Word: pickwick
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...written in 1915 before Darwin found himself running an Ordinance Depot in Mesopotamia. Darwin's stories are cluttered with chestnuts of wisdom from stories are cluttered with chestnuts of wisdom from Sam and Tony Weller while the cricket match between Dingley Dell and All Muggleton in the Pickwick Papers was for Darwin the penultimate tribute to the glories of English countrified society...
...cousin Gwen Raverat in a family memoir describes Darwin on his fourteenth birthday "lying with his long Etonian legs on the sofa in a negligent, grown-up attitude." While at Eton, Darwin engaged in quoting contests to see who knew Pickwick Papers the best. He practiced for these contests by seeing if he could continue out loud once he reached the bottom of a page. Certainly, Darwin would have ascribed to the Duke of Wellington's statement that "the Battle of Waterloo was won on the playing fields of Eton," for he considered the English public school, as epitomized...
...passage evokes a certain naivete when golf was still the game of a small clique, played by amateurs on seaside links. Darwin was truly a figure out of the pages of P.G. Wodehouse who engaged in quoting contests to see who knew Pickwick Papers best while at Eton and for whom the golden age of golf was when the gutta percha ball was in circulation and the renowned British "Triumvirate" of J.H. Taylor, Harry Vardon and James Braid reigned supreme...
...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...