seem strange at the first glance to say that Sam
Weller helped to make the story serious. Nevertheless, this is strictly
true. The introduction of Sam Weller had, to begin with, some merely
accidental and superficial effects. When Samuel Weller had appeared,
Samuel Pickwick was no longer the chief farcical character. Weller
became the joker and Pickwick in some sense the butt of his jokes. Thus
it was obvious that the more simple, solemn, and really respectable this
butt could be made the better. Mr. Pickwick had been the figure capering
before the footlights. But with the advent of Sam, Mr. Pickwick had
become a sort of black background and had to behave as such. But this
explanation, though true as far as it goes, is a mean and unsatisfactory
one, leaving the great elements unexplained. For a much deeper and more
righteous reason Sam Weller introduces the more serious tone of
Pickwick. He introduces it because he introduces something which it was
the chief business of Dickens to preach throughout his life--something
which he never preached so well as when he preached it unconsciously.
Sam Weller introduces the English people.

Sam Weller is the great symbol in English literature of the populace
peculiar to England. His incessant stream of sane nonsense is a
wonderful achievement of Dickens: but it is no great falsification of
the incessant stream of sane nonsense as it really exists among the
English poor. The English poor live in an atmosphere of humour; they
think in humour. Irony is the very air that they breathe. A joke comes
suddenly from time to time into the head of a politician or a gentleman,
and then as a rule he makes the most of it; but when a serious word
comes into the mind of a coster it is almost as startling as a joke. The
word "chaff" was, I suppose, originally applied to badinage to express
its barren and unsustaining character; but to the English poor chaff is
as sustaining as grain. The phrase that leaps to their lips is the
ironical phrase. I remember once being driven in a hansom cab down a
street that turned out to be a _cul de sac_, and brought us bang up
against a wall. The driver and I simultaneously said something. But I
said: "This'll never do!" and he said: "This is all right!" Even in the
act of pulling back his horse's nose from a brick wall, that confirmed
satirist thought in terms of his highly-trained and traditional satire;
while I, belonging to a duller and simpler class, expressed