The Pickwick Papers
A club of amiable gentlemen sends its founder into the English countryside to observe human nature, and he observes almost nothing correctly. The book began as a set of captions for sporting illustrations and turned into a serial that made Dickens famous at twenty-four.
Plot matters less than texture: inns, coaches, elections, lawsuits, Christmas. Mr Pickwick is a joke that slowly becomes a portrait of decency, and Sam Weller's slang is a small essay in how language belongs to class. It is the best book to read if you want to know what Victorian readers found funny before anyone told them to.
Public-domain status
First published in 1837. In the United States, works published before 1930 are in the public domain. In the European Union the general term is the life of the author plus 70 years; Charles Dickens died in 1870, so this work has been free to republish there since 1941.
Read the text free
- Project Gutenberg, ebook no. 580 — plain text, EPUB and Kindle, checked by us
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- Open Library — edition history and borrowable copies
Keep reading
- Pride and Prejudice — Jane Austen, 1813
- Great Expectations — Charles Dickens, 1861
- The Time Machine — H. G. Wells, 1895
- Bleak House — Charles Dickens, 1853
- London — the city behind the books
- Reading lists — 19 ways through the collection
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