The Politics of Family in The Pickwick Papers

The celebration of innocence, benevolence and stability that traditional readings of Charles Dickens’s The Pickwick Papers share has been associated particularly with the celebration of family that “begins memorably with Christmas at Dingley Dell” and “is so familiar that it requires little documentation in itself.” 1 Those less clearly identified with family, the novel’s bachelors, also have been seen in similar terms. As David Parker has recently noted, modern readers have depicted them as “lovably eccentric gentlemen, getting into pickles out of sheer foolishness.” 2

But as Jingle’s first mad anecdote illustrates, the novel often connects bachelors and family—and connects them in rather disturbing ways:

“Heads, heads - take care of your heads!... Terrible place work - other day - five children - mother - tall lady, eating sandwiches - forgot the arch - crash - knock - children look round head off - sandwich in her hand - no mouth to put it in - head of a family off - shocking, shocking! Looking at Whitehall, sir? - fine place - little window - somebody else’s head off there, eh, sir?” 3

This story of a “mother’s head off,” of motherless or orphaned children, provides evidence of a violent disintegration that threatens to overwhelm the family throughout the novel. It is a story of disruption that one bachelor, Jingle, “fathers,” and an activity that another bachelor, Pickwick, later admits to engaging in as well:

“Is it not a wonderful circumstance,” said Mr. Pickwick, “that we seem destined to enter no man’s house without involving him in some degree of trouble? Does it not, I ask, bespeak the indiscretion, or, worse than that, the blackness of heart - that I should say so! - of my followers, that, beneath whatever roof they locate, they disturb the peace of mind and happiness of some confiding female?”

(324–25)

Here, in a move that associates a woman’s inadequacy (“head off”) with men’s problems (“Whitehall” and the beheading of Charles I), a move that will become quite familiar, home is established as patriarchal and masculine (a “man’s house”), while the problem (“involving him in some degree of trouble”), which is actually one between men, is identified as “female.” Such stories relate the threat to family stability as an issue of paramount importance, setting it within the terms of a crucial opposition between bachelors and families, men and women.

In order to gain a better understanding of how such terms frame the novel, I want to turn first to Pickwick ‘s valentine and then to its breach of promise suit. For, as Sam Weller recognizes, “Walentine’s day” is a “reg’lar good day for a breach o’ promise trial” (508). His father reads the concept of sending valentines as particularly threatening, as the threat of the disruption of male happiness by women’s unhappiness (an echo of Pickwick’s announcement of the disruption of a “man’s house” by the “female”). As soon as he finds out that Sam is writing a “walentine” he reproaches his son:

Arter the warnin’ you’ve had o’ your father’s wicious propensities; arter all I’ve said to you upon this here wery subject; arter actiwally seein’ and bein’ in the company o’ your own mother-in-law, vich I should ha’ thought wos a moral lesson as no man could never ha’ forgotten to his dyin’ day!

(538)

Tony Weller knows that valentines lead to marriage: “To see you married, Sammy,” he says, will “be a wery agonizin’ trial to me” (539). He also knows that a valentine writer who does not offer marriage risks being misinterpreted and the victim of a breach of promise suit—especially when a “mother-in-law” is involved.

With the trial itself scheduled for St. Valentine’s day, both it and the valentine seem to present themselves as family formation alternatives. Both operate as socially-constructed bodies which ingest a heterogeneous network of sexual and class interests, a network that threatens to disrupt a more homogeneous representation of English courtship so essential to the middle-class struggle for hegemony in 1830s London. 4

Valentines sent on St. Valentine’s Day by middle-class...