Word: pickwick
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Essentially, it is a tale of two Dickenses that Biographer Johnson has to tell. One is a 19th-century success story, the other a saga of personal disenchantment. Success came to him with a smash at 24 with The Pickwick Papers. It swelled with each succeeding novel and never deserted him as he launched into weekly newspaper editing, amateur theatricals and public readings. In the end, he became a kind of king-of-the-hill of Victorian letters. At his death in 1870, he left ?93,000, in today's money something like a million dollars. But through...
...Pickwick Papers...
...Pickwick (freely adapted from Charles Dickens by Stanley Young) transfers The Pickwick Papers very pleasantly to the stage. What results, to be sure, is no longer exactly The Pickwick Papers: in writing for the theater, Playwright Young has been forced to domesticate one of the most gallivanting and helter-skelter of narratives, and hence to sacrifice a good deal of its hearty coaching flavor and its wildly exuberant fun. Moreover, in the act of boiling down the contents of the book, he has scrambled them as well. But if this is a thinner-blooded Pickwick, it is also a more...
Shown courting Rachel Wardle as well as being haled to court in the Widow Bardell's breach-of-promise suit, Mr. Pickwick (George Howe) counts for much more on the stage than he does in the book. This means-and it is the measure of where Dickens suffers most-that Mr. Pickwick counts for much more than his gloriously Dickensian servant, Sam Weller. The trial scene, too, though it is made the climax of the evening, has been shorn of its full comic grandeur, with Mr. Serjeant Buzfuz's appearance in it all too brief. But Stiggins...
...Partridge analyses are liberally flavored with allusions to the Bible, history, mythology and fiction (Gilbert & Sullivan and the Pickwick Papers are great favorites). Sometimes he personifies the elements (a lagging raincloud is a "queenly tragedienne, making a majestic exit into the wings"). Sometimes literal-minded listeners write him long, cross, reproving letters...