convincing evidence (his own and that gleaned from [End Page 612] other critical works) of the novel's anti-Semitic impulses (48). Perhaps Abraham's most provocative speculation concerns moments in the Pickwick aftertexts that evoke Warren's Blacking well before information about Dickens's past would have been publicly known. Were Dickens's imitators picking up on the references that he could not help but drop into his novels? Giving appropriate credit to Rosemarie Bodenheimer for the work she does in Knowing Dickens (2010), Abraham reads these aftertexts carefully to illuminate what Dickens's contemporary readers might have registered themselves. If Abraham's work...

SYSTEMATIC REVIEW AND META-ANALYSIS OF THE PALATAL SURGERIES IN THE TREATMENT OF OBSTRUCTIVE SLEEP APNEA

Abstract Background The first description of a patient with obstructive sleep apnea was in ‘The Posthumous Papers of the Pickwick Club’ published by English writer Charles Dickens in 18361. The first introduction of the terms ‘sleep apnea syndrome’ and ‘obstructive sleep apnea syndrome’ was by Guilleminault et al in 1967. Subsequently, Guilleminault coined the term ‘upper airway resistance syndrome’ in 19932. Objectives This paper aims to examine published articles between January 2008 and January 2019 on the different palatal surgeries performed on OSA patients and the treatment outcomes, which in turn will be used to determine two things. The first being the effectiveness of various palatal surgical techniques in treating OSAS and the second (if applicable) the most effective of the palatal surgical techniques in treating OSAS. Patients and Methods The current review followed the guidelines of preferred reporting items for systematic reviews and meta-analysis statement 2009 (PRISMA)5. The detailed steps of methods were described elsewhere as well as PRISMA checklist. The quality of relevant studies was assessed using NIH quality assessment tool for observational cohort and cross -sectional studies as well as NIH tool for quality assessment for case series studies. Results Meta-analyses of relevant studies showed that the surgical technique that achieved the best reduction on AHI was the lateral pharyngoplasty followed by the Anterior Palatoplasty, with a significant mean reduction of [(SMD= -0.848, 95% CI (-1.209 – -0.487), p-value<0.001) and (SMD= -0.864, 95% CI (-1.234 – -0.494), p-value<0.001), respectively]. The technique responsible for the best improvement in ESS was the Relocation Pharyngoplasty, with a significant mean reduction of [SMD= -0.998, 95% CI (-1.253 – -0.743), p-value<0.001]. Minimal O2 saturation level improved most with the Expansion Sphincter Pharyngoplasty, with a significant mean reduction of [SMD= 1.011, 95% CI (0.581 – 1.440), p-value<0.001]. The surgical procedure that result in the best post-operative VAS was Z-Palatoplasty, with a significant mean reduction of [SMD= -1. 551, 95% CI (-2.049 – -1.052), p-value<0.001]. soft palate length change with a significant mean reduction of [SMD= -2.219, 95% CI (-2.730 – 1.708), p-value<0.001]. Finally, meta-analyses of relevant studies showed that expansion sphincter pharyngoplasty achieved the overall highest success rate [Event rate= 77%, 95% CI (65.4%– 85.5%), p-value<0.001] Conclusion The best procedure for treating OSA varies from patient to patient and there is no universal cure-all. Careful patient selection and pre-operative evaluation are mandatory.

Translation Strategies for Phonographic Deviations: A Psycholinguistic Approach

The article proposes a psycholinguistic approach to investigating translation strategies on the basis of information obtained in the course of the retrospective experiment designed by the authors and defined as ‘Partial Delayed Report of Problems and their Solution’. The aim of the research is to expose and describe translation strategies for resolving such a variety of translation difficulties as phonographic deviations. The object of the research is translation strategies as a mental by nature and complex by structure plan for the translator’s actions. The subject of the research is specifics of the above strategies’ formation and implementation in literary translation.
 The main method of the research is retrospective experimental technique ‘Partial Delayed Report of Problems and their Solution’; other methods employed include algorithmic modeling (for prospected translation strategies and substrategies) and comparative analysis (for control units in the source and target texts).
 The material of the research was twofold: (1) the fragment of Charles Dickens’s novel “The Posthumous Papers of the Pickwick Club” and its translations carried out by 21 semi-professional subjects of the experiment; (2) the subjects’ reports in the form of the answers to the questionnaire completed and submitted after the translation. Since strategies in translation studies are mostly dealt with within cultural approach, the authors turned to the concept of communication strategies as a foundation of their own psycholinguistic model of translation strategies for phonographic deviations.
 The analysis of the experimental data supports the conclusion that the translator initially forms a strategy (conscious mental plan) of overcoming a certain variety of translation difficulties (such as phonographic deviations) and then implements it as a sequence of moves (substrategies) aimed at providing for the most natural for the target reader translation variant.

Łódzkie kawiarnie literackie w II połowie XX wieku

The article is an attempt to reconstruct a fragment of the history of literary Łódź on the basis of previously forgotten literary texts, memories, anecdotes or scattered press notes. The meeting places for writers just after 1945 were cafes located in Śródmieście, including Honoratka, Fraszka, Pickwick Club. In their interiors, there were meetings of poets, literary debuts, and thundering verbal fencing of intellectuals gathered around a coffee table.

The embodiment of the prose libretto in opera genre (on the example of the works by M. Mussorgsky, D. Shostakovich, S. Prokofi ev and G. Shantyr)

The embodiment of the prose libretto in opera genre (on the example of the works by M. Mussorgsky, D. Shostakovich, S. Prokofi ev and G. Shantyr)

Positively the Last Appearance: "BOZ" in Advertisements for Dombey and Son

Positively the Last Appearance:"BOZ" in Advertisements for Dombey and Son William F. Long (bio) and Paul Schlicke (bio) In this paper we report that Dickens's famous pseudonym survived for a time in publishers' advertisements in association with material which, by then, was itself attributed solely to "Charles Dickens."1 Attribution of Pickwick Papers In July 1836, "Boz," author of two volumes of selected Sketches with another in preparation and current "editor" of the monthly numbers of The Posthumous Papers of the Pickwick Club, was revealed to be Charles Dickens.2 By November 1837, as the serial neared its end, Dickens determined that, in volume form, it should carry the authorial name "Charles Dickens." Its publishers, Chapman and Hall, fresh in the trade and evidently happy to accommodate their best-selling author, agreed. Thereafter, with a few minor [End Page 101] exceptions,3 the title pages of all of Dickens's novels carried the words "by Charles Dickens." Both Dickens and his publishers, nevertheless, were clearly conscious of the attention that the famous pseudonym would attract to any product to which it was attached. In November 1836 Dickens, negotiating the editorship of a new magazine with the publisher Richard Bentley, emphasized "the assistance 'Boz's' name just now, would prove to the circulation" (Letters 1: 190). And a year later, Chapman and Hall, notwithstanding the "Charles Dickens" tag they had attached to the title page of Pickwick, advertised the novel as a work "by Boz."4 Attribution of the Novels after Pickwick The publishing arrangement for Pickwick – periodic installments "edited by Boz" later gathered to form a novel "by Charles Dickens" – both exploited the commercial attractiveness of the pseudonym and accommodated Dickens's apparent desire to signal his arrival as a fully-fledged author by the use of his patronym. The arrangement set a precedent. Oliver Twist, published monthly "by Boz" in Bentley's Miscellany (itself edited "by Boz"), eventually appeared in three volumes "by Charles Dickens." Nicholas Nickleby and Martin Chuzzlewit, the monthly numbers of both of which bore convoluted titles implying their contents to be assorted material "edited by Boz," were both published in volumes "by Charles Dickens." In between Nickleby and Chuzzlewit, the (various) part forms of Master Humphrey's Clock bore "by Boz" labels, an attribution which, by implying authorship rather than editorship, it has been suggested, is a signal of the "ambiguity of the conception of the Clock – part miscellany, later mainly novel[s]" (Patten 268). The serial resulted in five volumes. Three, appearing in October 1840, April 1841 and December 1841 respectively, contained sections of the Clock itself; two others, also appearing in December 1841, separately comprised the two novels contained in the work – The Old Curiosity Shop and Barnaby Rudge. Authorship of all five volumes was credited to "Charles Dickens." Thereafter, from Dombey and Son onwards, installments of Dickens's novels, whether appearing individually or contained in one of the weekly [End Page 102] periodicals he later edited, always bore the authorial name "Charles Dickens."5 During the latter part of the 1840s, too, Dickens stopped referring to himself as "Boz" in his correspondence.6 Attribution in Advertisements for the Novels after Pickwick We now consider the attributions of authorship (or editorship) of Dickens's novels as they were announced in publishers' press advertisements. In the sense that Dickens might be expected to have had influence over the content of these notices, they may be said to be "authorized." In this context it is noteworthy that Dickens was evidently conscious from early in his career of his target markets. On 3 August 1836, he informed the publisher John Macrone that he had agreed to supply sketches (promised to Macrone for a forthcoming volume of a second series of Sketches by Boz) for initial serial appearance in the newly launched Carlton Chronicle: The circulation I believe is a small one. So much the better – Fewer people will see the Sketches before they are collected. It is all among the nobs too – Better still. They'll buy the book (Letters 1: 160). And the terms of his formal agreements with Bentley about editing The Memoirs of Joseph Grimaldi and with Henry Colburn about editing...

Variations of grotesque in the novels pf Charles Dickens

The article deals with classification and analyze of various types of grotesque in the novels of a distinguished English prose writer Charles Dickens. Grotesque is considered as a key method of humor. It combines as well as humorous and satirical goals. Despite the fact that grotesque uses broad exaggeration and reduces psychological accuracy, Charles Dickens managed to make this technique a harmonious part of the imaginative world of his realistic novels. We take for our analyse the early novels as well as examples of mature literary works (“The Posthumous Papers of the Pickwick Club”, “The adventures of Oliver Twist”, “Dombey and Son”, “David Copperfield”, “Great Expectations” etc.).

Historia del síndrome de apnea-hipopnea obstructiva del sueño (SAHOS)

La historia de la apnea obstructiva del sueño es larga y complicada desde sus primeras descripciones en el siglo XIX con el relato de Pickwick en la primera novela de Charles Dickens. La definición de este término por parte de diferentes investigadores resalta la importancia de comprender las entidades asociadas al síndrome, como la hipoventilación alveolar y la somnolencia diurna excesiva. De esta forma, los estudios neurofisiológicos adelantados desde entonces, el desarrollo de la conferencia de la sociedad europea de neurología de 1964, la descripción del síndrome en pacientes pediátricos, la confirmación de la comorbilidad cardiovascular asociada a la enfermedad, la traqueostomía como tratamiento y la creación de implantes de estimuladores del nervio hipogloso —pasando por el descubrimiento de Sullivan de la presión positiva como tratamiento en casa— han sido esenciales para la comprensión de este síndrome.

Vellerismist – ühest erilisest väikevormist / About one specific minor form—Wellerism

Ütluste eritüübina määratletavat ilmingut nimega vellerism on senises eestikeelses teaduskirjanduses käsitletud napilt. Kuigi vellerismi peetakse üldiselt rahvusvaheliselt levinuks, ei saa siiski rääkida selle ühetaolisest populaarsusest kõigis keeltes ja kultuurides. Ei ole ka ühtset arusaama, millal on see väikevorm alguse saanud ning kas vellerismi algust tuleks otsida rahvaluulest või kirjandusest. Samad küsimused kerkivad ka eestikeelse vellerismi uurimisel. Artiklis annan sissevaate vellerismi kujunemisse ja käsitlustesse eri keeltes ning vaatlen seesuguste väljendite esmakordset esinemist eesti keeles vanemate allikate – kirjavahetuste, käsikirjaliste ainekogude, kalendrite, juturaamatute põhjal. My article focusses on a phenomenon of figurative speech called Wellerism. The term originates from a work of fiction, named after the central character of Charles Dickens’s novel The Posthumous Papers of the Pickwick Club (1836–1837), Samuel Weller, who uses plenty of original expressions. Even today, the researcher of proverbs Archer Taylor is mistakenly considered to have coined the term Wellerism, although he only applied this term which had started to spread both in England and America already earlier almost simultaneously with the publishing of the novel. We have to say that already the contemporaries of Dickens noticed that the expressions, which had become popular due to this work, were nothing new as figurative minor forms—such forms had been known in different languages already much earlier. Wellerism is defined as an expression consisting, as a rule, of three parts: a saying, a speaker and an accompanying sentence or a description of the situation. Some kind of a cliché, such as a proverb, can be used as the saying. The humorous moments caused by the conflict between these two parts play a central role here.Similar expressions to Wellerism can be dated back for centuries, and more and more studies can confirm that they are spread among almost all nations. There is still no solid understanding about the precise starting point of the phenomenon or about whether such figurative expressions can be considered as the phenomena of folklore or literature. Traditionally, Wellerism is studied as a genre belonging to the so-called minor forms of folklore (proverbs, sayings), differentiating between popular or original Wellerisms and literary or secondary Wellerisms. The study of older texts is made difficult by the scarcity of known source materials because in the German cultural space, for example, such expressions have been extremely popular since the 15th century, but the use of them in printed texts was avoided for a long time because of their crude comics and obscenity. More suitable texts for study were not published separately, but were included in publications which contained proverbs. The only common area between these two lies in the presentation of proverbs as parts of Wellerisms, but with an entirely different aim of amplifying the grotesque as the didacticism, characteristic to proverbs is overridden by mockery.Estonian-language Wellerisms have so far not been studied, only the relations between Wellerisms and narrative creativity have been briefly touched upon. Folklorists have even claimed that there are almost no Wellerisms in Estonian folklore since the number of recorded texts is very small when compared with other short folklore forms. Resulting from the current study, we can argue that Wellerisms reached the Estonian cultural space mainly via the German language in the second half of the 19th century. This is clearly confirmed by the correspondences between the learned men of the time who discussed the subject and suggested that relying on the example of the German language, such forms should be searched for the Estonian language as well. However, such searches more often resulted in introducing Wellerisms into the Estonian language by Estophile Baltic Germans who started to publish such texts in books of popular applied literature such as calendars and in collections of stories. As expected, due to this, Wellerisms became popular and spread in the word-of-mouth communication. As the first recordings of Estonian folklore originate from about the same time, we can treat the Wellerism in Estonian folklore mostly as a short form influenced by printed literature having no original basis in folklore. Numerous examples of its relations with narratives, especially with anecdotes, allow us to talk about the Wellerism as an existing, but not too prominent folklore genre. At the same time, although the number of recordings is small, we should not believe that this short form, which is widespread in different cultures and languages of the world, is only an unimportant side phenomenon in Estonian folklore having arrived under some foreign influence. Estonian Wellerisms have had their own role in the Estonian figurative language in the past as well as they have it today.

Dickens, Miscellanies, and Classical Traditions of Satire

Dickens, Miscellanies, and Classical Traditions of Satire John Drew (bio) Adetailed examination of Charles Dickens's influence on the genesis and development of the periodical that was originally advertised in the Autumn of 1836 as "The Wits' Miscellany" has yet to be made. Nevertheless I am going to argue that the context of its establishment was something of a watershed in the development of Dickens's approach to satirical writing as a journalist, editor and author.1 "The Wits' Miscellany" was the planned title for the new monthly magazine that the publisher was projecting in 1836, to be jointly penned by the leading humorists of the day, and edited by the intensely fashionable "Boz," creative force behind a strange monthly confection of narratives known as The Posthumous Papers of the Pickwick Club, then taking literary London by storm. At Dickens's suggestion, we are led to believe, the title soon mutated from "The Wits' Miscellany" to Bentley's Miscellany, prompting R. H. Barham's quip "but why go to the other extreme?" The joke acts as an illustration of something that will also be touched on in this article, namely the place in satirical traditions of the hit which depends for its effect upon the identification of an individual victim. This gives satire a particular kind of hold which is more of a bite than an embrace. In exploring such matters, Dickensian satire will inevitably be brought into conversation–perhaps even criminal conversation–with the central Dickensian theme of conviviality.2 With its emphasis on shared [End Page 221] enjoyment, sociability and consensus, the convivial would seem to be at odds with the properly satirical, which has to leave its sting in somebody's flesh, and which usually exposes two sides to any question, leaving some unfortunate soul–at times even its readers–uncomfortably stranded on the wrong bank, and scrambling for safety. This naturally prompts the question of what Dickens himself, as a young writer already being lionized for his wit in the mid 1830s, understood by such terms, as they affected the practice of his craft. In other words, how did Dickens orientate himself as a budding humorist against the existing satirical and comic traditions of his day? To be sure, this is not a fashionable line of enquiry.3 Following the great twentieth-century re-evaluation of Dickens as an artist, we have perhaps become conditioned to look for ways in which his works anticipated, predicted and prototyped his Modernist and postmodern successors and influenced the international current of prose fiction that was to come after. Nevertheless, it must occasionally be permissible to glance upstream as well as down, and try to understand Dickens's aesthetic and ethical development as a writer in terms of those he acknowledged and navigated amongst as forerunners: in this case well-established exponents of classical traditions of literary attack and reform. Dickens's "small Latin and less Greke" as a schoolboy is, in this respect, irrelevant, because such traditions were so widely diffused in Regency, Georgian and Victorian print culture, partly though the periodical press, but also through the warp and weft of parliamentary rhetoric, which of course, Dickens himself was as responsible as anyone for weaving into text during the 1830s (Hessell ch. 5). As George Augustus Sala would put it, in his book-length obituary of his mentor and former employer, Dickens as a young journalist "had listened to masters in every style of rhetoric: he had followed Henry Brougham the Demosthenes, Shiel the Cicero, O'Connell the Mirabeau, of their age" (36–37). A classical education was by no means a prerequisite to participation in a literary culture imbued with neoclassical tendencies, and which was thoroughly accustomed to adapting familiar stylistic formulae and imaginative reference points in the contest between conservative and radical traditions. Dickens was literally and literarily in the thick of it. [End Page 222] Party spirits, party warfare and the satirical stakes were all high during the stormy passage of the Catholic Emancipation Act (1829), the "Great Reform" Act (1832), and the implementation of the radical Whig reform agenda during the Grey and first two Melbourne ministries (1830–39)–in particular as effects of the...

Analysis of the Civilian Consciousness Reflected in Posthumous Papers of the Pickwick Club

Charles Dickens (1812-1870) is the founder of the English realistic criticism in the 19 th century. Posthumous Papers of the Pickwick Club is the first novel of Dickens. It uses the contemprary life as the writing material and regards the ordinary people as the hero in the novel, which makes the contribution to the English literature. This thesis analyzes on civilian consciousness which reflected in this comedy so as to understand Dickens’ thoughts deeply.

Plagiarizing Pickwick : Imitations of Immortality

Will perennial bachelor Samuel Pickwick ever marry? Will he travel abroad? Will he die? Will he be mistaken for a lunatic and locked in an asylum? These and other questions remain unanswered by The Posthumous Papers of Pickwick Club. Into this narrative void hastened a league of imitating authors, with imitative names such as Bos and Quiz and Poz; they knew answers and were keen to share them in exchange for shillings and pence. Commentators from Edgar Johnson to John Bowen have identified this Pickwick mania or phenomenon, and diligent Dickensians have produced annotated lists of various plagiaristic publications. (1) Although Dickens himself could complain, in fiery Nickleby proclamation, of and imitations of our delectable Works (781), critical writing on subject is not extensive. One can find sustained analysis in Louis James and Mary Teresa McGowan, but contemporary readers have generally accepted Dickens's dismissal of wretched imitations. Without exonerating their malfeasance (which may be real), I want to argue that early imitations of The Pickwick Papers can be illuminating--and strange. Anonymous, hackneyed and cheap publications such as Posthumous Papers of Cadgers' and Pickwick in America will each offer a reading of Dickens's text. Despite title appended above, plagiarism is in some ways an imperfect description of Pickwickian excrescences, which flourished from 1837 to 1842 and range from novel-length sequels to aborted serial publications to songbooks, jest books and theatrical adaptations. (2) According to OED, plagiary derives from plagiarius, a kidnapper, someone who abducts children or slaves. Dickens certainly may have experienced a paternal pang at loss of his intellectual progeny, but Peter Shaw further defines plagiarism as the art of using work of another with intent to deceive (327). It is not clear degree to which deception was intended in works that are Pickwick-branded. Many Pickwickian spinoffs are forthright about their imitative status. In incomplete Droll Discussions and Queer Proceedings of Magnum-Fundum (1838), narrator admits that the glorious achievements which 'Boz' has recorded of Pickwickians, gave rise to foundation of Magnum-Fundum Club (2). Of course, lax nineteenth-century copyright laws made such creative intervention possible. By today's standards, some of more enthusiastic Pickwick-inspired works might be read as forms of fan fiction. A tension emerges between two views of a literary text. D. F. McKenzie explains that in first view, a text is authorially sanctioned, contained, and historically definable; according to second view, a text is always incomplete, and therefore open, unstable, subject to perpetual re-making by its readers, performers, or audience (45). Writing The Pickwick Papers, Dickens perhaps imagined that he was composing text No. 1, but Pickwickian successors decided that his book was, in fact, No. 2. Rather than compel imitations of Pickwick into an existing category (such as plagiarism or fan fiction), one might consider this unwieldy batch as prostheses--artificial extensions to Pickwick corpus. (3) Pickwick prostheses make available aspects of original that are omitted, muted, implied, curtailed, forgotten, repressed, or secreted to distant corners. They interpret and interpenetrate with The Pickwick Papers and stand, alongside reviews and newspaper extracts, among earliest and most vivid responses to Dickens's text. Two categories emerge: works that retain Pickwickian innocence and those that draw on darker, hidden energies and discover instances of anti-Semitism, racism and sexual desire. By way of introduction, it will help to foreground a specimen from field, one that is emblematic of Pickwick prostheses. The Penny Pickwick, by Bos, may or may not be best of lot, but it is certainly longest; it was published weekly, from 1837 to 1839, and was gathered into twenty-eight monthly parts. …

The Omnicompetent Narrator from George Eliot to Jonathan Franzen

In April of 1873, four months after publication of final volume of Middlemarch, a glowing appraisal of George Eliot appeared in Atlantic Monthly. Whether her latest novel was a success or a failure, reviewer, Arthur George Sedgwick, hesitated to say. Rosamond and Mr. Brooke, he thought, were less memorable than Becky Sharpe or members of Pickwick Club, and Eliot's portrait of a provincial society was less beautiful than her portrait of sibling dynamics in The Mill Floss. Still, Middlemarch established Eliot as a novelist whose erudition was unprecedented: History, science, art, literature, language, she is mistress of' (493). Along with her keen moral insight, one of Eliot's great gifts as a novelist, according to Sedgwick, was sheer range of her knowledge. It is often said that realist novel, relative to other literary modes (epic or romance) and genres (poetry or drama), orients itself toward empirical realm, studding its plots with information about natural and social world. (1) But certain realist novelists repeatedly get singled out for much they seem to know. (2) Reviewers have praised, for instance, Goethe, Balzac, or Melville in terms that Sedgwick applied to Eliot--whereas those terms are rarely applied to, say, Austen, Flaubert, or James. This holds true of contemporary fiction as well: novelists like Marilynne Robinson or Joseph O'Neill are hailed for their taut prose or control of mood, while Richard Powers and Jonathan Franzen are more often championed for their encyclopedic intellects. One 2002 reviewer of The Corrections marveled that novel's author seemed to know everything, from the names of flowers chosen by corporate gardeners (mums, begonias, liriope) to the wear and tear--both natural and malign--suffered by signalling systems of branch railway lines in rural Midwest to the depredations suffered by Brezhnev-era power generators in Soviet satellite countries (Lezard). (3) Of course, not all critics find such praiseworthy. In 2001, James Wood famously denounced what he called hysterical realism infecting contemporary fiction, exemplified by novelists such as David Foster Wallace and Zadie Smith, who showcase a wealth of obscure and far-flung social knowledge by peppering their plots with information about everything from the sonics of volcanoes to how to make a fish curry in Fiji to terrorist cults in Kilbum! And about New Physics! And so on (n.p.). While Wood credits (or rather faults) Don DeLillo for this trend in its recent iteration, hyper-informed narrator is part of a long novelistic tradition, one that was crucially shaped, I argue, by George Eliot. By end of her career, Eliot had become associated with a certain type of omniscient narrator--I will call it omnicompetent narrator--that would be adopted by several novelists in her immediate wake (including Trollope, Flowells, and Dreiser), and would be revitalized by Smith, Franzen, and their peers. One factor that provoked Eliot to experiment with omnicompetent narrator, I claim, was her fear that a specializing division of labor was leading to extinction of generalist. Some of Eliot's contemporaries attributed rapid pace of specialization, in late nineteenth century, to an accelerating pace of production: Formerly, all science could be grasped by a single mind, remarked William Dean Flowells in 1891, but now man who hopes to become great or useful in science must himself to a single department (144). But specialization, Eliot recognized, was not simply an organic effect of there suddenly being more to know. The notion that an individual needed to devote himself' to a single field in order to be credible was also an ideological product of professionalization. Striving to establish monopolies of competence (Larson 15) over fields of knowledge, nineteenth-century professional organizations needed to persuade public to distrust nonprofessionals: to distrust, that is, practitioners who had not been through their systems of training and credentialing. …

Dickens in New Zealand

AbstractFour months after the first settlers of the New Zealand Company landed on a windswept beach in Wellington New Zealand in 1840, they founded the first Pickwick Club outside Great Britain. The expressed aim of the Club was to spread the ‘fame of the author’ in ‘this savage land’, but it is an interesting paradox that a novel which makes fun of British institutions should also be the inspiration to earnestly reproduce them in the shanty towns of empire. This paper examines the social history of the Pickwick Club of New Zealand and its relation to colonialism and Victorian cultural ambitions.

Charles Dickens: Impact on Medicine and Society

In 1836 Charles Dickens published the first installment of The Posthumous Papers of the Pickwick Club. In this novel he introduces the reader to a character, Joe, the Fat Boy who is obese, sleepy, difficult to arouse, snores, and has peripheral edema. This description so intrigued the medical field that many hypotheses about the symptoms were examined, but it was not until 120 years after the novel was published that physicians started to interrelate these features and a new field of medicine emerged. Although he is best known for this description, Dickens impacted medicine and medical care in many ways. Besides his brilliant clinical descriptions (many of which were unrecognized in his day) and his activities as a social reformer, he was instrumental in facilitating the development of homeless shelters for women, the first pediatric hospital in the United Kingdom, and the development of orthopedics.

Are cardiorespiratory complications a question of epigenetics?

The character Joe from Charles Dickens’ The Posthumous Papers of the Pickwick Club (1837) was markedly obese and often fell asleep in an uncontrollable way during the day (1). This is probably one of the first cases of sleep apnea syndrome described in the literature. Sleep apnea is most often due to upper airway obstructions during sleep (2) and is regarded as a national disease affecting approximately 4% of the adult population. It results in intermittent hypoxia, leading to cardiovascular complications such as hypertension, coronary artery disease, heart failure, and stroke (3). The incidence of intermittent hypoxia is also common among infants, particularly if they are born prematurely (4). It increases the risk for developing cerebral palsy and sudden infant death syndrome (SIDS) (5).

A History of Obesity, or How What Was Good Became Ugly and Then Bad

Chronic food shortage and malnutrition have been the scourge of humankind from the dawn of history. The current worldwide epidemic of obesity, now recognized as a public health crisis, is barely a few decades old. Only after the technological advances of the eighteenth century did a gradual increase in food supply became available. The initial effect of these advances in improved public health and amount, quality, and variety of food was increased longevity and body size. These early favorable outcomes of technological advances notwithstanding, their incremental effect since the Second World War has been an overabundance of easily accessible food, coupled with reduced physical activity, that accounts for the recent increased prevalence of obesity. Obesity as a chronic disease with well-defined pathologic consequences is less than a century old. The scarcity of food throughout most of history had led to connotations that being fat was good, and that corpulence and increased "flesh" were desirable as reflected in the arts, literature, and medical opinion of the times. Only in the latter half of the nineteenth century did being fat begin to be stigmatized for aesthetic reasons, and in the twentieth century, its association with increased mortality was recognized. Whereas early reports listed obesity as a risk factor for mortality from "chronic nephritis," the subsequent recognition of the more common association of obesity with diabetes, hypertension, and heart disease altered the listings and questioned its being a risk factor for kidney disease. An enlarging body of evidence, accrued over the past decade, now indicates a direct association of obesity with chronic kidney disease and its outcomes.

Business is Busyness, or the Work Ethic

be found a man as busy as this, and yet this man seemed busier than he was. If both of these statements are strictly true, most men are not as busy as they seem, and diligence is largely a matter of show. This particular pilgrim is the Serjeant of the law, as introduced in the general prologue to The Canterbury Tales. Lawyers have been targets of satire for quite a few centuries now, and some irony unmistakably plays about Chaucer's description: Discreet he was and of greet reverence / He semed swich, his words weren so wise; and, Of fees and robes hadde he many oon. Serjeants-at-law were senior barristers, as this description would suggest, and from the thirteenth to the nineteenth century in England the title was bestowed by the crown. Until 1845 one had to be a Serjeant in order to practice in the Court of Common Pleas that is, for civil, not criminal cases although the serjeant could be assisted by lesser barristers. Thus, in one of the most famous trials of that century, Bardell vs. Pickwick for breach of promise, Mrs. Bardell was represented by Serjeant Buzfuz and Mr. Pickwick by Serjeant Snubbin; and again, it may be that the lawyers in the case were neither so busy nor so diligent as they seemed. The best account of this trial can be found in chapters 31 and 34 of The Posthumous Papers of the Pickwick Club, as set down by Charles Dickens between 1836 and 1837.

Musical Snoring: To the Editor

I thank Gordon for calling attention to Glinka's perceptive portrayal of a colleague with possible obstructive sleep apnea (OSA), dating from 1840. However, I cannot agree that this “is the earliest account of OSA anywhere.” Descriptions of OSA date as far back as 360 BC at least, to the time of Dionysius, and they include the famous 1836 description of Joe the fat boy in Dickens' Posthumous Papers of the Pickwick Club.1