1 - Streetwise

Summary

SKETCHES BY BOZ, THE PICKWICK PAPERS

From the very start, a major element in Dickens's career as a writer was his recognition of the strangeness of life in the nineteenth-century city. Sketches by Boz (1833–6) represents an early attempt to investigate and grasp the nature of an environment that had totally revolutionized the lives of its inhabitants within the space of a few decades. During Dickens's youth and early adulthood, increasingly large numbers of British people were gravitating towards an urban lifestyle; by 1851, when a census was taken, a clear majority lived in cities and large towns. It had taken only one or two generations for most British people to exchange the pace of existence in the smaller-scale communities of the rural areas for the experience of living with, or in, the crowd. The change of scale created problems of intelligibility and orientation, obstructions to a sense of belonging, difficulties in the way of what the critic Raymond Williams has referred to as ‘knowability’.

In the smaller towns and villages of pre-industrial England, a walk down the high street would have involved encounters with other people many of whom would be familiar to the individual observer, but in the rapidly expanding centres of population in Victorian England perhaps the vast majority of those passing in the street would be, and would remain, unknown. In the earlier situation, the observer would be able to match the outward appearance of many passers-by with some knowledge of their character and relations: the experience of the street would involve frequent brushes with individuals with a definite past. But in the teeming cities of the industrial era, there would be a crowd of faces without names or histories, a variety of surfaces without depth.

Dickens testifies to the novelty and strangeness of this shift in social perceptions in his earliest published writings, composed in the early to mid-1830s. He remarks on the bizarre combination of anonymity with mere visual familiarity in his descriptions of waves of middle-aged men walking to work through the streets of London. These are figures who ‘plod steadily along, apparently with no object in view but the counting-house; knowing by sight almost everybody they meet or overtake, for they have seen them every morning (Sundays excepted) during the last twenty years, but speaking to no one’(SB 53).