Sam Weller is a fictional character in The Pickwick Papers (1836), the first novel by Charles Dickens, and the character that made Dickens famous. A humorous Cockney bootblack, Sam Weller first appeared in the fourth serialised episode. Previously the monthly parts of the book had been doing badly, selling only about 1,000 copies a month — but the humour of the character transformed the book into a publishing phenomenon, raising the sales by late autumn of 1837 to 40,000 a month.