The Pickwick Papers, twenty-four-year-old Dickens's joyful, rumbustious debut, made him an overnight sensation. The collected anecdotes from the fictional Pickwick Club -whose memebers include the poet Snodgrass, the romantic Tupman, Winkle the sportsman and the relentlessly cheerful Pickwick along with his immensely popular cockney sidekick Sam Weller- take readers from the comic delights of the cricket clib to debtors' jail by way of drunkennes, feasting and the immortal Fat Boy