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Before he wrote any novels, the young Charles Dickens wandered the streets of London as a journalist and described what he saw: crowded streets and markets…
Before he wrote any novels, the young Charles Dickens wandered the streets of London as a journalist and described what he saw: crowded streets and markets, pawnshops, gin shops and pubs, Newgate Prison, the courts, the theatres and Greenwich Fair, together with portraits of ordinary people, clerks, cab drivers and shabby-genteel families, and comic tales of middle-class life.
Context and significance
The sketches appeared in newspapers and magazines from 1833 and were collected as a book in 1836 under the pen name Boz, the family nickname of Dickens's youngest brother, with illustrations by George Cruikshank, and their success led directly to The Pickwick Papers. See Dickens's life.
About the author
Charles Dickens (1812–1870) worked in a boot-blacking factory as a boy while his father was in a debtors' prison, and poverty and wronged childhood run through his novels, from Oliver Twist to the largely autobiographical David Copperfield.