Charles Dickens was an English writer and social critic. Sketches by Boz is the collection of short pieces he originally published in various newspapers and other periodicals between 1833 and 1836. This richly varied collection of observations shows us the London at its best and worst — its streets, theatres, inns, pawnshops, law courts, prisons, omnibuses and the river Thames — in honest and visionary descriptions of everyday life and people. A startling mixture of humour and pathos, these sketches reveal London as wonderful terrain for an extraordinary young Dickens. .