Dickens, Charles.

Sketches By Boz.

Volume 1. New York / Cambridge, Hurd and Houghton / Riverside Press, 1869. 12 cm x 17 cm. VIII, 338 pages. Original hardcover. Very good condition with some clear signs of wear. Contains inscription and plate by pre-owner.

Includes for example the following essays: The Beadle. The Parish Engine. The Schoolmaster / The Curate. The Old Lady. The Half-pay Captain / The Election for Beadles / The Ladies’ Societies / The Streets – Night / Scotland Yard / Seven Dials / Monmouth Street / Doctors’ Commons / London Recreations / Astleys / Vauxhall Gardens by Day / Public Dinners / Brokers’ and Marine-Store Shops / Gin Ships / The Pawnbroker’s Shop / Criminal Courts / A Visit to Newgate etc.

″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 London as wonderful terrain for an extraordinary young writer.” (Amazon)

• Keywords: English essays · English Literature · English Literature – Rare · Reportage
• Language: English
• Inventory Number: 72228AB

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