Apr 22, 2015

Death and Mr Pickwick - Stephen Jarvis

Who conceived The Pickwick Papers?

Stephen Jarvis’s enthralling first novel traces the genesis, and subsequent history of Charles Dickens’ much-loved book. He offers a damning indictment of how an ambitious young writer expropriated another man’s ideas and then engaged in an elaborate cover-up of the true origin of the The Pickwick Papers.

Pickwick himself, of course, needed to be central to the cover but the design required a device that suggested there was more to the tale. The ink spatter offers this tension - is it the ink of the artist or the writer? Is Pickwick a creation of the artist Robert Seymour or a young journalist using the pen-name Boz?

Death and Mr Pickwick is published in May by Jonathan Cape.

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