What the secret of its popularity is would take a volume to make manifest; but in a word, one might attribute it to its vividness of reality—­to the fact that every character seems to be a real living being, with whose minute peculiarities we are made familiar in a singularly droll and happy manner.  With each we become close friends on first acquaintance, and as episode succeeds episode the friendship deepens, with no thought that our friends are mere imaginary creatures of the author’s brain.

It does not matter if the adventures of these amiable and jovial beings are boisterously reckless at times, or if they indulge in impossible probabilities.  Their high spirited gaiety and inexhaustible fun and humour and their overflow of good-nature stifles criticism.

Dickens’s object in writing The Pickwick Papers he assured us in the preface was “to place before the reader a constant succession of characters and incidents; to paint them in as vivid colours as he could command, and to render them, at the same time, life-like and amusing.”  All this he succeeded in doing with such amazing success that we have a masterly picture of English life of the period to be found in no other book.  The secret of the book’s popularity and fame is in its unaffected and flowing style, its dramatic power, and, of course, its exuberant humour.

But there is much for serious reflection in its pages as well, and one could dilate at length on the propaganda which is so thinly camouflaged throughout; propaganda against lawyers, prisons, corruption in Parliament, celebrity hunting, pomposity, fraud, hypocrisy and all uncharitableness in the abstract; but all this is wrapped up in the same way that such things are done in all the fairy tales of which Pickwick is one of the best.

There are, as a fact, innumerable reasons why Pickwick is so popular, so necessary to-day.  The one which concerns us more at the moment is its appeal as a mirror of the manners and customs of a romantic age which has fast receded from us.  It is, perhaps, the most accurate picture extant of the old coaching era and all that was corollary to it.  No writer has done more than Dickens to reflect the glory of that era, and the glamour and comfort of the old inns of England which in those days were the havens of the road to every traveller.  All his books abound in pleasant and faithful pictures of the times, and alluring and enticing descriptions of those old hostelries where not only ease was sought and expected, but obtained; Pickwick is packed with them.

The outside appearance of an inn alone was in those times so well considered that it addressed a cheerful front towards the traveller “as a home of entertainment ought, and tempted him with many mute but significant assurances of a comfortable welcome.”  Its very signboard promised good cheer and meant it; the attractive furnishing of the homely windows, the bright flowers on the sills seemed to beckon one to “come in”; and when one did enter, one was greeted and cared for as a guest and not merely as a customer.