Charles Dickens · 1836 · road

Charles Dickens's first novel, published in monthly parts from 1836. Mr Pickwick and three friends set out from London to observe human nature at first hand, and proceed to be swindled, sued, misdirected and locked up. The coaching roads of England supply the incidents, and a Cockney bootblack called Sam Weller supplies the sense.

1. 1
   London

   The Pickwick Club dispatches its founder and three members from the Golden Cross at Charing Cross to travel and report their observations - a scheme which produces almost no observations and a great many disasters.

2. 2
   Rochester

   The first expedition reaches Rochester, where the party falls in with the strolling player Jingle, whose habit of borrowing coats, money and other men's fiancees provides the engine for much of what follows.

3. 3
   Ipswich

   Through the eastern counties to Ipswich, where Mr Pickwick blunders into the wrong bedroom at the Great White Horse in the middle of the night, and is obliged to explain himself to a lady in yellow curl-papers.

4. 4
   Bath

   At Bath the party takes the waters and the assembly rooms, and Mr Winkle's romantic entanglement produces a flight, a pursuit and a duel that nobody involved has the smallest intention of fighting.

5. 5
   Birmingham

   A charitable errand carries Mr Pickwick to Birmingham to reconcile a father with a son, in a chapter that shows the coaching road at its most cheerful before the reckoning waiting for him in London.

6. 6
   The Fleet Prison

   Sued for breach of promise by his own landlady and refusing on principle to pay a penny of damages, Mr Pickwick is committed to the Fleet - where the comedy stops and Dickens shows him what a debtors' prison actually contains.