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Summary

Written for publication as a serial, The Pickwick Papers is a sequence of loosely related adventures. The action is given as occurring 1827–8, though critics have noted some seeming anachronisms.[5] It has been stated that Dickens satirized the case of George Norton suing Lord Melbourne in The Pickwick Papers.[6] The novel's main character, Samuel Pickwick, Esquire, is a kind and wealthy old gentleman, the founder and perpetual president of the Pickwick Club. To extend his researches into the quaint and curious phenomena of life, he suggests that he and three other "Pickwickians" (Mr Nathaniel Winkle, Mr Augustus Snodgrass, and Mr Tracy Tupman) should make journeys to places remote from London and report on their findings to the other members of the club. Their travels throughout the English countryside by coach provide the chief theme of the novel. A distinctive and valuable feature of the work is the generally accurate description of the old coaching inns of England.[7] (One of the main families running the Bristol to Bath coaches at the time was started by Eleazer Pickwick).

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