ABSTRACT
There are two very obvious points to be made about the Pickwick Papers, and since they inevitably condition the way we read the book it will be as well to note them at the outset of this chapter. The first point is that The Posthumous Papers of the Pickwick Clubto give the work its full title - is not really a novel at all, even though Dickens tries increasingly to give it shape and coherence. The second is, that the interpolated tales jar against the idyllic mode of the main narrative. It is of course this latter point which critics since Edmund Wilson have found more interesting. In his witty and provocative essay, 'Dingley Dell and the Fleet', Auden has argued that Mr Pickwick is a mythopoeic creation whom
Dickens must cease to write about as soon as the fat gentleman fully comprehends that he has entered a fallen world. The book, Auden suggests, is really about a banishment from Eden; and the tales of horror which at first seem merely tales to Pickwick, are more and more brought into line with the real world. In other words, Pickwick fmds that he does not live in an enclosed paradisal world but in a fallen world which naturally breeds the extreme, hideous emotions and human failings that the tales reveal.
