The Pickwick Papers

Mr. Samuel Pickwick — stout, kindly, gloriously naïve — sets out with three fellow club members to travel the roads of England and report back on all they see. The amorous Tupman, the poetical Snodgrass, and the hopelessly unsporting Winkle follow him from inn to inn through a half-remembered country of stagecoaches and turnpikes, blundering into one comic scrape after another and forever crossing the path of the fast-talking rogue Alfred Jingle.

Then Mr. Pickwick takes on a servant, and the book takes flight. Sam Weller — cockney boot-cleaner, philosopher, and the most devoted manservant in fiction — becomes its heart, his unflappable wit and his endless comic proverbs grounding the whole sunny chaos. With Sam comes a plot: a landlady's innocent misunderstanding, a pair of shyster lawyers, and the celebrated breach-of-promise trial of Bardell v. Pickwick, which lands the blameless Mr. Pickwick — on principle, refusing to pay a penny — in a debtors' prison.

Dickens wrote it month by month at twenty-four, inventing the serial novel as he went and discovering, in real time, his own incomparable gift for character. What begins as a lark deepens into something richer: a comedy that darkens, in the prison chapters, into a quiet fury at the cruelty of the law, and a portrait of friendship — between master and servant, innocent and worldling — as moving as anything he ever wrote.

The Pickwick Papers made Dickens famous and has never stopped making readers laugh. It is the great, generous, open-road comedy of the English novel.