A retired gentleman of comfortable means founds a club to observe the manners of England and takes to the road with three companions, none of whom is equal to it. Dickens was twenty-four and writing to a monthly deadline around another man's engravings when Sam Weller arrived in the fourth number and sales went from four hundred copies to forty thousand. It is the book that invented the serial novel and made him famous inside a year. One hundred plates of painting from 1680 to 1841, by painters including George Morland and George Romney, run alongside the text as a portrait of the England the club sets out to observe.