The quintessentially English Don Quixote, here presented in a new edition based on the authoritative text and accompanied by notes and extra material to help the modern reader. A rich and varied array of stories and vignettes, The Pickwick Papers is based around the investigations of the Corresponding Society of the Pickwick Club, consisting of its founder Mr Samuel Pickwick and Messrs Tracy Tupman, Augustus Snodgrass and Nathaniel Winkle, who travel around the country and then report back to the club concerning their extraordinary adventures and experiences.Dickens's first novel, The Pickwick Papers was an immediate success and caught the public imagination in a manner that few debuts have ever matched. Replete with colorful characters, fantastical anecdotes and a farcical plot, it catapulted its twenty-four-year-old author to literary stardom, and is widely considered to be one of the great comic masterpieces of nineteenth-century literature.