"The Pickwick Papers" was Dickens`s response to his publisher`s request for a monthly series of sporting sketches. It became the most famous of all pre-Victorian novels. The central characters, Mr Pickwick and Sam Welle are as familiar today as they became on publication, and there are over a hundred other speaking parts. The action is set in the late Georgian period of the writer`s earliest youth, drawing on experience and acute observation ranging from the unreformed election at Eatanswill to the horrors of the debtors` prison. Brilliantly comic, it also exposes social and especially legal abuses, as in the notorious trial of "Bardell v. Pickwick". Dickens`s satire is both topical and timeless.