In The Pickwick Papers, his first novel, Dickens displays the talents and skills that became his trademark; observational humour, pathos and social comment abound as we follow Mr Pickwick and Sam Weller, his sharp-tongued cockney servant, travelling around England with his friends in search of adventure and knowledge. Brilliantly comic scenes at the Eatanswill election, and the trial of Mrs Bardell vs Pickwick contrast with the horrors of the debtors prison. It was Thackeray who described the novel as ‘that great contemporary history’, and it presents a nostalgic view of England just before the coming of the railway.