Quizzes, puzzles, anagrams and wordsearches to test your knowledge of the inexhaustible and powerfully imagined worlds of The Inimitable Boz, as Charles Dickens liked to be called.

The crossword puzzles in this book focus on the same topics that fascinated Charles Dickens: London, food and drink, childhood, Christmas, love and marriage, and servants.

Ingenious anagrams draw on Dickens’s amusingly apposite names given to his characters, while wordsearch puzzles contain a host of heroes and heroines.

Pursue correctly identified characters through a maze in ‘Hunt the Villain’ puzzles and identify locations in the novels in ‘Place the Place’ puzzles. A more complex variation of this type of puzzle draws on Dickens’s critical view of the legal profession.

Over a dozen quizzes explore the clothes, work, pets, relations, nicknames, counties, inns, humble clerks and English towns of Dickens’s richly detailed world. There is even a quiz on Charles Dickens the man: the self-styled ‘Inimitable Boz’.

The book is illustrated throughout with George Cruikshank engravings of London characters. Test your knowledge, refresh your memory and challenge your ingenuity. If the quizzes and puzzles in this book lead you to reread the inexhaustible novels, so much the better.