ABSTRACT
Every biographer has described how Dickens began by contributing tales and sketches to magazines and newspapers, later collected and enlarged in the two series of Sketches by Boz; and many since Forster have followed Dickens’s own cue in high-lighting that dramatic moment in December 1833 when the twenty-one-year-old gallery reporter bought a copy of the Monthly Magazine and his eyes were ‘dimmed with joy and pride’ on seeing his first story ‘in all the glory of print’. 54 But there are many aspects of this crucial first phase of his writing that have been under-emphasized or even neglected: not only the sheer merit of the Sketches, but their signal importance as an event in literary history, and the effect of their contemporary fame on Dickens’s literary career; and, most neglected of all, the care which he took in revising them. That revision—its extent, direction, and probable motives—is the primary concern of this essay; it deserves a fairly full treatment, both for its obvious relevance to the theme of this book and for the light thrown on the inter-relations of journalistic and creative writing, a question of central interest to Dickens’s early career, and perhaps to the whole.
