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. Twenty-four plates by painters including William Powell Frith and George Morland follow the coach roads, inns and taverns that Pickwick and his companions knew.