Dickensblog

So I'm still laboriously making my way through Michael Slater's Dickens biography. As the quote below will show you, I haven't got very far, which is no fault of Slater's; rather, it's due to my bad habit of trying to read about 947 books at once. Still, even though it gives me away, I wanted to share the passage because I like what it says about Dickens's gift for writing a certain kind of character.

With Pickwick Dickens knew by now just where he was going. He kept Mr. Winke's love-story on the boil in this May number (Pickwick XIV) as the minor comic plot and filled it out with yet another variation on the reluctant-duellists joke, while his imagination warmed to the work of continuing the development of Pickwick himself into a specimen of that most difficult to portray of all fictional characters, the convincingly good human being.

Michael Slater, Charles Dickens, Chapter 5