Stephen Jarvis

This is a masterpiece of imagination supported by a mountain of research.

A novel as crowded, rude and brilliantly inventive as the great pre-Dickensian caricatures it celebrates.

Some may view this book as a remarkable piece of literary detection, others a dazzlingly written and superbly imagined exposition on how art and writing are gestated and born. Or both.

It offers a readers experience as immersive as Hilary Mantel’s Wolf Hall, and as visionary in its capacity to connect us with past lives.

A huge and hugely impressive first novel for both fans of immersive reads and of Dickens’ London.

In this astounding first novel, Jarvis re-creates, in loving and exhaustive detail, the writing and publication of Charles Dickens’s first novel, The Posthumous Papers of the Pickwick Club...it is a staggering accomplishment, a panoramic perspective of nineteenth-century London and its creative class.

A bravura exercise in fictionalized literary criticism.

You’ll be reluctant to leave its rambunctious world of creative intrigue and betrayal.

Original and very enjoyable… The narrative may be complex but the reading experience is leisurely and pleasant.

It’s a great, rich, swarming, seething broth of a story-behind-a story… You don’t need to be a Dickens nerd like me to be captivated by this epic of ambition and skullduggery.

Richly imaginative,… Jarvis’ first novel represents a major achievement.

A book as crowded and rude and brilliantly inventive as the great pre-Dickensian caricatures it celebrates.

Brimming with colourful characters, written with tremendous verve and bursting with information... it exuberantly resurrects an age of transition and enthrallingly depicts the pleasures and pressures of creativity.

A vast, sprawling epic, packed with digression and detail, it is a brilliant achievement for a first-time novelist.

Engrossing detail… Exuberantly broadens out from indictment to celebration… Teems with vividly idiosyncratic characters…. Burstingly informative and thronged with colorful characters, this panoramic novel about the shady start and sunny breakthrough of a literary phenomenon is a phenomenon itself.

Shortlisted for the HWA Goldsboro Debut Crown 
 
It is 31 March 1836. A new monthly periodical is launched entitled The Posthumous Papers of the Pickwick Club. Conceived and created by the artist Robert Seymour, it contains four of his illustrations. The words to accompany them are written by a young journalist, under the pen-name Boz. The journalist's real name is Charles Dickens. 
 
The Pickwick Papers soon becomes a phenomenal, unprecedented sensation, read and discussed by the entire British Isles. Before long, its success is worldwide. 
 
Stephen Jarvis's novel tells of the dawning of the age of global celebrity. It is a story of colossal triumph and of the depths of tragedy, based on real events - and an expose of how an ambitious young writer stole another man's ideas.

Stephen Jarvis

Praise for Death and Mr Pickwick

An outstanding debut novel.

This is a masterpiece of imagination supported by a mountain of research.

A novel as crowded, rude and brilliantly inventive as the great pre-Dickensian caricatures it celebrates.

An outstanding debut novel.

This is a masterpiece of imagination supported by a mountain of research.

A novel as crowded, rude and brilliantly inventive as the great pre-Dickensian caricatures it celebrates.

An outstanding debut novel.

This is a masterpiece of imagination supported by a mountain of research.

A novel as crowded, rude and brilliantly inventive as the great pre-Dickensian caricatures it celebrates.

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