Synopses & Reviews
The adventures of the immortal Pickwick Club, headed by good Mr. Pickwick himself, have kept readers laughing for nearly two centuries. Following the intrepidly bumbling Pickwickians along the highways and byways of old England, Charles Dickens creates a vivid world of highwaymen, duels, lawsuits, jails, and hilarious romantic imbrogliosbut a world too of deeply affecting human warmth and generosity. Filled with a host of indelible characters, [viii]
The Pickwick Papers has never ceased to enjoy the popularity it won with its initial publicationwhen it rocketed its author to sudden fame and launched a career without equal in the history of the English novel.
With an Afterword by Jasper Fforde
Synopsis
The adventures of the Pickwick Club-bumbling through duels, lawsuits, jails, and hilarious romantic imbroglios-rocketed their author to sudden fame.
Synopsis
Charles Dickens's satirical masterpiece, "The Pickwick Papers, catapulted the young writer into literary fame when it was first serialized in 1836-37. It recounts the rollicking adventures of the members of the Pickwick Club as they travel about England getting into all sorts of mischief. Laugh-out-loud funny and endlessly entertaining, the book also reveals Dickens's burgeoning interest in the parliamentary system, lawyers, the Poor Laws, and the ills of debtors' prisons. As G. K. Chesterton noted, "Before [Dickens] wrote a single real story, he had a kind of vision . . . a map full of fantastic towns, thundering coaches, clamorous market-places, uproarious inns, strange and swaggering figures. That vision was Pickwick."
Synopsis
200TH ANNIVERSARY EDITION
With dramatic eloquence, this story of the French Revolution brings to life a time of terror and treason, and a starving people rising in frenzy and hate to overthrow a corrupt and decadent regime.
Synopsis
In the fog of London, lawyers enrich themselves with endless litigation over a dwindling inheritance. A sterling example of Dickens's genius for character, dramatic construction, and social satire, this novel was hailed by Edmund Wilson as a "masterpiece".
About the Author
Charles Dickens (18121870) was born at Landport, near Portsmouth, England. The second of eight children in a family often plagued by debt, Dickens at ten saw his father arrested and confined in the Marshalsea, a debtors prison in London, and although a small boy, he was placed in a blacking factory where he worked at labeling bottles, visiting John Dickens on Sundays. On his fathers release, Charles returned to school, taught himself shorthand, and at sixteen became a paramilitary reporter. At twenty-four, his career took off with the publication of
Sketches by Boz, which was followed by
The Pickwick Papers the next year. As a novelist and magazine editor, he had a long run of serialized successes, including
Oliver Twist,
Great Expectations, and
A Tale of Two Cities. Even as ill health plagued him at the end of his life, he continued his popular dramatic readings from his fiction to an adoring public, which included Queen Victoria. He died at Gads Hill, his home in Kent, leaving his final manuscript,
The Mystery of Edwin Drood, unfinished.
Jasper Fforde worked in the film industry for nineteen years, where his varied career included the role of focus puller” on films such as Goldeneye and The Mask of Zorro. After he had received seventy-six rejection letters from publishers, his first novel, The Eyre Affair, was published in 2001 and became an international bestselling phenomenon. He has published six sequels, as well as multiple volumes in the Nursery Crime, Shades of Grey, and Last Dragonslayer series. Fforde lives and writes in Wales.