According to his widow, the author of that magical master- piece The Leopard always took a volume of Shakespeare plays on journeys, 'to console himself when he saw something disagreeable'; but the book he kept permanently by his bedside for sleepless nights was The Pickwick Papers. In the notes he made for a course on English literature, Lampedusa observed that however often he reread this novel, he always found something new to admire in it. More than a hundred and sixty years after it first appeared, the perennial newness of Pickwick is still its most remarkable feature. Despite revolutions in literary taste and the complete disappearance of the world Dickens describes, the novel comes up as fresh as ever, like its hero at the beginning of Chapter II: