On 31 March 1836 the publishers Chapman & Hall launched the first issue of a new monthly periodical entitled The Posthumous Papers of the Pickwick Club. Conceived & created by the artist Robert Seymour, it contained four of his illustrations; the words to accompany them were written by a young journalist who used the pen-name Boz. The story of a sporting-cum-drinking club presided over by fat, loveable Mr Pickwick, assisted by his cockney manservant Sam Weller, The Pickwick Papers soon became a popular sensation, outselling every other book except the Bible & Shakespeare`s plays, & read & discussed by the entire population of the British Isles, from the duke`s drawing-room to the lowliest chophouse. The fame of Mr Pickwick soon spread worldwide
- making The Pickwick Papers the greatest literary phenomenon in history. But one does not need to have read a single word of The Pickwick Papers to be enthralled by the story of how this extraordinary novel came to be. The creation & afterlife of The Pickwick Papers is the subject of Stephen Jarvis` novel, Death & Mr Pickwick. This vast, intricately constructed, indeed Dickensian work is at once the ultimate homage to a much-loved book, tracing its genesis & subsequent history in fascinating detail, & a damning indictment of how an ambitious young writer expropriated another man`s ideas & then engaged in an elaborate cover-up of The Pickwick Papers` true origin. Few novels deserve to be called magnificent. Death & Mr Pickwick is one of them.