Word: pickwick
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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...essay which best demonstrates the intimate connection between the different levels of analysis Marcus employs in reading a text is "Language Into Structure: Pickwick Papers," a piece on Dickens, the subject of his first book and the writer to whom he constantly returns. Having shown through a detailed textual analysis that the novel is about to plunge into the unrestricted use of language, an implicit claim that the novelist can represent anything he likes in language, Marcus points to the conclusion of the novel in which the misuse of language by the law puts Pickwick in prison...
...person of the law, Pickwick and Dickens have run into something which though it may at first seem to be an unalloyed linguistic universe is in fact much more than a world of words. It is and it represents society and its structures, in particular those structures known as property and money, both of them extra-linguistic phenomena...It is a matter of the very largest moment for Dickens's development as a writer--and a testimony to his exceptional inner integrity--that he should, in the midst of his greatest celebration of his language and transcendence as a genius...
...Pickwick Papers, Charles Dickens introduces "an elderly pimply-faced, vegetable-diet sort of man . . . who seemed to be an essential part of the desk at which he was writing, and to have as much thought or sentiment." That caricature of the desiccated plant-eater still pervades the English-speaking world. The very language is meaty with bias. Imagine a Beaneater martini, a fatted kale, a yam actor, a string of Turnip 'n' Brew restaurants...
...Praying. Hotels that cater to the area's unfortunates are keeping their doors locked 24 hours a day. A sign at the Pickwick Hotel advises, NO VISITERS ALLOWED NO MORE. At the mission, Jack McCarty, 50, shuddered: "A lot of the guys are sticking around here even during the day, talking about him all the time." Says the mission chaplain, George Caywood: "Everybody is looking at everybody else. We're all praying the Lord will help the police. These men are our friends. It really grieves us to see them so frightened." But no one could offer them...
...stood between the donkey and the sun [Dombey and Son]...I turned in a full circle. My rich young and handsome friends had disappeared. Changed. In their places were cardboard cutouts. I picked the thick paper men up [Pickwick Papers...