By the time Dickens’s earliest work was printed as a single volume in 1839, Sketches by Boz had already enjoyed several publications in various forms. The book is not a single story. Rather, it is a collection of scenes from London life, descriptions of character types and anecdotes about London lives, as well as a series of short stories that form almost half the volume. It represents the beginning of Dickens’s writing career, compiled from works published in newspapers and periodicals. It’s a good place to start reading Dickens if you’re interested, for instance, in tracing his development as a writer. The Sketches were originally published anonymously. In fact, Dickens wasn’t even paid for his earliest work and his name wasn’t associated with the Sketches until he gained notoriety from The Pickwick Papers . The name ‘Boz’ derived from a nickname for a brother. As I read the Sketches I sometimes sensed that this anonymity was an advantage to Dickens. It allowed him to attain a level of credibility in his early writing that would have been difficult to achieve for a young man. He was only 21 when he published his first story, and by the age of 24 he had written most of the pieces for this volume. It is not surprising, then, that he sometimes assumes a much older persona: “In our earlier days,” he writes as he introduces his subject in ‘Greenwich Fair’, and he later states, “We have grown older since then, and quiet, and steady.” It’s a conceit subtly introduced into ‘The Last Cab-driver, and the First Omnibus Cad’, with its sense of nostalgia and loss, and its implicit experience of London from the perspective of an older man: “there is one who made an impression on our mind which can never be effaced”; “The last time we saw our friend”; “the appearance of the first omnibus”; “the class of men to which they belonged are fast disappearing.” Dickens is not just writing about London: he is establishing a persona – Boz – who is not a twenty-something newcomer, but an older, more mature man; a purveyor of opinions; a man wise and experienced enough to rail against politicians and expose human foibles.

Publication of Dickens’s first book didn’t happen as aspiring young writers might now expect. He wrote for magazines and newspapers that were hungry for copy. As a result, his pieces were published singly, to begin with. The Sketches, themselves, as they eventually came to be arranged, suggest, somewhat misleadingly, a progression, divided as they are into four sections that begin with mostly descriptive works, which evolve into more fictive works, and later, short stories. The first section, Seven Sketches from Our Parish describes London life in the 1830s, beginning with functionaries like the beadle and clergyman. Even here, though, Dickens draws from life, with some of his types actually based upon real people from his local parish. This is the unifying theme of the first section of the book: the parish and its people. As twenty-first century readers, we glimpse a world that often seems quaint, mannered and stylised, but through Dickens’s pen, is painted as realistically as our own, both in its absurdity and pretence, in its drama and tragedy.

The second section, entitled Scenes, focuses on various places and institutions in London. Beginning with scenes of London in the morning and London at night, Dickens moves on to discuss subjects as varied as the London courts, Hackney Coaches, a local circus, private theatres, London gardens, gin shops and charity dinners.

The third section of the book, entitled Characters, demonstrates a broader fictionalising of Dickens’s observations and his ability to satirise his subjects. There is the lamentable John Dounce, who throws away his freedom by marrying his cook after long years of bachelorhood. In the hilarious ‘Making a Night of It’, Dickens describes what is ostensibly a 1830s pub crawl that ends in drunkenness and debauchery. And there are more serious pieces, too, like Dickens’s critique of poor manners and aggression in ‘The Parlour Orator’, or the tragic ‘The Hospital Patient’, dealing with the issue of domestic violence, which seems just as relevant now as it must have been for Dickens’s audience.

Finally, the fourth section, entitled Tales, suggests Dickens’s progress towards his career as a writer of fiction. However, as much as we might wish to see the order of the Sketches as a record of Dickens’s development as a writer, the original order for publication of these disparate works was entirely different to their final arrangement as Sketches by Boz. Some of the stories in this later section were actually published quite early. For instance, Dickens’s first ever published work was in December 1833. It was ‘A Dinner at Poplar Walk’, which was renamed ‘Mr Minns and His Cousin’ when it was included in this section of the Sketches, as they finally came to be arranged. Nevertheless, it is in this section that we experience Dickens as we are most familiar: as a great fictional writer, capturing the absurdities and tragedies of life, and telling entertaining stories about Londoners.

There is a broad overview of the entire Sketches after this review. It gives a sense of the subject of each piece, but usually leaves out enough detail for the reader to make their own discoveries. Nevertheless, if you’re genuinely interested in reading Sketches by Boz, you may wish to avoid the overview and use it as an easy reference after you have finished reading.

So, what became known as Sketches by Boz began as individual publications, starting with ‘A Dinner at Poplar Walk’ in 1833. Eventually, they were compiled into two volumes in 1836 under the current title. It wasn’t until 1839 that the Sketches were published as a single volume, arranged as they now are for the first time. But before that, between 1836 and 1839, the Sketches were republished in monthly parts to cash in on the popularity of Dickens’s first novel, The Pickwick Papers, itself being published concurrently in monthly parts. Dickens would revise the Sketches for later editions, making small edits, mostly to avoid the potential for offence, for instance, against religious sensibilities. In his preface to the 1850 edition, he described the work as his “first attempts at authorship” which he described as “crude and ill-considered, and bearing obvious marks of haste and inexperience”. It is certainly true that the Sketches aren’t as well developed as most of his work, but the talent is obvious in the writing and Dickens adopts his short prose style effectively for his audience. But by 1850, Dickens had established himself as a major writer and he could afford to disparage his earlier work. Despite this, the situations, character types and stories from this book inform a reading of his later writings. Dickensian themes like poverty and debt, marriage and lawyers, are already present. There are also early intimations of later characters from his novels, like Bill Sikes in Oliver Twist (evident in the partner who beats his wife in ‘The Hospital Patient’), or even Mr Bumble from that same novel. Misanthropic men like Mr Dumps seem to anticipate Scrooge in A Christmas Carol, even if Dumps isn’t railing against Christmas. The issue of imprisonment for debt is also already present in a number of the sketches, just as it was to appear in The Pickwick Papers and other novels in Dickens’s career. In short, reading the Sketches isn’t only an opportunity to see the development of a great writer, but it’s a great insight into the world of 19^th Century London, the setting of many of Dickens’s novels.

So I prefer Dickens’s earlier expression of hope for his work, rather than the older dismissive Dickens of 1850. In his preface to the first edition of the Sketches in 1836, he compares his work to a “pilot balloon, trusting it might catch a favourable current, and devoutly and earnestly hoping it may go off well.” He adds more emphatically, “it is very possible for a man to embark, not only himself, but all his hopes of future fame, and all his chances of future success.” It is a sentiment nicely captured by George Cruickshank’s George Cruickshank’s illustration for the front piece of the work, with two men waving flags from the basket of a hot air balloon (I like to presume one of them is Dickens, even though the scene is described in ‘Vauxhall-Gardens by Day’), as a crowd of well-wishers waves them off from below. As it turned out, Dickens’s hopes for his work were not unfounded. The Sketches helped Dickens secure the job of writing accompanying pieces for Robert Seymour’s series of illustrations around gentleman’s clubs and sporting endeavours, which evolved into Dickens’ first – and highly successful – novel, The Pickwick Papers (Dickens’s collaboration with Robert Seymour is discussed in my review for The Pickwick Papers).

These days Sketches by Boz is not as well-known as Dickens’s later writings. In fact, the edition I own was the first edition published by Penguin, as late as 1995. And given their interest in London life of the 1830s – the way they reflect concerns from that period – the Sketches may not be as appealing to some people, especially given that they are a collection of Dickens’s shorter writings, and somewhat underdeveloped compared to his novels. Dickens is content to establish a scene or situation and then just as quickly abandon it. “Years have elapsed since the occurrence of this dreadful morning” the narrator interjects at the climactic moment of ‘Horatio Sparkins’. “In short, the whole affair was, as Mrs Joseph Porter triumphantly told every body, ‘a complete failure’”, we are told at the end of ‘Mrs Joseph Porter’. In the longer pieces – typically the short stories in the last section, ‘Tales’ – Dickens is able to draw his reader into his narrative with all the skill typical of his later work. But his purpose is usually singular – to satirise institutional behaviour or social habits, or introduce us to a scene or a type – and once he has given us this quick sketch, a thumbnail of life, he as quickly abandons it before a reader can tire of the story.

I found the range of subjects and tone made reading the Sketches a pleasure. There are moments of high farce, such as the story of ‘The Great Winglebury Duel’, in which Mr Trott finds himself married to a woman whom he has never before met, after being challenged to a duel by a man he doesn’t know and incarcerated in a mental asylum on a pretence he has misunderstood. Somehow it all makes sense in the story and there is a great deal of pleasure in Dickens’s skilled manipulation of the plot. Even when his topic is specific to his time, like his discussion of Vauxhall Gardens, which had only just been made available to the public during the day, he manages to speak to truths that underlie our own experiences of life: the sense that the gardens are a disappointment during the day speaks to experiences of returning to a place in one’s past, or meeting someone again under different circumstances, which causes a re-evaluation, possibly disappointment. Yet, at other times, the scene is tragic: the death of an alcoholic and the impact of his addiction upon his whole family; or the domestic abuse of a woman, beaten so badly she dies, yet refuses to implicate her partner before she does. Dickens was incredibly popular from the very start of his career, and I attribute this largely to his ability to hold a mirror to the realities of peoples’ lives. Looking past the absurd names he often gave his characters, Dickens’s writing speaks to the realities of nineteenth century living. When he describes a prison, we know he has walked through its gates, and we know he understands the anguish of debt and the debtors’ prison, because his father was incarcerated for debt when he was young. When he speaks of the discomforts of travel, or the indignities of sexual competition for marriage, or the implacable and unsympathetic legal system, or the living conditions of the poor, we know he is giving us an insight into nineteenth century society and its concerns that would have been recognisable to his audience.

To that end, the Sketches are worth reading if you are interested in nineteenth century living conditions, or nineteenth century London society. They are also a good starting point if you are interested in reading nineteenth century fiction, particularly Dickens, for their broad perspective of that time and their anticipation of Dickens’s later work. But apart from that, I also found them fascinating because Dickens reveals a shared humanity with us. And it is not just because issues like domestic violence remain a concern, but because Dickens gives us the whole gamut of human experience. Just as it did in Dickens’s day, the pressures of family and marriage still affect us: we experience the sad longing of nostalgia and the feelings of threat inherent in change, as apparent in Dickens’s writing about disappearing traditions and characters within the city. And when Dickens describes the horrors of early morning travel, the loss of luggage or the disapproving stares of other passengers whose established seating arrangements are about to be disturbed by a newcomer, we sense our shared experience with people of the 1830s. When we read about the election for a new beadle, we recognise the political tricks and ploys described by Dickens because we are so used to them in our own lives. And anyone who loves Shakespeare is bound to have endured at least one terrible production. So the awful production of Othello, as described in ‘Mrs Joseph Porter’, is bound to make us smile. In short, when reading Sketches by Boz, there is a sense that while the conditions of people’s lives have improved and the kind of jobs they do have changed, human nature is pretty much as it was back in the 1830s. Which makes sense, otherwise novels from that time couldn’t speak to us the way they do.

So, I found the experience of reading Sketches by Boz enjoyable. Some people might choose to skip over the earlier sketches which are more descriptive and head straight to pieces which are more fictional. That will depend on what you’re hoping to get from them. What is beyond doubt is that there was a market for this writing in the 1830s, and it is clear that much of it would no longer be easily obtainable for the general reader, except that in this case the work is from a major writer. So Sketches by Boz offers that, too: an opportunity to read a genre of writing from this period now not easily obtained by modern readers.