Dickens seems to have had the idea for a paper or series of papers entitled 'Playing at Parliament' as far back as July 1850, when he was being exasperated by reports of the debates in the Court of Common Councils (governing body of the City of London) when many Councillors opposed sanitary reform (see Pilgrim, Vol. VI, p. 129; also Vol. 2 of [the Dent Uniform Edition of Dickens' Journalism], pp. 327–28). In one of his earliest sketches, 'Our Parish: the Election for Beadle' (Evening Chronicle, 14 July 1835; see Vol. 1 of [the Dent Uniform Edition of Dickens' Journalism], pp. 20–6), he had made fun of the self-important pomposities of local government assemblies as reflecting the absurdities of Parliamentary procedures; the Pickwick Club's behaviour in Pickwick Papers, Ch. 1, is a variant on this theme and Dickens again returns to it here.
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