The posthumous papers of the Pickwick club

First edition in book form of The Posthumous Papers of the Pickwick Club, published in London by Chapman and Hall in 1837, following its appearance in monthly parts beginning in March 1836. Dickens’s first novel, the work is illustrated with forty-three engraved plates, including a frontispiece and engraved title, by Robert Seymour, Robert William Buss, and Hablot Knight Browne, known as Phiz. The printed title is dated MDCCCXXXVII.

Contemporary full brown calf, spine with false raised bands, decorated with broad gilt fillets, longitudinal gilt tools over the bands, and blind wave tooling; red calf lettering-piece titled Pickwick. Covers framed with a broad blind roll within a gilt border. Some rubbing, spine slightly faded. The plates show the browning and foxing frequently encountered in copies of the first edition, particularly in the form of browned marginal frames.

The present copy retains a particularly interesting group of early issue points. Page 9 preserves the five-line footnote; at the final line of page 10, a small mark appears between the “r” and “u” of “rum”; page 341 retains the early misprints “inbe-licate” in line 1 and “inscriptino” in line 5; page 342 still reads “S. Veller” in line 5; and the “F” in the running headline on page 432 is imperfectly printed. The engraved title likewise reads “Veller” on the inn sign, identifying the first state of the plate before its correction to “Weller”. On page 260, however, the text already gives the corrected reading “holding” rather than the earlier “hodling”.

This coexistence of uncorrected and corrected readings is characteristic of the complex printing history of Pickwick. Copies in book form were assembled from sheets and plates printed throughout the twenty months of serial publication, while both text and illustrations continued to be revised. The present copy is therefore best described as a very early mixed state, retaining numerous early issue points and several first-state features.

Pickwick Papers, however, was not originally conceived as a novel. Chapman and Hall had planned the publication around a series of sporting scenes by Robert Seymour, for which the twenty-four-year-old Dickens, still writing under the name Boz, was engaged to supply accompanying text. The first part appeared at the end of March 1836; Seymour took his own life on 20 April, having produced the earliest illustrations for the project.

Robert William Buss briefly succeeded him, but his two plates were soon abandoned. The publishers then turned to the young Hablot Knight Browne, who adopted the pseudonym Phiz in deliberate echo of Dickens’s “Boz”. Thus began a collaboration that would last for more than twenty years, while the balance of the undertaking shifted decisively: the text, originally subordinate to the illustrations, took command as Dickens increasingly imposed his own rhythm, characters, and imaginative world.

Sales were modest at first, then rose dramatically following the appearance of Sam Weller. Circulation climbed to nearly forty thousand copies for the final numbers, transforming the young journalist within months into one of the most popular writers in England. Pickwick also established the model of monthly serial publication that Dickens would use for much of his later fiction.

The book’s publishing success was so extraordinary that the bibliographer John C. Eckel could later remark that only Shakespeare, the Bible, and perhaps the Book of Common Prayer had exceeded Pickwick Papers in circulation.

Retaining several of the earliest textual variants together with the first-state “Veller” engraved title, the present copy preserves the material traces of a book still in the process of becoming itself, at the precise moment when a projected series of comic sporting illustrations was transformed into Dickens’s first great success and permanently established his name in English literature.