Dickens's "Mr. Pickwick Addresses the Club" by Harold Copping

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Mr. Pickwick Addresses the Club

Harold Copping

1924

Colour lithography

Approximately 7 x 5 inches (16.9 x 12.25 cm)

From Character Sketches from Dickens, facing p. 16.

This scene dated 12 May 1837 occurs when in the first instalment Mr. Samuel Pickwick addresses the club to propose that it form a "corresponding society" which will travel about the country and report its finding to the entire club back in London. The travelling reporters (reminiscent of young Dickens himself in the 1832 election) are Pickwick himself, Tracy Tupman, Augustus Snodgrass, and Nathaniel Winkle (chapter 1, April 1836.

Scanned image, caption by Philip V. Allingham. See below for further commentary.

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Note by B.M. Matz on The Pickwick Papers

"The Pickwick Papers was first published in monthly parts in 1836, and projected Dickens to the top rung of the ladder of time, from which he never descended. His main object in writing it, he has told us, was "to place before the reader a constant succession of characters and incidents; to paint them in as vivid colours as he could command, and to render them, at the same time, life-like and amusing." All this he succeeded to do with amazing success, and the book remains to-day one of the most popular in the language, and retains that position by its exuberant humour.

The four extracts from its pages amply testify to this. They will be familiar to all readers, but, unlike most humorous stories, they can be read and read again with pure delight. [14]

Bibliography

Matz, B. W., and Kate Perugini; illustrated by Harold Copping. Character Sketches from Dickens. London: Raphael Tuck, 1924. Copy in the Paterson Library, Lakehead University.

Created 20 February 2009

Last modified 25 September 2923