Pickwick in the Papers: Charles Dickens and the Politics of Remediation in the Newspaper Press, 1836-1870

Abstract

From the moment of its first publication in March 1836, Charles Dickens’s first serial novel The Posthumous Papers of the Pickwick Club (1836–37) was re-purposed extensively by the newspaper press. From acting as innocuous filler material, to making strategic political statements, Pickwick was used in a variety of rich and tactical ways: it was plundered for its anecdotes, which were liberally excerpted for literary and ‘Varieties’ columns; its characters and scenes were adapted to form political commentaries; and it was disguised as spurious news items or self-help pieces under new headings. Its individual scenes and characters became familiar bywords for both journalists and readers, deployed and absorbed as part of political discussion and debate, and appearing in a wealth of different columns – from leaders and letters to the editor, to reports of public readings and political gatherings. This project examines the motivations behind and impact of this extensive journalistic phenomenon, reading Pickwick’s remediation as a valuable index to a considerable and critically understudied area of nineteenth-century media history. Crucially, the thesis demonstrates that literature can be found at the very heart of newspapers’ political strategies, as in their columns they carved out political identities both for themselves and for their communities of active readers.
Using a replicable, data-driven methodology, the thesis examines digitised newspapers in the British Newspaper Archive in order to draw new connections between the literary, journalistic and political realms. In doing so, it reads Pickwick’s words and tropes as rhetorical devices that were successfully mobilised in, and that drew together, all three of these spheres, as part of a networked, trans-genre debate. The project brings new material to light, including previously uncatalogued reviews and excerpts, evidence of dozens of public readings for which Pickwick became part of a programme of entertainment or education, and two politically strategic newspaper adaptations of the serial that have as yet eluded critical notice. Across its three chapters, which respectively examine the excerpting, adaptation and evocation of Pickwick both during its initial serialisation and throughout Dickens’s lifetime, the project questions what the re-use of Pickwick in the newspaper press can tell us about the role played by popular literature in nineteenth-century political discourse; in what ways the serial’s style and structure influenced the nature and extent of its use in the press; and how attention to journalistic remediation can nuance our understanding of Dickens’s relationship with the reception of his works.

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