Dickens, Charles | Ernest Boll (essay date 1940)
Ernest Boll (essay date 1940)
SOURCE: "The Sketches by 'Boz'," in The Dickensian, Vol. XXXVI, No. 254, Spring, 1940, pp. 69-73.
[In the essay below, American educator Boll examines how the stories in Sketches by Boz anticipate the themes and characters of Dickens's later novels.]
We gain something worth while when, to our enjoyment of the individual writings of an author we add an understanding of his works as a comprehensive whole. We enjoy a person's sense of humour, or his good taste in clothes, or his power of quick sympathy, and dislike his bad temper, his penuriousness, or his accent; but we do not understand him until we make an effort to knit together the various threads of his nature into a complete pattern. The truth applies to a man's traits and to a man's books.
There are really many kinds of threads we can use to gather together an author's works: characters, situations, devices of craftsmanship, direct...
[The entire page is 2330 words long]
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