ABSTRACT
Charles Dickens dreams of a man—a man named Bos, just one inverted letter away from Dickens’s penname, Boz. Bos, like Boz, is a writer. A man of humble origins, Bos is a creature of Grub Street, an ink-stained professor of penny publications with lurid illustrations. The foregoing never happened, but it derives from the truth. Of all the writers in the employ of Edward Lloyd, one was particularly focused on reproducing the form and humor of Charles Dickens’s popular fiction: Thomas Peckett Prest, known as ‘Bos’. In terms of biography, not much is known about the life of Thomas Peckett Prest. Unlike Dickens, he was born in London. The chapter describes a reading of Prest’s plagiaristic efforts, which are among the most vivid responses to the rise of Dickens the novelist in the 1830s. Imitations of Dickens’s novels flatter the original texts, but they also mount critiques.
