DICKENS Charles Sketches by “Boz”, illustrative of every-day life and everyday-people. In two volumes. [Et:] Second series. Complete in one volume.

First edition.

Brought up by carefree and irresponsible parents, Charles Dickens’ chaotic youth is not unlike that of David Copperfield.

A notary’s clerk and later a freelance stenographer, Dickens became a journalist and then a parliamentary columnist. He was soon recognised as one of the best reporters. Sketches by Boz is a collection of short stories that appeared between 1834 and 1836 in various newspapers, some of which, A Visit to Newgate, The Black Veil, The Great Winglebury Duel (first series) and Our Next Door Neighbours, The Drunkard’s Death (second series), appeared here for the first time. The collection was a real success and launched Dickens’s career.

‘It was for the public a delight and a distraction. Dickens, brought to London by his father at the age of two, had had the opportunity from childhood to mingle with all those bourgeois or petty characters who come and go in the offices of solicitors and barristers…; and all his caricatures, more serious and more pleasing at the same time in England than anywhere else, the ease of the brush, the unpretentiousness of the author… gave the Sketches a very great vogue’. (Duckett, Dictionary of Conversation and Reading, vol. VII, p. 554)

‘It cannot be emphasised too strongly that Dickens’s work – in its most characteristic, enormous and fantastic aspects, in its prodigious distortions of reality – emerged from the excessive emotions and traumas of this critical period, which fixed a whole part of Dickens’s personality in the emotional modes of childhood’ (see Jean-Jacques Mayoux, Nouveau dictionnaire des Auteurs).

Boz’s Sketches was Dickens’ very first work, which he called “a trial balloon” and whose aim was simply “to offer little pictures of life and manners as they really are”.

The work was illustrated by the famous cartoonist George Cruikshank, who, on the title of the second series, immortalised himself in the company of the author, in the basket of a balloon. Even today, the charm of these sketchbooks remains. John Forster described them as ‘a book that would have stood the test of time even if there had been no others’. The volume of the second series, whose engraved frontispiece is dated 1836, corresponds to the second issue, with the table in 17 lines, and the indication of ‘vol. III’ at the bottom of the plates erased.

Occasional stains.

Provenance: W. Lewis (signature to first two volumes) and Peter Starckjohann (bookplate, second series).