DICKENS, Charles.

The Posthumous Papers of the Pickwick Club.

"Poetry makes life what lights and music do the stage": First EDITION in book form OF DICKENS’ The Posthumous Papers of the Pickwick Club With a signed Check

London: Chapman and Hall, 1837.

$4,000.00

In Stock Item Number: RRB-148735

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First edition in book form of Dickens' first novel and one of his greatest works. Octavo, bound in full twentieth-century olive morocco with elaborate gilt tooling to the spine in five compartments within raised gilt bands, elaborate gilt ruling to the front and rear panels, gilt turn-ins and inner dentelles, marbled endpapers. 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, with thirty-two extra plates by Onwhyn. In near fine condition with toning throughout. Accompanied by an autographed check by Dickens tipped in on the third free endpaper and drawn on Coutts Bank, payable to "Young Ladies Quarters" for twenty-five pounds, London, fourth March 1862. Rare and desirable.

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.