The Posthumous Papers of the Pickwick Club is Charles Dickens's first novel. He was asked to contribute to the project as an up-and-coming writer following the success of Sketches by Boz, published in 1836. Dickens increasingly took over the unsuccessful monthly publication after the original illustrator Robert Seymour had committed suicide.
"When I need to read something that I know will fill my imagination, lift my spirits and also be effortless, I go to Dickens, and this is the most preposterously, comically overflowing of them all."