The Pickwick Papers - My Charles Dickens #12in12

The Posthumous Papers of the Pickwick Club (1836), Charles Dickens

The Posthumous Papers of thePickwick Club was the fictional publication that really made the name of Charles Dickens famous. After his reasonable success with descriptions and written sketches of London life (Sketches by Boz) in 1833-36, Dickens gained a popular following and the beginnings of a loyal audience thanks to the increasing success of The Pickwick Papers.

His publishers commissioned Dickens to provide the text for a picture novel about unsuccessful, bumbling sportsmen, with the pictures supplied by Robert Seymour. But rather than wait to be given illustrations to describe, Dickens began writing his descriptions before anything had been drawn and so, increasingly through The Pickwick Papers, his words took precedence over the illustrations. Seymour, who had originally proposed the idea of a series of illustrations of city-dwellers inexpertly hunting etc., shot himself before the second instalment's publication – though that probably wasn't just down to Dickens's increasing level of artistic control.

The collection of illustrations and story-captions detailing the exploits of the Pickwick Club eventually attracted a wide readership – and it's easy to see why. While not quite the soap opera of its day, The Pickwick Papers is a running light comedy, with each instalment dropping its increasingly familiar (dare I say predictable?) characters into fresh situations full of potential mishaps and fumbles.

Handily, the members of the Pickwick Club take copious notes of their bungled adventures and the mishaps they endure. A few select members, who seem to have unlimited reserves of money and free time, set out with Pickwick to discover curious things about England, people and life in general. The exception is Pickwick's manservant, Sam Weller, credited with much of the book's popular success – in part, no doubt, due to his down-to-earth worldliness, as compared with Pickwick's utter cluelessness. Think Jeeves and Wooster, but with a cockney Stephen Fry who doesn't have that smug, quietly superior face.

The Pickwick narrator's style is either naïve or sly, often telling us one thing and probably meaning quite another. Much of the comedy of the book lies in the discrepancy between, on one hand, the narrator's interpretation of the notes taken by the Pickwickians, and on the other hand, the likely reality of the situation. For example, while staying in the house of a regional newspaper editor, Pott, who spends the evening reading his editorials to Pickwick, Pickwick has his eyes closed in rapturous enjoyment of the prose...or has fallen asleep in boredom. Here is a narrator who, like the world of people he describes, seems to have fallen for the legend of Pickwick's intellect and popularity, interpreting his notes accordingly. In reality, Pickwick is a bumbling, inept man with more money and self-importance than sense.

Dickens' audience may have also fallen for Pickwick's charm, but either way the novel's popularity rose and made Dickens a household name. Not only that, but The Pickwick Papers gave Dickens his first experience of writing weekly instalments of novels – a pattern he followed for years afterward. It's a light read, quicker perhaps than some of Dickens' later work, but no weaker for it. While not so mature or impressive as, say, Bleak House, The Pickwick Papers is a solid debut into long-form fiction.

Bleak House - My Charles Dickens #12in12

Bleak House (1852-3), Charles Dickens

Unlike previous entries in the #12in12 Charles Dickens project (The Chimes and Hard Times), March's (delayed) instalment is rather long. This month it's Bleak House, published in twenty monthly issues in 1852 – 1853 – in my defence, it took Dickens much longer to write it than it has taken me to read it.

Bleak House came just before Hard Times in Dickens' writing career, although it feels much more mature – like the achievement of a much more accomplished writer. Perhaps that's because any moral or ethical point Dickens is making with Bleak House is much more subtle than the hammer blows of Hard Times. This makes Bleak House a subtle, complicated and downright imposing book.

The house of the title, Bleak House in St Albans, is a warren of twisty, interconnected corridors, rooms heaped upon one another and obscure little windows. It's a convoluted jumble of a building, presided over by a pair of charmingly selfless characters – John Jarndyce and Esther Summerson – and is the ideal object for Dickens to use as a title. The house itself isn't all that miserable (in fact, it's usually quite pleasant, and the northern house named after it in later chapters is especially pleasant), but it is a perfect reflection of much the book's content.

The twisty corridors of Bleak House, which sounds like the sort of house where someone could easily wander about getting lost and going round in circles, are reflected in the goings-on of the Court of Chancery in London. Until 1875, the Court of Chancery was the part of the British justice system overseen by the Lord Chancellor and, in this case, often concerned not with criminal cases but with cases involving inheritance, commerce and land ownership. Complaints about the slow and drawn-out procedures of the Chancery Court had been common since Tudor times, and Dickens not only lambasts them in his introduction but also provides a mirror for them in not only the structure of the physical Bleak House, but in the structure of the novel Bleak House itself. It isn't without humour, and Dickens clearly takes delight in spinning out descriptions of just how long Chancery takes over resolving the now infamous case of Jarndyce vs. Jarndyce:

'Innumerable children have been born into the cause; innumerable young people have married into it; innumerable old people have died out of it. Scores of persons have deliriously found themselves made party to Jarndyce and Jarndyce without knowing how or why; whole families have inherited legendary hatreds with the suits. The little plaintiff or defendant who was promised a new rocking horse when Jarndyce and Jarndyce should be settled has grown up, possessed himself of a real horse, and trotted away into the other world. Fair wards of court have faded into mothers and grandmothers; a long procession of Chancellors has come in and gone out; the legions of bills in the suit have been transformed into bills of mortality; there are not three Jarndyces left upon the earth perhaps since old Tom Jarndyce in despair blew his brains out at a coffee-house in Chancery Lane; but Jarndyce and Jarndyce drags its dreary length before the court, perennially hopeless.'

Like the physical house, Bleak House the novel has two characters presiding over it: Esther Summerson and an all-knowing, all-seeing narrator. The two of them take it in turns to tell the story and so we see Jarndyce and Jarndyce from the perspective of a ward of the court (apparently orphaned and abandoned Esther) and also from inside the court itself, as well as from wide-ranging perspectives outside – parties to the case and otherwise.

It's this wide-ranging perspective that I really admire about Dickens' writing here, especially in Bleak House. I've said before that his ability to write a striking character is his great strength, and in Bleak House Dickens has excelled himself. There are a great many characters, in a narrative that spans England geographically and socially – from Jo the crossing sweeper to high society's Lady Dedlock – and yet every one of those characters is sharply drawn and memorable. Even with a few words, Dickens creates a loving portrait of some person, and that person can be recognised when they return ten chapters later (as they have a habit of doing with this twisty, jumbled narrative) and appear just as fresh.

There's much more to Bleak House than the Court of Chancery and the social satire Dickens lays in with (Chancery isn't the only thing to be satirised; do-gooding philanthropists so focused on foreign shores they neglect their own offspring also take some flak) – though whether it really needs to be so long is another matter. The middle drags somewhat, and I hope Dickens won't mind me saying that the introduction of a detective late on smacks of an author needing to quickly tie up several lose plot ends with a character deliberately setting out to discover and expose the truth. Even so, the detective, Mr Bucket, must be one of the most finely-characterised plot devices in Western literature.

Like the physical house, the novel Bleak House has a dozen or more little compartments and rooms, all huddled up on top of one another, and connected by twisting corridors; the reader may get lost wandering the house, but Dickens as guide makes sure each room is beautifully decorated and somehow reminds the reader of the route back.