PICKWICK PARALLELS.

New Zealand Herald, Volume LXVI, Issue 20306, 13 July 1929, Page 8 (Supplement)

PICKWICK PARALLELS.

AN OLD COMPARISON. When only nine of the twenty numbers of tho Pickwick Papers had been published. a writer in tho Athenaeum, described them as consisting of " two pounds of Smollett, three ounces of Sterne, a. handful of Hookc, and a dash of a grammatical Pierce Egan—incidents at pleasure, served with original sauce piquante." Students of tho completed work have pointed to traces, more or less distinct, of the influence of all the authors named by this early critic, and of others. Forster suggested that Dickens, when ho resolved that Sam Wellcr should share Mr. Pickwick's imprisonment in the " Fleet," was thinking of tho Peregrine Pickle of his favourite Smollett. Dr. 15 ay no has pointed out the similarity between the incarceration of Jingle in "Pickwick" and of Jenkinson in "The Vicar of Wakefield." The Athenaeum's " dash " of Pierce Egan, says Mr. Hammond Hall, in Chambers' Journal, is not so easy to recognise. Egan, pdpular though ho was in his day, is dull reading now, and his only obvious parallel with Dickens is that both authors, like somo before and many after, found a mine of descriptive material in tho manners of contemporary cockneydom.