“Formidably knowledgeable...Jarvis sends readers on marvelous excursions into English social and cultural life in the early nineteenth century.”—The Washington Post

“For someone saddened that there will never be any more new novels coming from the pen of Charles Dickens, Jarvis’s sprawling, eight-hundred-page work could be the next big thing.”—NPR

“As crowded, rude, and brilliantly inventive as the great pre-Dickensian caricatures it celebrates.” —The Guardian (London)

"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."
—Peter Kemp, Sunday Times (London)

"A masterpiece of imagination supported by a mountain of research." —Sunday Telegraph (London)

"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." —Daily Mail (London)

"It offers a reading experience as immersive as Hilary Mantel's Wolf Hall, and as visionary in its capacity to connect us with past lives." —Independent (London)

"A wonderful creation of the imaginative world in which Dickens and his collaborators discovered Pickwick and his companions—witty, rambling, and vastly well informed." —Rowan Williams, New Statesman

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