Wellerisms in The Pickwick Papers
Bibliographic Data
| ID | 8933317 |
|---|---|
| Authors | Florence E Baer (SAN JOAQUIN DELTA COLLEGE, corresponding author) |
| Year | 1983 |
| Volume | 94 |
| Issue | 2 |
| Pages | 173-183 |
| Publication date | 1983-01-01 |
| Peer Reviewed | Yes |
| Open Access | No |
| Type | ARTICLE |
| Venue | Folklore (JOURNAL) |
| Journal identifiers | ISSN: 0015-587X • E-ISSN: 1469-8315 |
| Publisher | Routledge (PUBLISHER • GB) |
| DOI | 10.1080/0015587x.1983.9716275 |
| OpenAlex | W2060766822 |
| Language | EN |
| Citations received | 1 |
| References cited | 6 |
I put in a book once, by hook or by crook The whole race (as I thought) of a 'feller,' Who happily pleas'd the town's taste (much diseas'd), And the name of this person was Weller.1 More than the town's taste was pleased. Dickens and his publishers were jubilant as they watched sales soar from a pre-Weller 500 to 40,000 copies of each monthly number after Sam Weller's appearance in Chapter X. Both Mr. Pickwick and Sam became the objects of a national mania, and the above figures strongly indicate that Sam was carrying Mr. Pickwick on his coat-tails. Pickwick was published in 1836; a year later a dramatization, Sam Weller; or, The Pickwickians, opened in New York and Philadelphia and ran well in spite of poor reviews.2 This is popular success, and Sam is indeed a man of the people, 'as ordinary and perfect a reality as anything in the London street.'3 It is not surprising that the adulation of Weller was accompanied by emulation of the form of proverbial expression that characterized his speech. The form is readily recognizable: ' ,' as said, when (as, and) (s)he . I.e., a quotation, speaker named or otherwise identified, and a clause or phrase which puts the quotation in a new light or an incongruous setting, the total effect being ironic. In the United States alone more than one hundred of what came to be called wellerisms (a term first used in 1845), and were jingoistically referred to as Yankeeisms, appeared in popular books during the five decades following Weller's appearance.4 More than five hundred have been collected from periodical publications of the same period.5 By 1867 the form had attracted scholarly attention, and M. Maass published '39 Odd Similes aus den Pickwick Papers von Charles Dickens.'6 Maass included in his list two simple folk similes-'right as a trivet' and 'looks as convivial as a live trout in a lime-basket'-but he did place each of the items in its immediate context in the story. The notion of context was lost on his successors until very recently. For comparative purposes Maass also demonstrated the prevalence of the form in Germany with examples from proverb collections. Since this pioneering venture, folklorists, philologists, and paremiologists have combed earlier collections and come up with wellerisms from classical Greek, through sixteenth-century German and Italian, down to persistence or revival of the form in the twentieth century.' There are even wellerisms in Africa, almost the only examples collected in context from oral sources.8 Because of this penchant of collectors to collect from collections, one cannot point to versions in nineteenth-century oral tradition of precisely the wellerisms used by Sam and his father, Tony Weller. Clearly the proverbial form was not original with Dickens. Henry Mayhew, although not a folklorist, did field work in London among the urban folk during the first half of the nineteenth century and published interviews with the London poor as closely as possible in their own vernacular. A penny-circus
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| Unique citing works | 1 |
|---|---|
| Citations per year | 0,08 |
| Citation span | 2013 - 2013 (1) |
| Citation velocity | historical |
| Highly cited | No |
| Citation types | Neutral: 1 |