Charles Dickens | The Posthumous Papers of the Pickwick Club, London, 1836-7, 20 parts in 19

Charles Dickens

The Posthumous Papers of the Pickwick Club. London: Chapman and Hall, April 1836 - November 1837

FIRST EDITION, later issue, 20 parts in 19, 8vo (228 x 143mm.), 43 engraved plates, original light blue-green wrappers, housed in custom red buckram case, spotting in some parts, part 19/20 split along backstrip with final gathering and lower wrapper detached

FIRST EDITION OF DICKENS' FIRST NOVEL, IN ITS ORIGINAL MONTHLY PARTS. The Posthumous Papers of the Pickwick Club was initially conceived of as a series of comic sketches, written expressly to accompany monthly sporting plates by Robert Seymour. Dickens had the idea for Mr. Pickwick—a wealthy, retired businessman, with a penchant for good food and drink, an innocent and playful character, well-described later by W.H. Auden as "a pagan god wandering through the world imperviously". For the first month the work met with little success, but then, following the suicide of the illustrator Seymour, Dickens took over the project, altered the concept and introduced the character of Sam Weller, Pickwick's cockney servant, in Part 4, to immediate public approval. Searching for a replacement illustrator, Dickens commissioned the young "Phiz" who worked on the remainder of the work and became his most sympathetic and consistent of illustrators. From this moment on sales of the monthly numbers rose steadily and then spectacularly, the names and characters in Dickens' novel becoming common currency, and the enormous public success of the novel accompanied by great critical acclaim.

LITERATURE

Eckel pp. 3-88; Hatton and Cleaver, p. 3-88