“So dramatically convincing that it is all the more surprising how much of it is historically verifiable . . . [Jarvis] has written a novel that reflects upon the world-altering effects of novel reading.”—
The Atlantic
Death and Mr. Pickwick
by Stephen Jarvis is a vast, richly imagined, Dickensian work about the rough-and-tumble world that produced an author who defined an age.
The Posthumous Papers of the Pickwick Club
, featuring the fat and lovable Mr. Pickwick and his cockney manservant, Sam Weller, began as a series of whimsical sketches, the brainchild of the brilliant, erratic, misanthropic illustrator named Robert Seymour. When Seymour’s publishers, after trying to match his magical etchings with a number of writers, settled on a young storyteller using the pen name Boz, as the young Charles Dickens signed his work,
The Pickwick Papers
went on to become a worldwide phenomenon, and Dickens became, in the eyes of many, the most important writer of his time. The fate of Robert Seymour, Mr. Pickwick’s creator, was a very different story—one untold before now.
Few novels deserve to be called magnificent:
is one of them.