Reading Order
The Pickwick PapersCharles Dickens Pickwick Papers Reading Order
Charles Dickens's The Pickwick Papers (1836–37) was his debut novel and the work that made him famous at twenty-four — the picaresque adventures of the benevolent, naïve Mr. Samuel Pickwick and his companions (Sam Weller, Nathaniel Winkle, Augustus Snodgrass, and Tracy Tupman) across the roads, inns, and courtrooms of 1830s England. The novel's immediate and overwhelming popular success established Dickens as the most popular writer in England and transformed the landscape of English publishing.
Where to start
The Pickwick Papers
Complete The Pickwick Papers Book List
- 1Buy
The Pickwick Papers
Charles Dickens·1837·Start here — Dickens's debut and the novel that made him famous; the most purely comic of his works and the best introduction to his early voice, though it has less of the social criticism that defines his mature fiction. - 2Buy
Nicholas Nickleby
Charles Dickens·1839·The natural next step from The Pickwick Papers — more structured, with a more sympathetic protagonist and more sustained social criticism, but sharing the picaresque energy and comic character gallery of Dickens's debut. - 3Buy
Don Quixote
Miguel de Cervantes·1615·Cervantes's novel about the comic knight and his squire — the formal and tonal ancestor of The Pickwick Papers; Mr. Pickwick is the Don Quixote of the Victorian era, the benevolent naïf whose misunderstandings and misadventures expose the gap between ideal and real, and Sam Weller is Sancho Panza transposed to an English coaching inn. - 4Buy
Tom Jones
Henry Fielding·1749·Fielding's picaresque novel is the most direct English precursor to The Pickwick Papers — the comic hero's journey through a social world that reveals its varieties of virtue and vice; Dickens knew Fielding well, and The Pickwick Papers inherits both the form and the comic spirit. - 5Buy
Three Men in a Boat
Jerome K. Jerome·1889·Jerome's comic masterpiece about three men and a dog boating up the Thames is the most direct heir to The Pickwick Papers in its combination of comic misadventure, friendship, and English landscape; the two novels define the English tradition of benevolent comic travel narrative.
The Pickwick Papers — Frequently Asked Questions
Is The Pickwick Papers a novel?
Technically no — or at least, it wasn't planned as one. Dickens was commissioned by the publishers Chapman and Hall to provide text for a series of comic illustrations of a 'Nimrod Club' of sporting Cockneys; the illustrations were to be primary and the text secondary. After the first illustrator's suicide, Dickens took control, expanded the text, and transformed the project from illustrated sporting comedy to a full-length serial narrative. The result is more episodic than his later novels and less unified by plot, but it is coherent enough in character and theme to be read as a novel, and it has always been published and received as one.
Who is Sam Weller and why is he important?
Sam Weller — Mr. Pickwick's manservant, introduced a few installments into the serial — was the character whose appearance transformed The Pickwick Papers from moderate success to publishing sensation. Sam is the most important working-class character in Dickens's early fiction: intelligent, confident, loyal, and possessed of an inexhaustible supply of comic analogies ('Weller's wellerisms') that frame every social situation in terms of working-class folk wisdom. He represents Dickens's early conviction that the common people have a moral intelligence and social generosity superior to the pretentious middle class, and he established the loyal working-class companion as a type that Dickens would return to throughout his career.
What is the Fleet Prison episode in The Pickwick Papers?
Mr. Pickwick, in a point of principle, refuses to pay the costs awarded against him in a fraudulent lawsuit and is accordingly imprisoned in the Fleet debtors' prison. The Fleet episodes — in which Pickwick discovers that many honest, decent people are imprisoned for debt while their creditors prosper — mark the moment when The Pickwick Papers shifts from pure comedy to social criticism. Dickens's father had been imprisoned in the Marshalsea for debt when Dickens was twelve, and the Fleet episodes carry the emotional force of that biographical wound even in the novel's predominantly comic mode.
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