Sketches by Boz: 18 (New Oxford Illustrated Dickens) - Hardcover

Dickens, Charles

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0192545183 ISBN 13: 9780192545183

Publisher: Oxford University Press, 1987

Synopsis

The young Dickens composed these sketches, his first attempts at authorship, poised between two worlds. Thea Holmes writes in her Introduction, 'On the one hand Dickens depicts in relentless detail the horrors of poverty, disease, and crime - legacy of eighteenth-century London; on the other the prosperous vulgarity of the rapidly rising middle class.' Among the many essays are 'Scotland Yard', 'Gin-Shops', 'Shabby-Genteel People', and 'The Steam Excursion'. 'It is for the glimpses they afford us of their author that these sketches have a special fascination: not only in foreshadowings of future greatness but in those touches which reveal the young Boz himself.'

About this title

Review:

Walter 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.

From the Back Cover:

Sketches by Boz collected a rich and strange mixture of reportage, observation, fancy and fiction centred on the metropolis. It was Dickens's first book, published when he was twenty-four, and in it we find him walking the London streets, in theatres, pawnshops, lawcourts, prisons, along the Thames and on the omnibus, missing nothing, recording and transforming urban and suburban life into new terrain for literature. 'The first sprightly runnings of his genius are undoubtedly here, ' wrote Dickens's friend and biographer John Forster. Sketches is a remarkable achievement, and looks towards Dickens's giant novels in its profusion of characters, its glimpses of surreal modernity and its limitless fund of pathos and comic invention.

About this edition

• Publisher: Oxford University Press
• Publication date: 1987
• ISBN 10: 0192545183
• ISBN 13: 9780192545183
• Binding: Hardcover
• Number of pages: 708