Charles Dickens' life was staggeringly busy and various. This new miscellany will give readers a chance to get to know the man and his work through his work and its major themes. With carefully chosen quotations from the novels but also from his sketches and journalism, discover what Dickens had to say about the big issues like Crime, the Family, Education and Money. Meet here, too, those wonderful characters that have been handed down to us like the real figures of history - Mr Micawber, Fagin, Miss Havisham, David Copperfield and many more. What is it that made Dickens special? Concentrated in these pages is a selection of all the mad humour, passionate indignation, moral conviction, plain good sense and sheer unstoppable energy that made up one of the very greatest of English writers.