Sketches by Boz

Published in its complete form in 1839, this collection of fifty-six short essays, sketches, and fictional tales represents Charles Dickens's first published book, written under the pseudonym "Boz" for various London newspapers and magazines between 1833 and 1836. The pieces are organized into four sections: Seven Sketches from Our Parish, Scenes, Characters, and Tales. Across all sections, the narrator presents himself as a keen-eyed urban wanderer, cataloging the lives, manners, and surroundings of London's middle and lower classes.

The first section introduces the parish, the basic administrative unit of local government, as a microcosm of English society. The narrator sketches a gallery of local figures: a pompous beadle, a parish officer charged with minor church and civic duties, who marshals children in church and runs the parish fire engine with great self-importance but little competence; a schoolmaster broken by misfortune and bereavement; a handsome young curate, or assistant clergyman, whose popularity with female parishioners evaporates the moment a rival arrives; a benevolent old lady who distributes charity; and a half-pay naval captain, a retired officer living on reduced military pay, who disrupts the old lady's household with practical experiments and quarrelsome behavior. A mock-heroic parish election for beadle parodies national politics, complete with canvassing, pompous speeches, and hackney-coach intrigues. The newly elected beadle, Bung, recounts three stories from his former career as a broker's man, an agent sent to occupy a debtor's house: one comic tale of a gentleman who hires him as a waiter to hide the seizure from dinner guests, and two wrenching accounts of poverty, including a genteel lady whose quiet dignity masks her fatal decline, unseen by her oblivious husband. The section closes with the death of a boy with consumption who has worked himself to exhaustion copying manuscripts, begging his mother to bury him in open fields rather than the crowded streets that killed him.

The Scenes section expands outward to London at large. Two panoramic sketches trace the city from the silence of pre-dawn through the bustle of noon and into the night streets near the Victoria Theatre, where ragged boys discuss melodrama and a woman with an infant attempts to sing for pennies. Successive sketches follow the narrator into gin-shops, where gilded interiors contrast with the squalor outside and evenings end in brawls and police intervention; into pawnbrokers' shops, where a genteel young woman and a woman in faded finery occupy adjacent booths and the narrator asks who can say how soon they may change places; into the slum district of Seven Dials, where seven streets converge upon overcrowded houses; and into second-hand clothing shops on Monmouth Street, where the narrator imaginatively traces a man's decline from boyhood to prison through discarded garments, until the clothes seem to spring to life in a pantomime dance and a shop-woman's rebuke jolts him from his reverie.

Other sketches survey London's public amusements and institutions. The narrator visits Astley's Equestrian Amphitheatre, attends Greenwich Fair, observes amateur theatricals where stage-struck shop-boys pay to play Shakespeare, and watches an aeronaut ascend in a balloon from the disenchanted daylight ruins of Vauxhall pleasure gardens. He rides omnibuses and hackney-coaches, cataloging testy passengers and rival conductors, and depicts the bustle outside Parliament on a debate night. The section's most sustained piece is a visit to Newgate Prison, where the narrator passes through iron gates past imprisoned women, shameless boy pickpockets, and idle male prisoners. The sketch concludes with an imaginative reconstruction of a condemned man's last night: his feverish dreams, his memories of childhood and his wife, and the tolling of St Paul's bell as the hours dwindle toward execution.

The Characters section presents London types and social occasions. A lonely clerk walks in St James's Park, unable to enjoy his day off. London apprentices parade down the Strand in absurd finery. A Christmas dinner brings reconciliation when "poor aunt Margaret," who married against her parents' wishes, appears pale and broken-spirited, and her mother's assumed coldness gives way to tearful embrace. A red-faced pub orator named Rogers demands "Proof!" for every proposition and lectures his fellow drinkers on their enslavement. A retired glove-maker named John Dounce falls for a young woman in an oyster-shop, drives away his daughters and old friends, is rejected, and marries his cook to live henpecked and miserable. In a hospital ward, a dying woman refuses to testify against the handcuffed man who beat her, insisting the injuries were self-inflicted and dying with his hand in hers. Two sisters emerge handcuffed from a prisoners' van: the elder, about sixteen, flaunts her sentence with defiant laughter, while the younger, barely fourteen, weeps and hides her face.

The Tales section contains the longest and most developed fictional narratives. "The Boarding-house" follows farcical entanglements at Mrs Tibbs's establishment in Bloomsbury, where three secret marriages are planned for the same day. A lawsuit for breach of promise, the legal action for breaking a promise to marry, follows one jilting, and the household disintegrates amid nighttime surveillance, mistaken identities, and Mrs Tibbs's meek husband drunkenly pursuing the maid. "Horatio Sparkins" depicts a socially ambitious family who court a mysterious, eloquent stranger, only to discover he is a junior shop assistant at a cheap linen-draper's. "The Tuggs's at Ramsgate" follows a grocer's family who inherit twenty thousand pounds and resolve to become genteel, only to be swindled by a trio of confidence tricksters. In "The Black Veil," a Gothic tale set around 1800, a veiled woman begs a young surgeon to attend a dying man the next morning; when he arrives at a desolate house, he finds a corpse with marks of violence on its throat and learns the dead man is the woman's son, hanged that morning.

"The Great Winglebury Duel" is a farce of mistaken identities in which a cowardly suitor named Alexander Trott, a wealthy eloping woman named Miss Julia Manners, and a bewildered mayor become entangled in misunderstandings. Trott and Manners end up together in a post-chaise, a hired carriage for travel, and proceed to Gretna Green, a Scottish village famous as a destination for runaway marriages, while Trott's rival has already eloped with the woman Trott was meant to marry. "Passage in the Life of Mr Watkins Tottle" traces a timid bachelor who is bailed out of a lock-up house, a private facility where debtors were held temporarily, by a friend on condition he propose to a wealthy lady, only to discover the lady has been using him as an unwitting go-between to arrange her marriage to someone else; afterward, a body is found in the Regent's Canal. The collection closes with "The Drunkard's Death," a morality tale in which a man's addiction destroys his family one by one, until, homeless and delirious, he plunges into the Thames beneath Waterloo Bridge, immediately fights for life, and drowns, his body washed ashore unrecognized.