The Posthumous Papers of the Pickwick Club.

DICKENS, Charles.

$1,500.00

Item Number: 129149

London: Oxford University Press, 1967.

Early printing of the Oxford Illustrated edition of Dickens’ first novel. Octavo, bound in full crushed red morocco by Sangorski and Sutcliffe with gilt titles and tooling to the spine in six compartments within raised gilt bands, gilt ruling and fleuron cornerpieces to the front and rear panels, gilt turn-ins and inner dentelles, marbled endpapers, all edges gilt. With forty-three illustrations by Seymour and ‘Phiz’ and an Introduction by Bernard Darwin. In fine condition. Housed in a custom slipcase.

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 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.