Death and Mr. Pickwick

“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: Death and Mr. Pickwick is one of them.