Bursting with the good humour, vitality and charm of a young author embarking on his career, The Pickwick Papers is an immortal work of comic fiction.

Readers are drawn in from the very first chapter, when Mr Pickwick announces his brilliant idea and the immortal Pickwick Club is born. Winkle the sportsman, Snodgrass the poet and Tupman the lover all join with Pickwick in reporting back on their ‘perambulations, perils, travels and adventures’. And they provide a rainbow of experiences that is the stuff of Dickens’s glorious novel.

The Pickwick Papers appeared in serial form during 1836-7 and soon it was all the rage. There were Pickwick hats, coats, canes, cigars and song-books. This is the novel that made twenty-four-year-old Dickens famous, and it has delighted and entertained countless readers ever since.