Without any hesitation for Chesterton, 'Pickwick Papers' is Dickens' finest achievement, which is a pleasant enough problem if we happen to remember that he also wrote 'David Copperfield.' Possibly it is really unfair to compare them. 'Pickwick Papers' is not in the strict sense a novel; 'David Copperfield' is a novel even if it is an autobiography. At any rate Pickwick was a fairy, and as fairies are pretty elastic he probably was in that category of beings, but he was even more a royal fairy, none other than the 'fairy prince.'
In Pickwick, Dickens made a great discovery, which was that he could write ordinary stuff like the 'Sketches by Boz,' and also could produce Mr. Pickwick and write 'David Copperfield,' which was to say that Dickens discovered he had a good chance of being the Shakespeare of literature.
'It is in "Pickwick Papers" that Dickens became a mythologist rather than a novelist; he dealt with men who were gods.' That is, no doubt, that they became household gods; in other words, as familiar as the characters of Shakespeare.
There is one tremendous outstanding characteristic of Dickens which Chesterton brings out with considerable force. It is that above all things Dickens created characters. It is almost as if the setting of his books were on a stage where the environment changes but the essentials of the characters remain unchanged.
The story is almost subordinated to the drawing of the principal character; it is almost a modern idea of the psychoanalytical kind of novel that our young novelists love to draw. But still there is the great difference that the characters of Dickens pursue there own way regardless of the trend of events round them.
Naturally the modern novel is inferior to some of Dickens' works, but they do not deserve the hard things Chesterton says about them. Thus he remarks in passing that the modern novel is 'devoted to the bewilderment of a weak young clerk who cannot decide which woman he wants to marry or which new religion he believes in; we still give this knock-kneed cad the name of hero.'
This is, I think, unfair. The modern novel is very often still a good healthy love tale; the hero is more often than not a gentleman who has not the brains to be a cad; his trouble about marriage is that he wants to marry the right woman to their mutual well being; he is neither a cad nor a hero, but an ordinary Englishman whom we need not walk half a mile to see; he usually marries a girl who can be seen in any suburb or at any church bazaar. I have dwelt on this at some length, as Chesterton has a tendency to despise modern novelists while being one himself.
At this period, when 'Pickwick' had once and for all brought fame to Dickens, it will be interesting to see why Dickens attained the enormous popularity he did. He was, our critic thinks, a 'great event not only in literature but also in history.'
He considers that Dickens was popular in a sense that we of the twentieth century cannot understand. In fact, he goes so far as to say that there are no really popular authors to-day.
This is probably not entirely true. When we say an author is popular we do not mean that necessarily, as Chesterton seems to suggest, he is a 'best seller'; rather we call him popular in the sense that a large number of people find pleasure in reading him, even if the subject is not a pleasant one. Dickens was popular in a different way: he was read by a public who wished his story might never end. They not only loved his books, they loved his characters even more. No matter that there might be five sub-stories running alongside of the main one, the central character retained the public affection. His characters were known outside their particular stories, and not only that, this was by no means confined to the principal ones.