Few writers are more often read, and better loved, than Charles Dickens and Samuel Langhorne Clemens - Mark Twain. Many of the characters populating their novels have become household words, cultural landmarks in their own right - Tom Sawyer and Huckleberry Finn, David Copperfield and Oliver Twist. It is as if we have known them life-long. In this course we take a look at the lives and works of both authors, comparing and celebrating them in their use of use language, in their humor - and both, of course, are master humorists - in their evocation of character, and in their evocation and evaluation of the social world in which they find themselves.