John Sutherland has called The Pickwick Papers “[t]he most important single novel of the Victorian era.” His point is compelling, except that Pickwick is not “Victorian,” and it is not a “novel.” The Posthumous Papers of the Pickwick Club began publication on 31 March 1836, when William IV was on the throne, and it continued to appear, in monthly shilling numbers, through 30 October 1837. Fourteen of its twenty numbers thus appeared during William’s reign, so Pickwick is, at best, 30 percent Victorian. Further, early reviewers did not identify Pickwick as a novel. The Morning Chronicle described it as “a magazine consisting of only one article,” and Chambers’s Edinburgh Journal found it to be “a series of monthly pamphlets.”