Charles Dickens\'s first book, complete with all the pathos and comic invention of his later masterpieces Published under the pen-name \'Boz\', Charles Dickens\'s first book Sketches by Boz (1836) heralded an exciting new voice in English literature.
It also hastened his death at the age of fifty-eight, when he was characteristically engaged in a multitude of work..
In later years, the pressure of serial writing, editorial duties, lectures, and social commitments led to his separation from Catherine Hogarth after twenty-three years of marriage.
He worked as an attorney\'s clerk and newspaper reporter until his Sketches by Boz (1836) and The Pickwick Papers (1837) brought him the amazing and instant success that was to be his for the remainder of his life.
A turn of fortune in the shape of a legacy brought release from the nightmare of prison and "slave" factories and afforded Dickens the opportunity of two years\' formal schooling at Wellington House Academy.
The second of eight children of a family continually plagued by debt, the young Dickens came to know not only hunger and privation, but also the horror of the infamous debtors\' prison and the evils of child labor.
He died in Kent on June 9, 1870.
About the Author: Charles Dickens was born on February 7, 1812, in Landport, Portsea, England.
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This edition also includes the original illustrations by George Cruickshank, a chronology, further reading, appendices and notes.
In his introduction, Dennis Walder discusses Dickens\'s social commentary, his view of London and his imaginative mixing of genres, and places the Sketches in the tradition of eighteenth and nineteenth-century reportage.
A startling mixture of humour and pathos, these Sketches reveal London as wonderful terrain for an extraordinary young writer.
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.
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.
Charles Dickens\'s first book, complete with all the pathos and comic invention of his later masterpieces Published under the pen-name \'Boz\', Charles Dickens\'s first book Sketches by Boz (1836) heralded an exciting new voice in English literature
