In March, 1836, the first monthly number of the “Posthumous Papers of the Pickwick Club” made its appearance and “... in less than six months from this time the whole reading world was talking about them; the names of Winkle, Wardle, Weller, Snodgrass, Dodson, and Fogg had become familiar in our mouths as household words. ‘Pickwick chintzes’ figured in linen-drapers’ windows, and ‘Weller corduroys’ in breechesmakers’ advertisements; ‘Boz cabs’ might be seen rattling through the streets, and the portrait of the author of Pelham and Crichton was scraped down or pasted over to make room for that of the new popular favourite in the omnibuses.” It was only natural that a work so launched, with the author pressed for copy for each part, should be lacking in any definite form or plot. Dickens writes in the preface to the original edition: “The publication of the book in monthly numbers, containing only thirty-two pages in each, rendered it an object of paramount importance that, while the different incidents were linked together by a chain of interest strong enough to prevent their appearing unconnected or impossible, the general design should be so simple as to sustain no injury from this detached and desultory form of publication, extending over no fewer than twenty months. In short, it was necessary—or it appeared so to the author—that every number should be, to a certain extent, complete in itself, and yet that the whole twenty numbers, when collected, should form one tolerably harmonious whole, each leading to the other by a gentle and not unnatural progress of adventure. “It is obvious that in a work published with a view to such considerations, no artfully interwoven or ingeniously complicated plot can with reason be expected. The author ventures to express a hope that he has successfully surmounted the difficulties of his undertaking. And if it be objected to the Pickwick Papers, that they are a mere series of adventure, in which the scenes are ever changing, and the characters come and go like the men and women we encounter in the real world, he can only content himself with the reflection that they claim to be nothing else, and that the same objection has been made to the works of some of the greatest novelists in the English language.” The publishers of the present volume felt that the very manner in which “Pickwick” was first issued justifies the separate reprinting of those chapters which deal with the Christmas festivities at the Manor farm. Aside from this there is an especial interest attached to the Christmas sentiment contained in these chapters, because it marks the first formal expression of that Christmas feeling to which Dickens afterwards devoted a considerable series of delightful works.