Penguin Classics give you the best possible editions of Charles Dickens's novels,
including all the original illustrations, useful and informative introductions, the
definitive, accurate text as it was meant to be published, a chronology of Dickens's life
and notes that fill in the background to the book. This Penguin Classics edition of The
Pickwick Papers also includes a map of the Pickwickians' tours.
Few first novels have created as much popular excitement as The Pickwick Papers -
a comic masterpiece that catapulted its twenty-four-year-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 debtors' prison, characters and
incidents spring to life from Dickens's pen, to form an enduringly popular work of ebullient
humour and literary invention.
This edition is based on the first volume edition of 1837, and includes the original
illustrations. In his introduction, Mark Wormald discusses the genesis of The Pickwick
Papers and the emergence of its central characters.
