Description
Book SynopsisCharles Dickens's first book, complete with all the pathos and comic invention of his later masterpieces Published under the pen-name 'Boz', Charles Dickens's first book
Sketches by Boz (1836) heralded an exciting new voice in English literature. This richly varied collection of observation, fancy and fiction shows the London he knew so intimately at its best and worst - its streets, theatres, inns, pawnshops, law courts, prisons, omnibuses and the river Thames - in honest and visionary descriptions of everyday life and people. Through pen portraits that often anticipate characters from his great novels, we see the condemned man in his prison cell, garrulous matrons, vulgar young clerks and Scrooge-like bachelors, while Dickens's powers for social critique are never far from the surface, in unflinching depictions of the vast metropolis's forgotten citizens, from child workers to prostitutes. A startling mixture of humour and pathos, these
Sketches reveal Lo
Trade ReviewWalter Bagehot once remarked, Dickens wrote about London "like a special correspondent for posterity".
"The first sprightly runnings of his genius are undoubtedly here," wrote Dickens’s friend and biographer John Forster.
