The Posthumous Papers of the Pickwick Club.

DICKENS, Charles.

Item Number: 4306

London: Chapman and Hall, 1837.

First edition with the Buss plates, and first state of the title-page with “Veller” for “Weller.” Octavo, bound in full brown calf. Gilt titles and ruling to front and rear panels, all edges gilt, inner dentelles, marbled endpapers. Illustrated with 43 engraved plates by Seymour and Phiz. Marbled endpapers with inner dentelles, all edges gilt, cloth slipcase. A near fine copy.

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 humour and literary invention.