The Pickwick Book Club is a community of local bookworms, students, and teachers who meet monthly to discuss a nineteenth-century novel. Spontaneous human combustion! Evil lawyers! Detectives! Family intrigue! These all come together in Charles Dickens’s masterwork, Bleak House.

The Dickens Project is a multi-campus research consortium headquartered at UC Santa Cruz and consisting of over 40 colleges and universities from across the United States and overseas. The chief goal of the Dickens Project is to promote research on the life, work, and times of Charles Dickens and to bring the results of this research before both a scholarly audience and the general public. The Project is also an important center for research on nineteenth-century literary and cultural studies more generally.