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by DJ Taylor

Sketches by Boz (1833-1836)

Originally written as newspaper journalism, collected in two volumes published by John Macrone in February and November 1836, with illustrations by George Cruikshank, and nearly titled "Bubbles from the Brain of Boz and the Graver of Cruikshank", Sketches by Boz is the public record of Dickens's apprenticeship. The early pieces, as he later pointed out, "comprise my first attempts at authorship". By the time of "Vauxhall Gardens by Day", written in October 1836, The Pickwick Papers had reached its eighth number and a meteoric career had taken flight.

Read in the order they were written, the Sketches consequently give off the terrific air of a newly minted talent discovering what it can do. While the opening tranche of "tales" derive from the work of forgotten contemporary humorists, the pieces of London reportage that he began to contribute to the Morning Chronicle in autumn 1834 ("Gin Shops", "Shabby-Genteel People", "The Pawnbroker's Shop") are like nothing else in pre-Victorian journalism: bantering and hard-headed by turns, hectic and profuse, falling over themselves to convey every last detail of the metropolitan front-line from which Dickens sent back his dispatches.

As he itemises the contents of the pawnbroker's shop ("a few old China cups; some modern vases, adorned with paltry paintings of three Spanish cavaliers playing three Spanish guitars; or a party of boors carousing: each boor with one leg painfully elevated in the air by way of expressing his perfect freedom and gaiety �") you sense that Dickens barely knows how to stop. It is the same with Miss Amelia Martin in "The Milliner's Mishap", eyeing up her friend's wedding breakfast ("pewter-pots at the corners; pepper, mustard and vinegar in the centre; vegetables on the floor") � a world so vivid and variegated to the person writing about it that there is almost too much to set down.

By the time of the final sketches ("Our Next Door Neighbours", "The Tuggses at Ramsgate") Dickens had begun to stake out the lower-middle-class interiors that critics were already marking down as his special subject. Meanwhile an admiring gang of early Victorian novelists stood ready to take their cue. Reading "Shabby-Genteel People", for example, one can almost see Thackeray (who shortly afterwards was to write his own shabby genteel story) making notes in the background.

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