Opening Passages: As a book of literary sketches, there is no opening in the usual sense, but the sketches are divided into four groups -- "Seven Sketches from Our Parish", "Scenes", "Characters", and "Tales", so these are the opening passages of the opening sketches of the four groups, as a sampling.
From "The Beadle -- The Parish Engine -- The Schoolmaster", in "Seven Sketches from Our Parish":
How much is conveyed in those two short words—‘The Parish!’ And with how many tales of distress and misery, of broken fortune and ruined hopes, too often of unrelieved wretchedness and successful knavery, are they associated! A poor man, with small earnings, and a large family, just manages to live on from hand to mouth, and to procure food from day to day; he has barely sufficient to satisfy the present cravings of nature, and can take no heed of the future. His taxes are in arrear, quarter-day passes by, another quarter-day arrives: he can procure no more quarter for himself, and is summoned by—the parish. His goods are distrained, his children are crying with cold and hunger, and the very bed on which his sick wife is lying, is dragged from beneath her. What can he do? To whom is he to apply for relief? To private charity? To benevolent individuals? Certainly not—there is his parish. There are the parish vestry, the parish infirmary, the parish surgeon, the parish officers, the parish beadle. Excellent institutions, and gentle, kind-hearted men. The woman dies—she is buried by the parish. The children have no protector—they are taken care of by the parish. The man first neglects, and afterwards cannot obtain, work—he is relieved by the parish; and when distress and drunkenness have done their work upon him, he is maintained, a harmless babbling idiot, in the parish asylum.From "The Streets -- Morning" in "Scenes":
The appearance presented by the streets of London an hour before sunrise, on a summer’s morning, is most striking even to the few whose unfortunate pursuits of pleasure, or scarcely less unfortunate pursuits of business, cause them to be well acquainted with the scene. There is an air of cold, solitary desolation about the noiseless streets which we are accustomed to see thronged at other times by a busy, eager crowd, and over the quiet, closely-shut buildings, which throughout the day are swarming with life and bustle, that is very impressive.From "Thoughts about People" in "Characters":
It is strange with how little notice, good, bad, or indifferent, a man may live and die in London. He awakens no sympathy in the breast of any single person; his existence is a matter of interest to no one save himself; he cannot be said to be forgotten when he dies, for no one remembered him when he was alive. There is a numerous class of people in this great metropolis who seem not to possess a single friend, and whom nobody appears to care for. Urged by imperative necessity in the first instance, they have resorted to London in search of employment, and the means of subsistence. It is hard, we know, to break the ties which bind us to our homes and friends, and harder still to efface the thousand recollections of happy days and old times, which have been slumbering in our bosoms for years, and only rush upon the mind, to bring before it associations connected with the friends we have left, the scenes we have beheld too probably for the last time, and the hopes we once cherished, but may entertain no more. These men, however, happily for themselves, have long forgotten such thoughts. Old country friends have died or emigrated; former correspondents have become lost, like themselves, in the crowd and turmoil of some busy city; and they have gradually settled down into mere passive creatures of habit and endurance.From "The Boarding-House" in "Tales":
Mrs. Tibbs was, beyond all dispute, the most tidy, fidgety, thrifty little personage that ever inhaled the smoke of London; and the house of Mrs. Tibbs was, decidedly, the neatest in all Great Coram-street. The area and the area-steps, and the street-door and the street-door steps, and the brass handle, and the door-plate, and the knocker, and the fan-light, were all as clean and bright, as indefatigable white-washing, and hearth-stoning, and scrubbing and rubbing, could make them. The wonder was, that the brass door-plate, with the interesting inscription ‘Mrs. Tibbs,’ had never caught fire from constant friction, so perseveringly was it polished. There were meat-safe-looking blinds in the parlour-windows, blue and gold curtains in the drawing-room, and spring-roller blinds, as Mrs. Tibbs was wont in the pride of her heart to boast, ‘all the way up.’ The bell-lamp in the passage looked as clear as a soap-bubble; you could see yourself in all the tables, and French-polish yourself on any one of the chairs. The banisters were bees-waxed; and the very stair-wires made your eyes wink, they were so glittering.
Summary: It is in some sense impossible to summarize a large book of literary sketches like this; all the parts are, by the very nature of the work, relatively independent, impressionistic, occasional, episodic, mostly descriptive (although with plenty of the anecdotal), and brief. But in some sense this works very well, because perhaps we should understand Sketches by Boz is as a portraiture, or better, a gallery of portraits with a theme, and the theme is something like the character of London in the 1830s. We see 1830s London in fifty-six different sketches. So let's reflect a moment on this titanic and legendary character, the City of London, at this bustling and bursting time of her life.
She is bustling, a swiftly expanding metropolis beginning to feel her full vigor. We see this in many of the titles of the sketches in the "Scenes" section of the work: "The Streets -- Morning", "The Streets -- Night", "Shops and Their Tenants", "Hackney-coach Stands", "London Recreations", "The River", "Private Theatres", "Vauxhall-gardens by Day", "Omnibuses", "A Parliamentary Sketch", "Public Dinners", "Brokers' and Marine-store Shops", "Gin-shops", "The Pawnbroker's Shop", "Criminal Courts". It's like a walk around the city, although we have the benefit of Dickens's native eyes and, better still, his genius for vivid and striking description. This only becomes more clear when we look at the content of the sketches. We are only getting little samples, and yet all of these sketches are almost bursting with sights and scenes and activity. The London we see is a city of trade and business, with shops apparently everywhere and constantly changing, as new tenants rent old shops and redecorate them and do their business and eventually close, leaving the space to be rented again. Coaches and omnibuses, both old and new, speed everywhere. But it is also a city of delights, full of gardens and picturesque streets and theatrical events of a wide variety.
London as Dickens presents her is also very much a people-city, large numbers thrown together of every type and stereotype, and yet also each one extraordinarily unique. I open the book to a random page, in the midst of the sketch, "Public Dinners", about a dinner held by the charitable institution, "Indigent Orphans' Friends' Benevolent Institutions" (which the narrator assures us is an abbreviated version of the actual name), and we find a crowd of people watching the hackney-coach drivers drop off the indigent orphans' friends, waiters, the important and self-important committee members, low and high tables filled with guests, and musicians. Most random pages in the book would serve the point just as well: we are in an endless sea of interesting people.
Dickens being one of the great character writers of all time, excels at the people, and many of my favorite sketches in the book are my favorites because they exemplify his talent for swiftly describing a peculiar character in a way that is difficult to forget. I liked "The Election for Beadle", as the election for beadle (one of the elected representatives of the parish-neighborhoods of the city) heats up between Spruggins and Bung, the two primary candidates; Spruggins takes the lead early because he has ten children, two of them twins, and a wife, but Bung, suffering under the political handicap of having only five children, none of them twins, powers through, benefited by being only 35 to Spruggins's 50 and, more importantly, having a system for getting drunks and elderly ladies to the voting booths. I also particularly liked "Private Theatres". Theatre in nineteenth century London was a big thing. There were the great licensed theaters -- Covent Garden, Drury Lane, and the Haymarket; theatricals required licensing. But there were two other kinds of theaters without licensing that made a space for themselves in the interstices of the licensing rules. The first were places like Astley's Royal Equestrian Amphitheatre, that officially provided non-theatrical entertainment (equestrian, of course), but in reality was a theatre that just made sure that its theatrical productions had horses in them. The second were places that got around the rules by being small places where the money was made not primarily by audiences paying tickets (there were tickets, but very cheap), but by stage-struck amateur actors paying to be in a production. From what I gather, the private theatre would often have its own small company of actors, but they would be supporting characters; amateurs from around the city would, of course, pay to be the leading ones in famous scenes:
All the minor theatres in London, especially the lowest, constitute the centre of a little stage-struck neighbourhood. Each of them has an audience exclusively its own; and at any you will see dropping into the pit at half-price, or swaggering into the back of a box, if the price of admission be a reduced one, divers boys of from fifteen to twenty-one years of age, who throw back their coat and turn up their wristbands, after the portraits of Count D’Orsay, hum tunes and whistle when the curtain is down, by way of persuading the people near them, that they are not at all anxious to have it up again, and speak familiarly of the inferior performers as Bill Such-a-one, and Ned So-and-so, or tell each other how a new piece called The Unknown Bandit of the Invisible Cavern, is in rehearsal; how Mister Palmer is to play The Unknown Bandit; how Charley Scarton is to take the part of an English sailor, and fight a broadsword combat with six unknown bandits, at one and the same time (one theatrical sailor is always equal to half a dozen men at least); how Mister Palmer and Charley Scarton are to go through a double hornpipe in fetters in the second act; how the interior of the invisible cavern is to occupy the whole extent of the stage; and other town-surprising theatrical announcements. These gentlemen are the amateurs—the Richards, Shylocks, Beverleys, and Othellos—the Young Dorntons, Rovers, Captain Absolutes, and Charles Surfaces—a private theatre.But, you say, bustle and people are the stuff of all cities? Ah, not so; the life of London in the 1830s is actual life, lively life, fullness of life, where everything is done by people working with people. Machines are as yet just clever devices; the gas-lamp and the steam engine are assistance and nothing more. Everywhere you go, people are busy with making connections with other people, busy with building actual things, busy with participation in social ventures bigger than themselves. You can walk out to the street and find it so. The same cannot be always be said for our money-farms.
But there are features distinctive to London in her growing spurt. She is a city of English humor, and we see her through the humor of a Dickensian narrator. The citizens of London live lives of joke, sometimes pleasant and sometimes absurd; London herself is a grand fair of humor, with her people fitting themselves into, and seeing themselves as participating, in a great humorous venture. There is nothing more English than that, to make civilization, and one's entire part in it, a bit of a playful joke. It's not an England that is entirely gone yet, but in 1830s London, humorous England rose to heights that astounded everyone who witnessed it.
She is also a city of great tragedies, broken lives, terrible sorrows -- she must be, because she is The City. But in London of the 1830s, as Dickens presents her, the tragedies are not unknown, the sorrows not unseen; they are not dulled by familiarity. She is not a mere market for woe. Every tragedy, ever sorrow, every failure, is an opportunity, an invitation, to see the tragedy, the sorrow, the failure, and help out. People often do not -- but sometimes they do, and always they can. Dickens is stronger with humor than with sympathy, I think; that is, he has an ability to uncover humor that is not obvious, but he sometimes over-relies on the reader to sympathize. But his slides to heart-string-tugging are lightened by their sincerity; he is not going through motions but trying to make people see. We see this in the best of the darker and more tragedy-oriented sketches, "A Visit to Newgate", about prison. And it makes the whole better. Dickens's is not an advertiser, marketing London to us; he is showing us around, and points out to us the flaws as well as the glories.
But most of all, the 1830s London of Dickens is, for all her faults and absurdities, lovable. She is a home, one with her own culture, her own life, her own customs. She is beginning to be queen of the world, but she has not yet forgotten her humbler days or her ancient heritage; she is already a legend, but, not resting on her laurels, continues to do things of legend, and yet at the same time is personable. Because the personable London, I think, is the London Dickens himself knew and loved, and however fragmentary literary sketches may be, they combine together in a messy medley that mirrors the city itself, and shows how one may love a city.
Favorite Passage: From the "Tale", "Sentiment":
‘Lavinia, hear me,’ replied the hero, in his most poetic strain. ‘Do not condemn me unheard. If anything that emanates from the soul of such a wretch as I, can occupy a place in your recollection—if any being, so vile, deserve your notice—you may remember that I once published a pamphlet (and paid for its publication) entitled “Considerations on the Policy of Removing the Duty on Bees’-wax.”’
‘I do—I do!’ sobbed Lavinia.
‘That,’ continued the lover, ‘was a subject to which your father was devoted heart and soul.’
‘He was—he was!’ reiterated the sentimentalist.
‘I knew it,’ continued Theodosius, tragically; ‘I knew it—I forwarded him a copy. He wished to know me. Could I disclose my real name? Never! No, I assumed that name which you have so often pronounced in tones of endearment. As M’Neville Walter, I devoted myself to the stirring cause; as M’Neville Walter I gained your heart; in the same character I was ejected from your house by your father’s domestics; and in no character at all have I since been enabled to see you. We now meet again, and I proudly own that I am—Theodosius Butler.’
The young lady appeared perfectly satisfied with this argumentative address, and bestowed a look of the most ardent affection on the immortal advocate of bees’-wax.
Recommendation: Recommended, although this is a book more for dipping into than reading straight through.