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Title: Sketches by Boz
Series: ———-
Author: Charles Dickens
Rating: 3.5 of 5 Stars
Genre: Classic
Pages: 874
Words: 252K
| Synopsis: |
A series of “sketches” about places, people and situations culled from Dickens’ tenure as a newspaper columnist.
| My Thoughts: |
The full title this book is Sketches by Boz: Illustrative of Everyday Life and Everyday People. So you have a 800+ pages of little short sketches that Dickens used to fill in blank spaces when he was writing at various newspapers.
Dickens gets very preachy about his pet issues in several of the sketches. I’m a teetotaler and even I was reacting against his emotional manipulation about gin shops. I was like “Ok, time to start drinking hard time, that will show him!”
When I read these back in 2007 I read them as part I and II (as that is how they were broken up in the hardcovers I own) and that worked much better. Honestly, these should be treated as a short story collection and perused at leisure. This time around I was better able to appreciate the technical side of Dickens’ writing which is why I’m bumping it up to 3 ½ stars.
That being said, I highly doubt I’ll ever read this again. No stories, no plot, doesn’t really work for me.
★★★☆½
You get a certain momentum when you work through the big texts like Little Dorritt; I find it hard to imagine reading such sketches as you describe because without focus, such social commentaries are literally just fish and chip paper; filler, essentially.
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Yep, you got that right. These are the kind of things that should be read between other books. If I had been really thinking, I would have given this my “short story collection” and read it between other books.
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What a curious “little” collection. I haven’t heard of this one before but it’s an interesting concept. It indeed doesn’t sound like something you’d want to crack open and read by a fire. More like some kind of coffee table display thing to pick up when you’ve got nothing else to do hahah
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Or if you’re reading some super epic fantasy and need a break, read a couple of these stories and then jump back into the fray…
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Sounds interesting — my first thought reading the header was “oh, I didn’t know Dickens drew, also!” But story sketches, not drawings. Oops. I can see why this would work better as filler between the longer works.
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There were some illustrations, but they were by his collaborator at the time. I have no idea what his name was though 🙂
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Interesting! I don’t think I knew about these sketches at all, though, so I can’t help you with Dickens’ collaborator’s name. 🙂
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Have heard of this, but that’s about it. Could be interesting to work through over the course of months, but…
Not sure I could handle reading that much of Dickens without a single coincidence occurring. Just doesn’t seem right.
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Oh, you are such a cynic! You need to stop reading those gruesome murder mysteries and read some good old fashioned, good for you SF books by Neal Asher, that has just the right dose of violence and carnage for any healthy man!
And …. said books will make you lose weight, grow taller, give you a chiseled physique and make your breath nice and minty.
Dr. Bookstooge guarantees it!
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Doesn’t sound like it’d really work for me. But I find it interesting that Dickens made these sketches, cos I didn’t know about that.
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Not a book I’d recommend for a casual Dickens’ fan, that is for sure.
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