The Pickwick Papers

Fat times have not vanished in the United States. We still have an obesity epidemic, for one thing, and the metaphorical blubber of more digital information than anyone needs; both have grown out of the excesses of richer years. It is an odd condition, but Dickens foresaw it nearly two hundred years ago and devised strategies for coping with it. The Pickwick Papers, his first novel, gave the 1830s a formerly successful and presently unemployed character who lives happily with his literal fatness in a realm metaphorically plump with information: Samuel Pickwick, an amiable amateur researcher drawn to absurd minutiae in a world brimming with social chitchat and with the kind of free time that allows studies on “the mighty ponds of Hampstead” and a “Theory of Tittlebats.”

The novel begins as portly Pickwick, having accrued a comfortable amount of wealth and status, sets out to gather and share some information just for the joy of it. As he later remarks, “Nearly the whole of my previous life having been devoted to business and the pursuit of wealth, numerous scenes of which I had no previous conception have dawned upon me—I hope to the enlargement of my mind, and the improvement of my understanding.” Having enlarged himself by eating up so much of the world, that is, he now seeks to make his understanding commensurate with his body. (Of course, it would have been better if he’d sought understanding first, but then we wouldn’t have a novel.)

Because it comes from his love for the world that has fed him so well, Pickwick’s wish to learn is fundamentally social, so he puts together a society of amateur knowledge-sharers who seek “to forward, from time to time, authenticated accounts of their journeys and investigations, of their observations of character and manners, and of the whole of their adventures, together with all tales and papers to which local scenery or associations may give rise.” After their society is founded, the Pickwickians plunge almost immediately into misadventure, as does Pickwick himself, but his resulting lack of profit or of any particular achievement is more than compensated for by his other gains: knowledge of humanity’s wild variety, the fellowship of like-minded knowledge-seekers, the pleasures of ever-refreshing novelty.

The Pickwick Papers, which is itself now freely available in the public domain, may in fact be the most appropriate book for understanding how we can better...