“There are very few moments in a man’s existence when he experiences so much ludicrous distress, or meets with so little charitable commiseration, as when he is in pursuit of his own hat.” Acclaimed British writer Charles Dickens was commissioned to write the accompanying text for a series of comic engravings by Robert Seymour in February 1836. Dickens’s witty accounts of Samuel Pickwick and his friends in the London-based Pickwick Club became an instant success and he gained an immense fan following. The Pickwick Papers (1836–37), Dickens’s first and arguably funniest novel, was published in monthly instalments by Chapman & Hall. The eccentric cast of characters in The Pickwick Papers are typical Dickensian creations, caricatured in speech, body language, and temperament. Mr. Pickwick, the central character, remains a perennial favourite of readers across the globe. Painting a vivid account of Mr. Pickwick and his fellow club members (Nathaniel Winkle, Augustus Snodgrass, and Tracy Tupman), as they set out on their mission to observe some specimens of the human race at close quarters, the novel grapples with the themes of class, money, social inequality, incarceration, and parenting.