The Pickwick Papers

**The Comic Journey That Became a Publishing Phenomenon**

**Charles Dickens's First Novel**

**From Sporting Illustrations to the Fleet Prison**

**The Serial That Redefined Popular Entertainment**

*Before the celebrated masterpieces came The Pickwick Papers: a first book in which Charles Dickens's defining concerns were already taking shape.*

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The Posthumous Papers of the Pickwick Club (also known as The Pickwick Papers) was the first novel by English author Charles Dickens, first published in serial form from March 1836 to November 1837. Because of his success with Sketches by Boz published in 1836, Dickens was asked by the publisher Chapman & Hall to supply descriptions to explain a series of comic "cockney sporting plates" by illustrator Robert Seymour, and to connect them into a novel. The book became a publishing phenomenon, with bootleg copies, theatrical performances, Sam Weller joke books, and other merchandise. On its cultural impact, Nicholas Dames in The Atlantic writes, "'Literature' is not a big enough category for Pickwick. It defined its own, a new one that we have learned to call 'entertainment'." Published in 19 issues over 20 months, the success of The Pickwick Papers popularised serialised fiction and cliffhanger endings. Seymour's widow claimed that the idea for the novel was originally her husband's, but Dickens strenuously denied any specific input in his preface to the 1867 edition: "Mr Seymour never originated or suggested an incident, a phrase, or a word, to be found in the book."

The Pickwick Papers is a sequence of loosely related adventures written for serialization in a periodical. The action is given as occurring 1827-28, though critics have noted some seeming anachronisms. For example, Dickens satirized the case of George Norton suing Lord Melbourne in 1836. The novel's protagonist Samuel Pickwick, Esquire is a kind and wealthy old gentleman, the founder and perpetual president of the Pickwick Club. Bored with the club's usual sporting activities, he suggests that he and the three other "Pickwickians" should make journeys to places remote from London and compose reports of what they see and experience. Their travels throughout the English countryside by coach provide the chief subject matter of the novel. A romantic misunderstanding with his landlady, the widow Mrs Bardell, results in one of the most famous legal cases in English literature, Bardell v. Pickwick, leading to them both being incarcerated in the Fleet Prison for debt.

Dickens was working as a parliamentary reporter and a roving journalist at the age of 24, and he had published a collection of sketches on London life as Sketches by Boz. Publisher Chapman & Hall was projecting a series of "cockney sporting plates" by illustrator Robert Seymour. There was to be a club, the members of which were to be sent on hunting and fishing expeditions into the country. Their guns were to go off by accident, and fishhooks were to get caught in their hats and trousers, and these and other misadventures were to be depicted in Seymour's comic plates. They asked Dickens to supply the description necessary to explain the plates and to connect them into a sort of picture novel that was fashionable at the time. He protested that he knew nothing of sport, but still accepted the commission.

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*“Mr Seymour never originated or suggested an incident, a phrase, or a word, to be found in the book.”*

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**Why The Pickwick Papers Still Matters**

Read today, The Pickwick Papers offers more than the curiosity of a famous writer's beginning. It preserves the risks, experiments, and unresolved tensions of a literary voice before later success made that voice familiar.

*Return to the beginning, and discover how The Pickwick Papers first opened the path ahead.*