Dickens Charles - Sketches of Young Gentlemen and Young Couples

SKETCHES OF YOUNG LADIES YOUNG GENTLEMEN AND YOUNG COUPLES

CHARLES DICKENS

WITH

SKETCHES OF YOUNG LADIES

BY

EDWARD CASWALL

ILLUSTRATED BY

PHIZ

Great Clarendon Street, Oxford ox2 6DP

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Introduction Paul Schlicke 2012

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First published 2012

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BY the summer of 1837 Charles Dickens had shot to fame like a rocket (in the words of an early reviewer) and was well on his way to becoming the hottest literary property of the century. Sketches by Boz, which collected in three volumes the newspaper and magazine pieces he had been producing piecemeal since 1833, had been published in two series in February and December 1836 to rapturous reviews, and The Pickwick Papers, commissioned in response to that first success, was appearing in its fifteenth monthly serial part, to even greater acclaim. Oliver Twist had begun its monthly run in the pages of Bentleys Miscellany, which Dickens was editing. By then he had also written and produced three plays and an anonymous pamphlet, but it was his serial publications which were the primary sensation.

Eager to expand their fledgling company and to exploit the success of their star writer, Chapman and Hall, the publishers of Pickwick, brought out a collection of brief vignettes called Sketches of Young Ladies, by a pseudonymous author, Quiz, with engravings by Hablot Browne (Phiz). It sold splendidly, having reached its eighth edition within just over a year, and Dickens, writing anonymously (he was under contract to Richard Bentley, his Oliver Twist publisher, not to bring out anything additional with a rival publisher), six months later produced a sequel, Sketches of Young Gentlemen, which also

The journalistic format of short fiction, essays, sketches, serials, and miscellaneous writings was very much the dominant mode of publication in the 1830s. Whereas Sir Walter Scotts Waverley novels, commencing in 1814, had led the ascendancy of works of long fiction in the early nineteenth century, the publication of novels declined dramatically following the bankruptcy in 1826 of the firms of Archibald Constable and James Ballantyne, publisher and printer respectively of Scotts works. In place of novels, a veritable deluge of sketch writing flooded the field in the 1820s and 1830s, both as single pieces in newspapers and magazines, and as collections in volumes. Writers largely forgotten today, such as Theodore Hook, Thomas Hood, John Poole, and Robert Surtees, produced sketches which competed with the longer-lasting achievements of Washington Irvings Sketch Book (181920), Mary Russell Mitfords Our Village (1824 32), William Makepeace Thackerays Paris Sketch Book (1840)and of Dickenss works. It is this context which underlies the publication of all of Dickenss novels as monthly or weekly serials, as he developed his own distinctive talents within the publishing conditions of his day.

But that is to jump ahead. By 1837 Dickens had written sixty sketches as Boz;

The first of these three little works, Sketches of Young Ladies, was written by a young literary aspirant, Edward Caswall (181478). As an undergraduate at Brasenose College, Oxford, Caswall neglected his studies to produce The Oxonian, a series of sketches published in the Metropolitan

Having adopted the pseudonym Scriblerus Redivivus (the satirical writer come back to life) for Pluck, for Sketches of Young Ladies Caswall called himself Quiz, a name indicating a witty fellow who mocks or ridicules. The sketches consist of twenty-four brief descriptions of a variety of types of contemporary young middle-class females, described by an adolescent male, Mr. P, whose observations are based mainly on witnessing young women at social gatherings. There is only occasionally any of the individuation which makes Dickenss character sketches so memorable, and each sketch concludes with a moral assessment of the subject under scrutiny. But the content and manner of these sketches led admiring reviewers to praise them as rather droll (York Herald, 8 July 1837) and pleasing (Hull Packet, 14 July 1837). In many respects these caricatures come so nearly to life, wrote another reviewer, that we humbly think some young ladies might here and there find a hint for the improvement of their habits or their manners (Sheffield Independent, 19 August 1837).

The Preface, attributed to M. P.initials with no known referentannounces the purpose of the work, namely to set forth the classification of young ladies according to the Linnan system, a philosophical theme which, he ironically laments, has been neglected by the foremost authorities of the age, and which (he maintains) has been erroneously described by another. The Linnan system is a methodology established by Carl Linnus, the Swedish botanist and zoologist, who founded modern taxonomy and binomial nomenclature, and the authorities Caswall accuses of neglect of his important subject are among the foremost scientists of the age. Georges Cuvier, Dionysius Lardner, and Mary Somerville had all published notable works on aspects of natural history and the physical sciences. And Caswall facetiously accuses William Buckland, dean of Westminster, the author of the first account of a dinosaur fossil and a leading proponent of creationism, of the error of mistaking troglodytes for ichthyosauri. In fact, Buckland writes learnedly about the ichthyosaurus, an extinct giant marine reptile resembling a fish (the first fossilized remains were found in 1811 by Mary Annig in Lyme Regis), but not at all about troglodytes, or cavemen.