The start of summer teaching coincided with the start of the summer heat.

It is going to take me a few days to adjust. Our heat index around 4 pm yesterday was 100*. My body does not like humidity.

I also had an evening meeting, for which food needed to be prepared. So I finished one of the half-blocks on the quilt but that was the extent of the craft-work for yesterday.


I did, however, finish reading "The Pickwick Papers." It took me much longer to read the last 40 or so pages than it might - I find that with books I am enjoying, I don't want them to end, so I drag out the reading longer.

I think "Pickwick Papers" has to be the most cheerful of Dickens' works (with the possible exception of the short story, "The Cricket on the Hearth") that I've read. Except for the unpleasant stay in debtor's prison on entirely trumped up charges, the book was mostly one long entertainment.

(And I will say - small spoiler here - but it may be the original "Marriage is breaking up that old gang of mine" story).

The book does change a bit in tone as it progresses - first, it starts off as the somewhat bumptious adventures of the four men (the most-likely-fifty-ish Messrs. Pickwick and Tupman, and the two younger men, Winkle and Snodgrass). Pickwick, while not exactly a fool, is a bit naive (and lovable for that). Tupman is somewhat of a ladykiller; Snodgrass a poet and sensitive soul; Winkle claims to be a sportsman but is a notoriously poor shot.

They travel about, getting into trouble (One of them very nearly has to fight a duel), visiting inns, seeing famous sights, shooting at partridge.

They meet up with the bootblack Sam Weller, who becomes Mr. Pickwick's valet (and who provides considerable comic relief, and is a "man of the world" in contrast to Pickwick's unworldliness). Weller speaks in a rather opaque dialect: I assume it is meant to be some variant of Cockney but I found myself reading bits of it aloud and not being able to get it to sound "right."

Eventually they fetch up at Dingley Dell, home of Mr. Wardle (and his marriageable daughters and their friends).

It is here that Mr. Winkle and Mr. Snodgrass begin to form their attachments.

And the story progresses - as Mr. Pickwick is incarcerated (for a claimed "breach of promise" to his housekeeper who apparently wanted to believe he was offering to marry her) - things happen, things change. Mr. Tupman is seen less and less, Mr. Winkle especially comes to the fore as he woos and eventually wins his Arabella.

Oh, there are still comic moments...but it is almost as if you can see Dickens growing and changing as he writes (I believe this was one of his earlier works?) and the book's tone becomes less picaresque and more serious.

Eventually, it all ends well enough (I suppose): Pickwick, deciding that as two of his young friends are now husbands, the Pickwick Club must be broken up and he decides no more to roam, but to settle in a quiet sort of retirement in a house he bought. (I rather wish the book had closed with the Pickwick club - in some shape or form - continuing and continuing their rambling adventures. But you can't always have what you want, and it was still a good book.)