Pickwick Club: posthumous papers

“Time and feeding had expanded that once romantic form; the black silk waistcoat had become more and more developed; and gradually had the capacious chin encroached upon the borders of the white cravat.”

This is how Charles Dickens described Mr Tupman, a character in the Pickwick Club.1 Such descriptions would have been unusual in the 19th century, but in the 21st …