First monthly part of Dickens's The Pickwick Papers published in London

Background. Charles Dickens's first collection of pieces, Sketches by Boz, drawn from his journalism and sketches in periodicals, was published in 1836, with Boz being a family nickname he employed as a pseudonym. Because of its success, the publisher Chapman & Hall asked Dickens to supply descriptions to explain a series of comic "cockney sporting plates" by illustrator Robert Seymour and to connect them into a novel. The Pickwick Papers was the result, a work later characterised as defining its own new form that readers have learned to call 'entertainment'.

Publication. The Posthumous Papers of the Pickwick Club was Dickens's first novel, published in serial form starting in March 1836. The first monthly part appeared in London, initiating a run that lasted until November 1837. This serialization popularized cliffhanger endings and serialized fiction, becoming a publishing phenomenon that sparked merchandise and spin-offs.

Context. The first monthly part appeared during a busy 1836 for Dickens. On 2 April 1836, after a one-year engagement, and between episodes two and three of The Pickwick Papers, he married Catherine Thomson Hogarth, daughter of George Hogarth, editor of the Evening Chronicle. In the same year his journalism formed his first collection, Sketches by Boz, and as he finished the last instalments of The Pickwick Papers he began writing the beginning instalments of Oliver Twist, writing as many as 90 pages a month.