The Pickwick Papers election

This month it’s another election special! Emma and Steve discuss the chapter about the election in Charles Dickens’ Pickwick Papers.

Those who know Emma (and especially those who studied with her) will know that she tried to read the whole book once and gave up halfway through with a lifelong aversion to Dickens. But here we talk about the interesting - and interestingly negative – way that the election is presented and the similarities with practically all depictions of politics ever since.

You can read The Pickwick Papers here (we are covering Chapter XIII) https://www.gutenberg.org/cache/epub/580/pg580-images.html#link2HCH0013

Steve’s essay which informed this episode is here https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/full/10.1111/2041-9066.12084