The Pickwick Papers

The Pickwick Papers, formally The Posthumous Papers of the Pickwick Club, is a novel by the English writer Charles Dickens, published in twenty monthly installments between April 1836 and November 1837, his first novel and the work that established his reputation. It recounts the travels and misadventures of Samuel Pickwick, the amiable, well-meaning founder of the Pickwick Club, and his three companions Tracy Tupman, Augustus Snodgrass and Nathaniel Winkle, as they journey around England collecting observations for the club, encountering comic scrapes with confidence tricksters, election chicanery, a duel, and a Christmas gathering at Dingley Dell, guided through much of the second half of the book by Pickwick's resourceful, street-smart Cockney servant Sam Weller, whose introduction in the fourth installment sharply boosted the novel's popularity. A central plot thread involves Pickwick's landlady Mrs. Bardell mistakenly believing he has proposed marriage to her, leading to a comically disastrous breach of promise lawsuit, Bardell v Pickwick, that ends with Pickwick briefly imprisoned in the Fleet debtors' prison rather than pay damages he considers unjust. Loosely structured as a picaresque sequence of episodes rather than a single continuous plot, in the tradition of earlier comic road novels, The Pickwick Papers was published in the new format of cheap monthly serial parts and became a publishing sensation whose sales built the mass readership that sustained Dickens's entire subsequent career.