Four Great Dickens Materpieces Condensed for the Modern Reader: David Copperfield, Pickwick Papers, Oliver Twist, Martin Chuzzlewit From the Editor's Note: "...To bring these four gigantic books withing the compass of a single volume it was necessary to eliminate, first of all, padding. It was also desirable. All four of these books were written as serials or in monthly numbers. Their plot complications, their repetitions, their digressions, their 'rant and can' were by-products, not only of the nineteenth-century taste for leisurely style, but of the pressure under which Dickens wrote, hastily, almost without plan, entirely without opportunity for careful revision and correction. The padding, then, came out first. Next, some of the social satire was dispensed with, satire in tone and intention means little o the reader today. Finally, the technique of compression learned through long experience in book condensing eliminated the circumlocution that accounts for much of Dickens' verbosity. And the four novels were brought down to the length of one. ..."