Dickens, Schuler & Bellairs III

We’re celebrating the 200th anniversary of celebrated author Charles Dickens’s birth this year. Born February 7, 1812, in Landport, Portsmouth, England, Dickens created a plethora of memorable characters with whimsical names across a dozen major novels and numerous short stories.

We’re also celebrating Winston J. Schuler (1908-93), the popular restaurateur and owner of the now 100+-year-old Schuler’s Restaurant in downtown Marshall. Following his takeover of the business from his father, Win maintained his passion for Old English Inns and refurbished his family’s restaurants with old English relics to preserve the best of that heritage for Schuler's patrons to enjoy while dining. In the late 1940s he went as far to convert one of the dining rooms into the Dickens Room, whose walls were covered with illustrations of some of Dickens’s popular and enduring characters.

We discussed the over-arching connection between these two characters and their connection to John Bellairs in a previous post and so we’ll just bring out the third in our series of Schuler postcards from the 1950s.

This month we’re celebrating two more characters from The Pickwick Papers (1836): Mrs. Martha Bardell – “a comely woman of bustling manners and agreeable appearance” – who was Mr. Pickwick’s widowed landlady in Goswell Street, and the fat-bodied, red-faced Serjeant Buzfuz, the prosecuting counsel in the trial between Bardell and Pickwick.