The Pickwick Papers

Mr Samuel Pickwick, a kindly, round, retired businessman, sets out from London with three members of his club, the romantic Tupman, the poetic Snodgrass and the would-be sportsman Winkle, to report on the curiosities of English life. They are swindled by the smooth adventurer Jingle, fight duels, attend elections and balls, and fall through the ice; Mr Pickwick hires the quick-witted Cockney Sam Weller as his servant; and when his landlady, Mrs Bardell, mistakes a question for a proposal of marriage, he is sued for breach of promise and chooses prison rather than pay.

Charles Dickens was twenty-four when the first monthly part appeared in 1836, written to accompany comic sporting pictures by the artist Robert Seymour, who died soon after. Sales were poor until Sam Weller arrived in the fourth number, and then they rose from a few hundred to some forty thousand copies, making Dickens famous. His earlier journalism is collected in Sketches by Boz.

Charles Dickens (1812–1870) worked in a boot-blacking factory as a boy while his father was in a debtors' prison, and poverty and wronged childhood run through his novels, from Oliver Twist to the largely autobiographical David Copperfield.

Published in instalments, books such as A Tale of Two Cities, Great Expectations and A Christmas Carol mixed comedy and social protest.