ABSTRACT
In a letter of 31 March 1836, Dickens speaks of ‘the great success of my book, and the name it has established for me among the publishers . . .’ One immediate consequence of the Sketches by Boz, published on 6 February 1836, was the well-known offer from Chapman and Hall 143 on 10 February:
I was a young man of three-and-twenty, when the present publishers, attracted by some pieces I was at that time writing in the Morning Chronicle newspaper (of which one series had lately been collected . . .), waited upon me to propose a something that should be published in shilling numbers. . . The idea propounded to me was that the monthly something should be a vehicle for certain plates to be executed by MR SEYMOUR; and there was a notion . . . that a “NIMROD club”, the members of which were to go out shooting, fishing, and so forth, and getting themselves into difficulties through their want of dexterity, would be the best means of introducing these. 144
