Inventing Social Identity: Sketches by Boz

Abstract

Sketches by Boz, the book we now have, is a collection of 56 short pieces, including a dozen (largely comic) tales, Dickens wrote between 1832 and 1836, when he was in his early twenties. They first appeared in The Monthly Magazine, The Morning Chronicle, Bell’s Life of London and similar publications. They were brought together in two collections in 1836 and 1837, and Chapman and Hall ran them again in monthly parts from November 1837, to cash in on the success of The Pickwick Papers, which had just finished its run. They show Boz walking the streets of London as if beating the bounds of his domain, marking a writer’s territory he was to hold for nearly four decades. ‘We had been lounging one evening, down Oxford Street, Holborn, Cheapside, Coleman Street, Finsbury Square and so on, with the intention of returning westward, by Pentonville and the New Road’ (SB, 231). He hangs around the river, or crosses it to the Borough (site of the Marshalsea). He favours the run from the slums of St Giles and nearby Monmouth Street with its dealers in second-hand clothes, across to the lawyers’ districts: Holborn, Lincoln’s Inn, the Law Courts, Newgate. Or he moves to the outskirts, the indeterminate spaces where the city is spreading itself, past ‘a new row of houses at Camden Town, half street, half brick-field, somewhere near the canal’ (SB, 264).

Mr Jennings Rudolph played tunes on a walking stick, and then went behind the parlour door and gave his celebrated imitations of actors, edge-tools, and animals. (SB, 250)¹

A turn-up bedstead is a blunt, honest piece of furniture: it may be simply disguised with a sham drawer; and sometimes a mad attempt is even made to pass it off for a book-case; ornament it how you will, however, the turn-up bedstead seems to defy disguise. (SB, 177)