''One of my life''s greatest tragedies is to have already read Pickwick Papers - I can''t go back and read it for the first time'' Fernando PessoaFew first novels have created as much popular excitement as The Pickwick Papers - a comic masterpiece that catapulted its twenty-four-year-old author to immediate fame. Readers were captivated by the adventures of the poet Snodgrass, the sportsman Winkle and, above all, by that quintessentially English Quixote, Mr Pickwick, and his cockney Sancho Panza, Sam Weller. From the hallowed turf of Dingley Dell Cricket Club to the unholy fracas of the Eatanswill election, characters and incidents sprang to life from Dickens''s pen, to form an enduringly popular work of ebullient humour and literary invention. Edited with an Introduction and Notes by Mark Wormald