incidental stops in Paris and Berlin. Release and reception "The Honourable Event" and "The Adventure of Westgate Seminary" were released in the United States on February 28, 1913, and "The Adventure of the Shooting Party" was released on September 5, 1913. The first two reels were released in the United Kingdom on June 9, 1913, and the third reel was released on December 18, 1913. Despite the effort Bunny and his associates invested in The Pickwick Papers, contemporary audiences did not take to the film, instead preferring the one-reel comedies Bunny was used to producing for Vitagraph. As Bunny recalled in 1915: "Listen, I went to England and put in some of the hardest work of my life in producing Mr. Pickwick. I found every place that was unchanged, from Dingley Dell to the White Hart Tavern, and we worked it all out true to life. I'm proud of those pictures—but they haven't sold at all in comparison with these things I'm turning out every week." According to Vitagraph's co-founder Albert E. Smith: "As Mr. Pickwick, Bunny won no new laurels, though we felt he deserved them. His followers would have no part of this sort of artistry; they preferred the old-line Bunny farce: the comic terror, the panic, the despair." Hugh Hoffman of The Moving Picture World praised the film for using the original locations Dickens had written of, finding: "The pictures are saturated with local color and in every instance they live up to the very letter of the word of Dickens." He noted Bunny's compatibility for the role of Pickwick and also highlighted the contributions of Arthur Rickets as Mr. Jingle, writing that he closely resembled a drawing by the Dickens illustrator George Cruikshank. Film scholar Michael Pointer criticized Bunny's portrayal of Pickwick, writing that "Bunny's heavy features and often gloomy expression did not really convey the idea of a benign benefactor". Caroline Millar of the British Film Institute found Vitagraph's adaptation overall to be "rather unadventurous". She criticized its use of title cards to convey the plot and noted that much of Jingle's comic wordplay is lost in the medium of silent film. In 1916, the New York Sun listed The Pickwick Papers among a group of films that adapted classic literature for the screen, positing that such adaptations increased demand for their printed subjects and exposed many to literature they otherwise would have been unfamiliar