The Pickwick Papers

Four bumbling members of a nineteenth-century London social club, known as the legendary Pickwick Club, journey to places outside the city and become involved in romantic foibles, danger, and a few legal scrapes.

Charles Dickens (1812–1870) was born at Landport, near Portsmouth, England. The second of eight children in a family often plagued by debt, Dickens at ten saw his father arrested and confined in the Marshalsea, a debtors’ prison in London, and although a small boy, he was placed in a blacking factory where he worked at labeling bottles, visiting John Dickens on Sundays. On his father’s release, Charles returned to school, taught himself shorthand, and at sixteen became a paramilitary reporter. At twenty-four, his career took off with the publication of Sketches by Boz, which was followed byThe Pickwick Papers the next year. As a novelist and magazine editor, he had a long run of serialized successes, includingOliver Twist, Great Expectations, and A Tale of Two Cities. Even as ill health plagued him at the end of his life, he continued his popular dramatic readings from his fiction to an adoring public, which included Queen Victoria. He died at Gads Hill, his home in Kent, leaving his final manuscript, The Mystery of Edwin Drood, unfinished.

Jasper Fforde worked in the film industry for nineteen years, where his varied career included the role of “focus puller” on films such asGoldeneye and The Mask of Zorro. After he had received seventy-six rejection letters from publishers, his first novel,The Eyre Affair, was published in 2001 and became an international bestselling phenomenon. He has published six sequels, as well as multiple volumes in the Nursery Crime, Shades of Grey, and Last Dragonslayer series.Fforde lives and writes in Wales.