Memoirs of Joseph Grimaldi is the autobiography of the nineteenth-century clown Joseph Grimaldi. Grimaldi's original manuscript, which he mostly dictated, was about 400 pages long; he completed it in December 1836. In September 1837, Bentley bought it, after securing the copyright from Grimaldi's estate, but he thought it was still too long and also poorly edited, so he asked one of his favorite young writers, the novelist Charles Dickens, then twenty-five years old, to re-edit and re-write it.