The Posthumous Papers of the Pickwick Club.

DICKENS, Charles.

$1,600.00

Item Number: 148216

London: Chapman and Hall, 1837.

First edition in book form of Dickens’ first novel and one of his greatest works. Octavo, bound in full polished calf bound by Bayntun with elaborate gilt tooling to the spine in six compartments within raised gilt bands, morocco spine labels lettered in gilt, double gilt ruling to the front and rear panels, marbled endpapers, all edges gilt. Forty-three engraved plates by Seymour and Phiz, and the two Buss plates which Dickens requested to be removed in subsequent printings on pages 69 and 74, frontispiece and title vignette. In near fine condition, bookplate to the front pastedown. Housed in a custom marbled slipcase. A very sharp example.

Few first novels have created as much popular excitement as The Pickwick Papers – a comic masterpiece that catapulted its twenty-four-year-old author to immediate fame. Readers were captivated by the adventures of the poet Snodgrass, the lover Tupman, the sportsman Winkle and, above all, by that quintessentially English Quixote, Mr Pickwick, and his cockney Sancho Panza, Sam Weller. From the hallowed turf of Dingley Dell Cricket Club to the unholy fracas of the Eatanswill election, via the Fleet debtor’s prison, characters and incidents sprang to life from Dickens’s pen, to form an enduringly popular work of ebullient humour and literary invention.