An odd mix of articles and short stories. I preferred the fiction in general, and overall this was an interesting read.

There is nothing like reading a little Dickens for giving yourself a new perspective as a writer. When you find yourself on a bit of an ego trip, thinking how great and undervalued you are, Dickens makes you ashamed. He makes you feel like a pretender. And that's what you need. You need to strive to

My favorite quotation from the collection, because it withstands the test of time: "Perhaps the cast of our political pantomime never was richer than at this day. We are particularly strong in clowns."

This is a collection of Dickens' earliest writing in the form of short sketches and tales. Written

Split into four parts—Sketches, Scenes, Characters, and Tales—Sketches by Boz is Dickens’s apprenticeship to becoming a novelist of undeniable magnificence. The scenes here evoke pre-Victorian London with the forensic description, the restless persistence of detail, the compassionate eye, and the fo

Excellent short stories by Charles Dickens written before he was known as Dickens and written under his alias as Boz. Remarkably, the writing style and quality is almost as good in these short stories as it is in his more popular novels. I simply love Dickens and have finally come down to reading hi

Although not a novel, more a collection of short pieces - as the blurb says - Sketches by Boz - does have a certain continuous narrative. The first section contains a collection of vignettes entitled Our Parish, and describes certain personages inhabiting the parishes of the London of the late Georg