In 1837, 25-year-old Charles Dickens was asked to "tidy up" the autobiography of Joseph Grimaldi, one of the greatest English clowns and pantomimes of all time and the first to fill the theaters of early 19th-century London. The task was so laborious that Dickens ended up redrafting and rewriting most of it. The result was a work comparable to his famous early successes, such as Sketches of Boz and the Pickwick Papers, both of which appeared the year before. Edited by Dickens from Grimaldi’s original journal, the author depicts the pantomime buffoonery and daring physical comedy that underpinned not only the Sadler’s Wells stage act, but also undermined Grimaldi’s tragic-comic life.