Critical Praise

“In this astounding first novel, Jarvis re-creates, in loving and exhaustive detail, the writing and publication of Charles Dickens’s first novel…. The book offers an impressively imagined account of Seymour, Dickens, and a huge host of others (the sheer scale of the book is, itself, Dickensian)…[DEATH AND MR. PICKWICK] is a staggering accomplishment, a panoramic perspective.” 

—Publishers Weekly (starred review)

“Massive and marvelous, Stephen Jarvis’s debut places the reader in the midst of the artists, writers, publishers and booksellers who invented modern publishing in the first half of the 19th century. Exquisite in both its language and its detail, impeccably researched and brilliantly conceived, DEATH AND MR. PICKWICK is everything historical fiction should be.”

—Charlie Lovett, author of THE BOOKMAN’S TALE