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  • Despite its picaresque contents, this first novel-length work is a wonderful piece to read. The characters are likable and amusing, the writing, while not yet what he will later become, is still outstanding. Highly entertaining. (This edition also contains pretty good end notes, as well.)

    

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• ― guaddess said on May 30, 2007 about the Paperback edition| Add your feedback

Charles Dickens’s satirical masterpiece, The Pickwick Papers, catapulted the young writer into literary fame when it was first serialized in 1836–37. It recounts the rollicking adventures of the members of the Pickwick Club as they travel about England getting into all sorts of mischief. Laugh-out-loud funny and endlessly entertaining, the book also reveals Dickens’s burgeoning interest in the parliamentary system, lawyers, the Poor Laws, and the ills of debtors’ prisons. As G. K. Chesterton noted, “Before [Dickens] wrote a single real story, he had a kind of vision . . . a map full of fantastic towns, thundering coaches, clamorous market-places, uproarious inns, strange and swaggering figures. That vision was Pickwick.”

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The Novel 100 (20)

England England (971)

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