The Pickwick Papers by Charles Dickens

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About Charles Dickens

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The Pickwick Papers

The Posthumous Papers of the Pickwick Club

» Charles Dickens

Editor/introduction - Mark Wormald

Penguin Classics
Paperback : 24 Feb 2000

£8.99

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Edited with an introduction and notes by Mark Wormald

Look inside: The Pickwick Papers

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Synopsis

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.

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Reviews

Customer Review: 06 May 2010

Reviewer: Kay Sanders

'This is a wonderful book. It is so easy to think that you know everything about "The Pickwick Papers" because you can remember a few incidents, but the whole work is well-sorth re-reading. Not only is it extremely funny, it is also truly dramatic. The scenes in the Fleet prison are moving and had me really concerned both for Mr Pickwick and Sam. The characters met during the travels and the tales told are all highly absorbing. It''s a book I wish I hadn''t waited so long to re-read.'

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