The Pickwick Papers: The Novel That Made Dickens Famous

He was twenty-four, an unknown parliamentary reporter, when he began knocking out monthly instalments of a comic serial about a plump gentleman and his friends bumbling around the English countryside. By the end, The Pickwick Papers was the publishing sensation of the age, and Charles Dickens was the most famous writer alive. Fame in England has rarely happened so fast, or so completely.

Read it and you see why. Pickwick is pure sunshine — the funniest of Dickens’s books, a picaresque of coaching inns and Christmas feasts and cricket matches and lawsuits, held together by the sweet, gullible Mr Pickwick and, above all, by Sam Weller, the quick-witted Cockney servant whose arrival midway through the serial doubled its sales overnight. Sam is one of the great comic creations in English, the ancestor of every wisecracking sidekick since.

But the young Dickens is already more than a joker. Into the merriment he drops a debtors’ prison, and the laughter catches in the throat — the first sign of the social conscience that would drive the later masterpieces. The comedy and the cruelty of England are already there, side by side.

It is where the whole career begins. Read on with Oliver Twist, the darker book that came next.

Read The Pickwick Papers — the Erato Press edition →