Fact of the Day : Which famous author's first book was entitled 'Sketches by Boz'? (from Oxford Reader's Companion to Dickens)
Sketches by Boz Dickens's first book, which gathered, along with some new pieces, the sketches and tales which he had published between 1833 and 1836 in newspapers and journals. Inspired by his love of the writings of 18th- and 19th-century essayists, with their distinctively crafted narrative personae (see ‘Boz’), the sketches attracted some attention and led Chapman and Hall to invite Dickens to collaborate with Seymour on The Pickwick Papers.
Although the huge success of that work quickly eclipsed the reputation of Sketches by Boz ( Forster claimed (1.5) that Dickens ‘decidedly underrated it’), Dickens retained an active interest in the sketch form, culminating in The Uncommercial Traveller pieces written in the last decade of his life (see short-story and sketch writer, Dickens as).
Inception and Composition
Most of the stories and sketches collected in Sketches by Boz were first written as individual miscellaneous items for various periodical publications. Details can be found in Appendix F of volume 1 of the Pilgrim Letters; in Appendix A of De Vries1976; and in Journalism 1, pp. xxiii–xxvi. Michael Slater's Introduction to that volume offers a succinct survey, and Maxwell (1981) examines the distinctly differing audiences at which the different newspapers and periodicals in which the pieces first appeared were aimed.
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