Rapid and Dexterous: A Study of Dickens’ Journalistic Writing and Sketches by Boz
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This essay aims to examine the quality of Dickens’ writing in dealing with diverse patterns of urban experience in Sketches by Boz, the first work published in two volumes in 1836. In particular, the inquiry takes account of the way in which Dickens’ writing was continuously informed by aspects of physical experience, ones that were brought on by shifting technological and social circumstances in Victorian England. Taking a cue from Dickens’ speech delivered at a fund dinner for the Newspaper Press in which he fondly recalls his experience as a young journalist, the essay considers the possibility that his distinct manner of writing－“the rapidity and dexterity of its exercise” acquired in response to challenging circumstances surrounding his journalistic pursuits－facilitates a type of imagination that is uniquely Dickensian. If not in explicit reference to this habit, his writing at its daring moments evokes the sense of rapidity and dexterity as a necessary strategy of writing in accounting for scenes of urban lives; lively, energetic modes of social and technological adjustments that use a similar strategy for living in the city. Nowhere does this Dickensian style of writing evince itself more directly than in Sketches by Boz. With a markedly lesser degree of authorial deliberation and intent in comparison with his major novels, each piece in Sketches demonstrates the fluency and verve of his journalistic writing, freely pursuing and recording a variety of incidents and events peculiar to contemporary urban life.
Abstract
This essay aims to examine the quality of Dickens’ writing in dealing with diverse patterns of urban experience in Sketches by Boz, the first work published in two volumes in 1836. In particular, the inquiry takes account of the way in which Dickens’ writing was continuously informed by aspects of physical experience, ones that were brought on by shifting technological and social circumstances in Victorian England. Taking a cue from Dickens’ speech delivered at a fund dinner for the Newspaper Press in which he fondly recalls his experience as a young journalist, the essay considers the possibility that his distinct manner of writing－“the rapidity and dexterity of its exercise” acquired in response to challenging circumstances surrounding his journalistic pursuits－facilitates a type of imagination that is uniquely Dickensian. If not in explicit reference to this habit, his writing at its daring moments evokes the sense of rapidity and dexterity as a necessary strategy of writing in accounting for scenes of urban lives; lively, energetic modes of social and technological adjustments that use a similar strategy for living in the city. Nowhere does this Dickensian style of writing evince itself more directly than in Sketches by Boz. With a markedly lesser degree of authorial deliberation and intent in comparison with his major novels, each piece in Sketches demonstrates the fluency and verve of his journalistic writing, freely pursuing and recording a variety of incidents and events peculiar to contemporary urban life.
참고문헌 (19)
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