The Pickwick Papers is a peculiar read. You come to the end and realize that the book you started has transmogrified into a different book under your nose. Chesterton summarizes: “Many critics have commented on the somewhat discordant and inartistic change between the earlier part of Pickwick and the later.”
But GKC has a crucial insight into what happens between the front and the back of Pickwick:
The strange and stirring discovery which Dickens made was this—that having chosen a fat old man of the middle classes as a good thing of which to make a butt, he found that a fat old man of the middle classes is the very best thing of which to make a romantic adventurer. “Pickwick” is supremely original in that it is the adventures of an old man. It is a fairy tale in which the victor is not the youngest of the three brothers, but one of the oldest of their uncles. The result is both noble and new and true …
Dickens, and Dickens only, discovered as he went on how fitted the fat old man was to rescue ladies, to defy tyrants, to dance, to leap, to experiment with life, to be a deus ex machinâ, and even a knight-errant. Dickens made this discovery. Dickens went into the Pickwick Club to scoff, and Dickens remained to pray.
Twenty years after GKC wrote this appreciation, another story about a fat old (well, middle-aged) man of the middle classes emerged:
“The Bagginses had lived in the neighborhood of The Hill for time out of mind and people considered them very respectable, not only because most of them were rich, but also because they never had any adventures or did anything unexpected…This is the story of how a Baggins had an adventure, and found himself doing and saying things altogether unexpected.”
Grown-up critics of The Hobbit have accused it of having a similarly “discordant and inartistic change” along the way. We move from what feels like a cheery nineteenth-century village to high fantasy in what feels like late antiquity — in other words, from Barchester Towers to Beowulf and back again!
But I think The Hobbit endures because it shares the deep insight of Pickwick, that the bumbling middle-aged gentleman who eats too much cake is mysteriously the right hero for an adventure story. Chesterton again:
His simple vanity and voracity, his innocent love of living, his ignorant love of learning, are things far fuller of romance than the weariness and foppishness of the sniggering cavaliers. When he consciously speaks prose, he unconsciously thinks poetry. … With torches and trumpets, like a guest, the greenhorn is taken in by Life. And the sceptic is cast out by it.
