ABSTRACT
In the first paragraphs of The Pickwick Papers, Pickwick receives his charge. The Pickwick Papers is distinctive for its heterogeneity, its meanderings along the byways of incident, its narrative aimlessness that coheres only intermittently into something recognizable as a plot. Brontë and Dickens begin with notably undifferentiated images of the self - the desiring machine that is Zamorna, the innocent flower that is Pickwick - and then work to give contours to the initial shapelessness. Stewart has argued that the device of the tales reveals Pickwick's estrangement from the imagination, 'from both sorts of imagination, from the imprisonment of psychosis and the release of fancy'. What Sam offers to the Pickwickians is a way to address emotions which have eluded them, and he offers Dickens a way to integrate a world which threatens to decompose. The sentimental pleasures which Dickens associates with the healthy personality depend on reducing excitement and enjoying the stasis of a perfect emotional poise.
