The Pickwick Papers, twenty-four-year-old Dickens's joyful, rumbustious debut, made him an overnight sensation. The collected anecdotes from the fictional Pickwick Club - whose members include the poet Snodgrass, the romantic Tupman, Winkle the sportsman and the relentlessly cheerful Pickwick along with his immensely popular cockney sidekick Sam Weller - these adventures take readers from the comic delights of the cricket club to debtors' jail by way of drunkenness, feasting and the immortal Fat Boy.

The story of the trials and triumphs of David Copperfield, growing to maturity in the affairs of the world and the affairs of the heart - his success as an artist arising out his sufferings and out of the lessons he derives from life.

Following the bumbling Pickwickians along the highways and byways of old England, he creates a vivid world of highwaymen, duels, lawsuits, jails, hilarious romantic imbroglios--but a world, too.