The Posthumous Papers of the Pickwick Club. [Fore-edge Painting]. by Dickens, Charles - 1837

London: Chapman and Hall, 1837. First edition in book form of Dickens' first novel and one of his greatest works. Octavo, bound in full morocco with gilt titles and tooling to the spine in six compartments within raised gilt bands, elaborate gilt ruling to the front and rear panels, gilt turn-ins and inner dentelles, all edges gilt with a fore-edge painting displaying a portrait of Dickens and a scene from the novel. With forty-three illustrations by R. Seymour and "Phiz. In very good condition. Bookplate to the pastedown. 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.