Charles Dickens published The Pickwick Papers in parts. In a later preface, he explained that “no ingenuity of plot was attempted, or even at that time considered very feasible by the author.” He linked this to “the desultory mode of publication adopted.”
The novel opens with the Pickwick Club, but the club did not last. Its “machinery,” Dickens wrote, “proving cumbrous in the management, was gradually abandoned as the work progressed.”