Sketches by Boz. Charles Dickens.

Sketches by Boz [Rhymes with “nose’]
Charles Dickens
Oxford: Oxford University Press. 1836.

Why read it? A collection of brief scenes of English life that are wonderfully entertaining and moving. Some examples of Dickens’s topics in this, his first book: poverty; clubs (in which only four people may speak at the same time); door knockers and their relationship in looks to the tenants; London streets in the early morning (the last drunken man, who shall find his way home before sunlight, has just staggered along, roaring out the burden of the drinking song of the previous night; the last houseless vagrant whom penury and police have left in the streets, has coiled up his chilly limbs in some paved corner to dream of food and warmth); the evening mist which hangs over every object, makes the gas lamps look brighter and the brilliantly-lighted shops more splendid, from the contrast they present to the darkness around.

Nightly meetings at the pub (…so they would go on drinking and wondering till ten o’clock and with it the tailor’s wife to fetch him home, when the little party broke up, to meet again in the same room and say and do precisely the same things, on the following evening at the same hour); people in the streets (…every post in the open space has its occupant, who leans against it for hours, with listless perseverance); bickering feuds in apartment houses (Animosities spring up between floor and floor; Mrs. A. ‘smacks’ Mrs. B’s child for ‘making faces’; Mrs. B forthwith throws cold water over Mrs. A’s child for ‘calling names’); education (…wince involuntarily, as we remember the hard knuckles with which the reverend old lady who instilled into our minds the first principles of education).

The stage (Fathers are invariably great nuisances on the stage, and always have to give the hero or heroine a long explanation of what was done before the curtain rose, usually commencing with ‘It is now nineteen years, my dear child, sine your blessed mother confided you to my charge.’); journalism: (If you missed the date of a story, just wait a year and the event and the story will be repeated); the evils of gin drinking and the poverty that drives men to it; the deplorable conditions of prison; life in London (It is strange with how little notice, good or bad, or indifferent, a man may live and die in London); Christmas dinner (It is an annual gathering of all the accessible members of the family, young or old, rich or poor, and all the children look forward to it for two months beforehand in a fever of anticipation); writing (…and as every sentence contained a good many words of four syllables, his admirers took it for granted that he meant a good deal).

Quote: “Mr. Nicodemus Dumps was never happy but when he was miserable. The only real comfort of his existence was to make everybody about him wretched—then he might be truly said to enjoy life; he adored King Herod for his massacre of the innocents, and if he hated one thing more than another, it was a child.”

Quote: “Young couples (about to be married; formal couple; loving couple; contradictory couple; couple who dote upon their children; the cool couple—to each other; plausible couple—focus on their public appearance; nice little couple; egotistical couple; couple who coddle themselves; the old couple). The contradictory couple never quarrel except about trifles; the plausible gentleman calls his wife ‘darling’ and the plausible lady addresses him as ‘dearest’; you cannot tell the egotistical couple anything they don’t know or describe to them anything they have not felt; they have been everything but dead.”