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
Letters of Charles Dickens noted that there were some errors and omissions of transcription he endorsed it as being in general extremely accurate, and thought the project as a whole "of incomparable value". New Dickens letters are discovered at the rate of about 20 per year, and they were for some years edited and published in Supplements to the Pilgrim Edition in "The Dickensian", the journal of the Dickens Fellowship. They have also been made accessible online by the Charles Dickens Letters Project, and it is intended eventually to publish a supplementary volume to the Pilgrim Edition. The costliness of both the Nonesuch and