Dimensions
129 x 198 x 36mm
The Pickwick Papers was the comic masterpiece that carried 24 year-old Dickens to fame as it appeared in monthly instalments in 1836-7. It records the 'perambulations, perils, travels, adventures' of the Pickwick Club's members: the founding chairman, former business man and amateur scientist Mr Pickwick, his trusted companion Sam Weller, the sportsman Winkle, the poet Snodgrass and the lover Tracy Tupman.
Beginning in haste to meet magazine deadlines and continuing in exuberant confidence, Dickens drew on his own experiences, on theatre, trials, romances and popular novels. Characters and incidents blossomed in his hands and Pickwick's rotund charm is now the stuff of mythology. If this endearing 'angel in tights and gaiters' still speaks to us from his early nineteenth-century world, it is due, at least in part, to Dickens's brilliant skill in handling the enduring currency of everyday speech.
This Penguin Classic, edited by Mark Wormald, makes available the first volume edition of 1837 together with the original illustrations.
