‘Who wrote this script?’: Pickwick in Stepney

In 2016 the Dickens Museum in London acquired the manuscript minute book of a Stepney-based ‘Pickwick Club’ operating in the 1830s and early 1840s. This volume offers a unique record of Boz’s reception by a radical, working-class community comprised largely of legal clerks. The voices presented in the weekly record both mock and seem complicit in the representation of working-class behaviour as irresponsible and in need of control. But they also deploy a flexible range of linguistic markers to position themselves as political and social critics in their own right. The club tests the limits of social and literary hierarchies through discussions of Pickwick alongside plagiarized spin-offs. At one point they consider co-authoring their own work, under the title ‘Adventures of a Lawyer’s Clerk’, with each member writing a chapter. The young men who participated in these debates would themselves have been old in the 1880s and 1890s, when the rage for ‘literary pilgrimages’ began to capitalize on Dickens’s exuberant early work. They would not in any case have recognized the sanitized version of Pickwick that was being presented by the emerging heritage industry. For that very reason, their immediate responses to the work are a good place for historians of reading to start.