Snoring for the Million

This chapter looks at periodical publication as a third form of representation undergoing modernization in the 1830s, with a focus on Dickens’s first serial novel, The Pickwick Papers. First, it examines The Mirror of Parliament as a commercial enterprise from the perspective of its rivals like The Parliamentary Review and Family Magazine. Second, it considers how the Parliamentary Papers (or blue books) sought to re-present the People through new kinds of literature, combining numbers and words, derived from verbatim testimony. Third, it reveals the parliamentary subtexts of The Pickwick Papers, including its references to Henry Brougham, a major figure in the First Reformed Parliament. It does this in part by tracing Dickens’s debt to a previous pictorial series by Robert Seymour (the original Pickwick artist), a satire of Brougham called The Schoolmaster Abroad. Finally, it links the breach of privilege with which Pickwick begins to the breach of promise suit with which it ends. Throughout, it emphasizes the lulling qualities of verbatim reporting and the “hearing” of voices on paper.