Word: pickwick
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Dates: during 1950-1959
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...irrepressibly comic. Other "best stories" of Editor Zabel's choosing include second-rate ghost thrillers and third-rate detective stories. At novel length, Dickens could create memorable caricatures, e.g., Mr. Micawber, Uriah Heep, Madame Defarge. In the short stories, his characters are mere mannerisms. In the novels, Mr. Pickwick and Sam Weller produce idiosyncratic dialogue; in the short stories there is only an endless chatty...
Reading the article on the sleepy people, I remembered Joe, the fat boy,* in The Posthumous Papers of the Pickwick Club by Charles Dickens. I always thought it a poor invention by the writer, but now I see that it is a classic description of narcolepsy...
...With wit and humor, Rab Butler apprised the party of the ever-changing path to office: "In the Middle Ages you bullied your way to power. In the classical age you bribed your way to power. And for the major portion of the 19th century, as readers of Pickwick Papers will recall, you kissed your way to power. Nowadays we are obliged to argue our way to power...
...love of household gadgets-to a house without electricity, where she dies, at length, of fright during a thunderstorm. Prodded by an ambitious lawyer, her back-country kin charge Uncle Daniel with murdering her. The trial-of a modern-day Uncle Toby-calls to mind the trials in Pickwick and Alice in Wonderland. With cousins on the jury, kids overrunning the witness box, refreshments being served, Uncle Daniel first disappearing and then hiring the prosecution lawyer to handle the defense as well, it not so much travesties court trials as stands them squarely, and often hilariously, on their heads...
...stranger who made advances to Mrs. Nickleby over the garden wall in Nicholas Nickleby. In at least one instance Dickens got the jump on the medical profession: the first recorded instance of the association of narcolepsy (uncontrollable desire to sleep) with obesity occurs in the fat boy of Pickwick Papers...