Customer Reviews:
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 Enjoy the humor, skim the longer story asides August 26, 2008
Not quite as good as Great Expectations (Oxford World's Classics), still a classic. Mr. Pickwick is the titular head of the Pickwick Club, who run around England getting into various humorous adventures, most involving women, and most of those involving widows.
Apparently at that time and place widows were considered avaricious vultures (or "wultures" as Sam Weller would say) ready to latch on to any available man with money. This might say more about the life expectancy of women in their child-bearing years than anything else, but it was enough of a problem for Dickens to make it the butt of basically a running joke throughout the book.
The characters, except for Sam, are not as memorable as Pip and Joe from Great Expectations, and the device Dickens frequently uses of inserting totally unrelated short dramatic stories (as spoken or written by one of the characters) into the main flow of the story is distracting at best and irritating at worst.
But still a classic.
Amazing July 19, 2008
1 out of 1 found this review helpful
How could Dickens have written this book--so wise, balanced, informed, witty, tender, loving, and intelligent--at such a young age? I'm glad to have finally gotten around to reading it.
 I liked it May 28, 2008
PP is a joy; in that it was written when CJHD was 24, it is also a wonder. I don't have much to add that has not been said. One sees the author grow as a writer as the book develops; by the end he is in top form. The plotting is thin, and the chapters episodic, while the details are vivid, and the language rich. By the end, the reader feels at home in early Victorian England. I enjoyed the spectrum of characters. The bad ones are able to be polished a little, and develop redeeming quality. The good ones sparkle, but have their shortcomings. There are also plenty in the scrum who are just ordinary, albeit singular, human beings. Recommended.
Dickens' Magic January 1, 2008
A friend of mine said that she loved the Harry Potter books because they returned her, as an adult, to the mesmerized delight in reading that she felt as a child.
That's what The Pickwick Papers did for me. Think of it as a sort of prose nineteenth century Decameron or Canterbury Tales. A group of friends, which make up the Pickwick Society, go traveling the English countryside. Along the way, they experience many adventures, and these adventures are punctuated by the telling of tales, sometimes fabulous, by various characters. And of course, seasoning it all is Dickens' unparalleled eye for the idiosyncratic and ear for dialect.
This is a charming and magical book. The fact that it was conjured by a man still in his early twenties makes it all the more astonishing.
A true joy to read! I did not want it to end! March 15, 2007
2 out of 3 found this review helpful
Charles Dickens is by far among my most favorite writers. The Pickwick Papers was such wonderful light humor and a rollicking adventure, that I never wanted to put it down. Every page, every chapter, brought these wonderful characters into a whole new unique set of adventures! I highly recommend anyone who enjoys Dickens to not miss this one, as although it is an early work, it shows the wonderful humorous side of the author that you will not quite see in some of his later works. These characters became like good friends by the time I was done with the book. A true joy to read.
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