Dickens' Writing Career

Of course Dickens did not enjoy his job as a clerk. In 1829 he studied shorthand and worked as a freelance court reporter. His experience in covering court cases for the paper gave him inspiration for one of his books: The Bleak House. Additionally Dickens became sensitive to social issues and injustices.

In about 1832 Dickens began to write his first work of fiction, a series of short stories titled: A Dinner At Poplar Walk. It began when Dickens hesitantly dropped his writing to the office mailbox of Monthly Magazine. Without his knowledge, the editor liked the story, and when opening the next issue of the magazine, Dickens was very excited to find his writings there in print ...

The editors commissioned Dickens to write eight stories of "sketches of everyday life". Critics judged Dickens as "He has infinite skill in giving importance to the commonplace scenes of everyday occurrence”; a skill that has appeared at the time, and which later catapulted the name of Dickens. Dickens then met the subeditor of Morning Chronicles, and in 1834 he moved to work at it as a young journalist. This was where Dickens was assigned to concentrate on writing sketches of daily lives of Londoners, which Dickens wrote under the pseudonym "Boz". Having appeared in various magazines, a publisher named John Macrone proposed the idea to record these works, then became "Sketches by Boz" as Charles Dickens's first novel published.

Sketches by Boz when first published