The Posthumous Papers of the Pickwick Club

"I was a young man of two or three-and-twenty, when MESSRS. CHAPMAN and HALL, attracted by some pieces I was at that time writing in the Morning Chronicle newspaper, or had just written in the Old Monthly Magazine (of which one series had lately been collected and published in two volumes, illustrated by MR. GEORGE CRUIKSHANK); waited upon me to propose a something that should be published in shilling numbers-then only known to me, or, I believe, to anybody else, by a dim recollection of certain interminable novels in that form, which used to be carried about the country by pedlars, and over some of which I remember to have shed innumerable tears before I had served my apprenticeship to Life." --Charles Dickens