Notes

Few first novels have created as much popular excitment as The Pickwick Papers - a comic masterpiece that catapulted its twenty-four-yeat-old author to immediate fame. Readers were captivated by the adventures of the poet Snodgrass, the lover Tupman, the sportsman Winkle and, above all, by that quintessentially English Quixote, Mr Pickwick, and his cockney Sancho Panza, Sam Weller. From the hallowed turf of Dingley Dell Cricket Club to the unholy fracas of the Eatanswill election, via the Fleet debtor's prison, characters and incidents sprang to life from Dickens's pen, to form an enduringly popular work of ebullient humor and literary invention.
This edition is based on the first volume edition of 1837, and includes the original illustrations.