Les grandes espérances I

Few first novels have created as much popular excitement as **The Pickwick

Papers** –-a comic masterpiece that catapulted its 24-year-old author to

immediate fame. Readers were captivated by the adventures of the poet

Snodgrass, the lover Tupman, the sportsman Winkle &, above all, by that

quintessentially English Quixote, Mr Pickwick, & his cockney Sancho Panza, Sam

Weller. From the hallowed turf of Dingley Dell Cricket Club to the unholy

fracas of the Eatanswill election, via the Fleet debtor’s prison, characters &

incidents sprang to life from Dickens’s pen, to form an enduringly popular

work of ebullient humour & literary invention.