Charles Dickens scenes in "The Pickwick Papers" are claimed to have been influential in having the Fleet Prison shut down. Karl Marx asserted that Dickens "issued to the world more political and social truths than have been uttered by all the professional politicians, publicists and moralists put together". George Bernard Shaw even remarked that "Great Expectations" was more seditious than Marx's "Das Kapital". The exceptional popularity of Dickens's novels, even those with socially oppositional themes ("Bleak House", 1853; "Little Dorrit", 1857; "Our Mutual Friend", 1865), not only underscored his almost preternatural ability to create compelling storylines and unforgettable characters, but also ensured
Literary Pocket-Book is for the most part delightfully written [...] The 'Miscellanies' consist of a very clever and interesting paper called 'Walks round London;' and various pieces of original poetry [...] We must now shut up the Literary Pocket-Book, recommending it, however, to our readers, partly for its original matter, and partly for its "Lists" [...] which [...] are really invaluable and are to be found in no other publication whatever." "The Literary Gazette", after an 1828 publication of the work, stated, "The first title of this pocket-book, which has been popular for some years, obtained from us a favourable notice on