The Pickwick Papers: Hot Brandy and Pineapple Rum

Kevin Smith's first two films, Clerks and Mallrats, hit my generation pretty hard. Mallrats was a box office flop, but everyone I knew saw it, either in the theatre or on video. Part of the reason they were such a hit with it was that we'd all had customers like the ones in Clerks, we'd all spent time hanging around at the mall for no good reason, and we all knew people just like Jay, Dante, Randall, and Brody. Those two films captured a certain sort of suburban Americana that had never quite been put on film before - at least with all of the Star Wars references intact.

And this is also part of what made Charles Dickens's first novel, The Pickwick Papers, such a big hit. Everyone knew someone like Mr. Pickwick, or Sam Weller, or Mr. Jingle. It captured, in the words of Simon Callow, a certain sort of Englishness that had never really been captured before. For a good several decades, if you met five people on the street and asked them what the funniest novel ever written was, at least a couple of them probably would have said The Pickwick Papers.  Something like 80% of the people who could read bought the book when it came out, and people of all classes followed the original serial version. I particularly like Mr. Jingle:

    'Heads, heads—take care of your heads!' cried the loquacious stranger, as they came out under the low archway, which in those days formed the entrance to the coach-yard. 'Terrible place—dangerous work—other day—five children—mother—tall lady, eating sandwiches—forgot the arch—crash—knock—children look round—mother's head off—sandwich in her hand—no mouth to put it in—head of a family off—shocking, shocking!'

Today, it's still very funny -sometimes laugh-out-loud funny - but I can't help but think that, for much of the humor, you sort of had to be there. None of the characters or customs seem at all familiar anymore, and the book has lost some of its punch.

There's no plot to this book, exactly - Mr. Pickwick and his friends just wander around having adventures that read about like Laurel and Hardy farces today. Now and then, when Dickens was stuck for ideas, he would throw in a totally unrelated short story. Some of these stories are excellent - the one where a guy talks to a chair is pretty funny, "The Goblin Who Stole a Sexton" comes off as a prototype for A Christmas Carol (if it were written by Washington Irving) and "The Madman's Tale" seems like a prototype for everything Edgar Allan Poe would ever write.

But for a good portion of the book, the "Pickwickians" just wander around eating and drinking - there are nearly 250 references to drinking in the book, by one count, and I suspect it's higher. Perhaps the most commonly mentioned drink is brandy-and-hot-water, which is mentioned by name more than two dozen times. There's hardly a need for a proper recipe here - just take some hot water and add brandy to taste. It's a drink that occurs throughout Dickens books as the go-to drink at any tavern and a cure for what ails you. This is not strictly a fiction thing, either - doctors called for brandy and hot water when Abraham Lincoln was shot.

Sam Weller, Sancho to Mr. Pickwick's
Don Quixote. Or Rose Tyler to his Doctor.

Tastier still, though, is pineapple rum, which Sam Weller, Mr. Pickwick's wise-cracking assistant, encounters in a pub where his father hangs out when he wants to be brow-beaten by his wife. Weller was the "breakout character" of the book, given to jokes that came to be called "Wellerisms." For instance, when he directs a character known as "the fat boy" to the place where he might find some Christmas pies, he says "Wery good..stick a bit o' Christmas in 'em...there; now we look compact and comfortable, as the father said ven he cut his little boy's head off to cure him o' squintin.'"

Weller's stepmother ("mother-in-law," they called it then) is the proprietess of a pub called The Marquis of Granby in the town of Dorking (yep - I went there once strictly to stock up on postcards).

Dickens says of it:  The Marquis of Granby, in Mrs. Weller's time, was quite a model of a roadside public-house of the better class—just large enough to be convenient, and small enough to be snug."

In it, Weller finds a red-nosed man:

The fire was blazing brightly under the influence of the bellows, and the kettle was singing gaily under the influence of both. A small tray of tea-things was arranged on the table; a plate of hot buttered toast was gently simmering before the fire; and the red-nosed man himself was busily engaged in converting a large slice of bread into the same agreeable edible, through the instrumentality of a long brass toasting-fork. Beside him stood a glass of reeking hot pine-apple rum-and-water, with a slice of lemon in it; and every time the red-nosed man stopped to bring the round of toast to his eye, with the view of ascertaining how it got on, he imbibed a drop or two of the hot pine-apple rum-and-water, and smiled upon the rather stout lady, as she blew the fire."

Dickens himself was fond of pine-apple rum; there were five dozen bottles of it in his cellar when he died. The recipe is easy enough:

- 1 pint of dark rum
- 1 pint of pineapple juice
- sugar to taste

Simply add equal parts pineapple juice and dark rum. Some recommend freshly squeezing the juice from the pineapple, mixing it with the rum and leaving it in a jar with a few slices of pineapple for a few weeks, if you're into that sort of thing, and then bottling it, but you'll get a pretty good effect just by heating up some rum and adding pineapple juice and perhaps a bit of sugar.  I don't make whole bottles of this stuff at a time, after all. Just a cup or so of each (and perhaps some hot water to heat it up and make it last longer, as the red-nosed-man had) and I'm all set. After all, bottling and jarring this stuff was far more important in Dickens' own day - it was a winter drink, and pineapples would have been harder to get in the winter. Now we can get them year round.

Personally, for testing this one out, I took some frozen pineapple bits, added hot water, and blended them up, eventually pouring out one finger of rum and one finger of blended pineapple, with a teaspoon of sugar and some hot water just for the sake of matching what the red-fact man had. The result was really quite delicious - a pale-looking concoction (my rum wasn't all that dark), but with a hearty, refreshing taste.


The Pickwick Papers is the first Dickens novel some people read now - mainly those who insist on beginning at the beginning, since this was his first novel. But this is not really a great introduction - it made him a star, and it's still great fun, but if Dickens hadn't written anything else, no one would likely remember him now. The easiest introduction to Dickens is probably A Christmas Carol (it's short, you probably already know the plot, and the writing distills almost everything Dickens did well into one piece that you can read in one sitting), or perhaps Great Expectations. The madcap humor that characterizes his earlier works, like Pickwick, is better done in Nicholas Nickleby and the under-rated Martin Chuzzlewit.

But that's not to say Pickwick is bad - it's really a lot of fun. Besides Mr. Jingle, you get Bob Sawyer, the drunken medical student who delights in talking about dissections over dinner, and Bil Stumps, the semi-literate who creates a sensation by writing his name on a rock, a whole bunch of random old men who tell interesting stories, bar-maids and taverns by the score, the lawyers at Dodson and Fogg, a really hilarious trial scene, and a lot of good cheer. When it came out it was just the right book at just the right time, and, though it's not aged as well as Dickens' later work, it's still well worth reading. All the seeds of the best books are here.