both
this first story and the stories that followed it in _The Old Monthly
Magazine_, during 1834 and the early part of 1835, possessed qualities
of a very remarkable kind. So also did the humorous descriptive papers
shortly afterwards published in _The Evening Chronicle_, papers that,
with the stories, now compose the book known as "Sketches by Boz." Sir
Arthur Helps, speaking of Dickens, just after Dickens' death,[5] said,
"His powers of observation were almost unrivalled.... Indeed, I have
said to myself when I have been with him, he sees and observes nine
facts for any two that I see and observe." This particular faculty is,
I think, almost as clearly discernible in the "Sketches" as in the
author's later and greater works. London--its sins and sorrows, its
gaieties and amusements, its suburban gentilities, and central
squalor, the aspects of its streets, and the humours of the dingier
classes among its inhabitants,--all this had certainly never been so
seen and described before. The power of exact minute delineation
lavished upon the picture is admirable. Again, the dialogue in the
dramatic parts is natural, well-conducted, characteristic, and so used
as to help, not impede, the narrative. The speech, for instance, of
Mr. Bung, the broker's man, is a piece of very good Dickens. Of course
there is humour, and very excellent fooling some of it is; and
equally, of course, there is pathos, and some of that is not bad. Do I
mean at all that this earlier work stands on the same level of
excellence as the masterpieces of the writer? Clearly not. It were
absurd to expect the stripling, half-furtively coming forward, first
without a name at all, and then under the pseudonym of Boz,[6] to
write with the superb practised ease and mastery of the Charles
Dickens who penned "David Copperfield." By dint of doing blacksmith's
work, says the French proverb, one becomes a blacksmith. The artist,
like the handicraftsman, must learn his art. Much in the "Sketches"
betrays inexperience; or, perhaps, it would be more just to say,
comparative clumsiness of hand. The descriptions, graphic as they
undoubtedly are, lack for the most part the final imaginative touch;
the kind of inbreathing of life which afterwards gave such individual
charm to Dickens' word-painting. The humour is more obvious, less
delicate, turns too readily on the claim of the elderly spinster to be
considered young, and the desire of all spinsters to get married. The
pa