Effortless Art: The Sketch in Nineteenth-Century Painting and Literature

Criticism, Summer, 1999 by Alison Byerly

Beneath the smooth surface created by the casual style of Dickens's sketches, however, we can sense an uneasy preoccupation with issues of money, work, and social class that reflects the financial burden that led to their creation. While economic problems would of course be important in his novels as well, they are rendered especially prominent in Dickens' sketches. The descriptive, episodic nature of the form placed a greater burden of meaning on the outward appearance of things, the level at which differences in social class are more immediately apparent than differences in moral character. Arlene Young has pointed out that comic sketches by Dickens and others in the 1830's and '40's contain "a variety of marginal social and occupational types" belonging to the lower middle class.(25) One reason for this focus on ridiculous or ineffectual characters who "attempt to imitate middle-class style and manners" may have been the distance an author's humor establishes between himself and his subjects.

Boz' studied nonchalance wavers when he describes the misery of many of the people he observes, and he seems particularly affected by the poverty of middle-class people who have fallen on hard times. In his anguished description of a widow and her invalid son in "Our nextdoor neighbor," one may hear echoes of Charles Dickens's own traumatic youth. The narrator befriends the unfortunate couple, whose only income is the "pittance the boy earned, by copying writings, and translating for booksellers."(26) His primary sympathies are clearly with the boy as he describes how hard he works, and the pride he is able to maintain in spite of these circumstances. Dickens's well-known bitterness at having himself been forced at the age of twelve to work in support of his family seems to have centered not on the physical privations of his life at the blacking-factory but on the social displacement it entailed. In "Our next-door neighbor," Dickens says little about the boy's physical condition before his death, but focuses instead on his humiliation at having sunk from "better circumstances," and the "unceasing labour" the boy is unfairly forced to perform.

The sketch "Brokers' and Marine-Store Shops" shows a similar preoccupation with the danger of sliding out of one's social class. The narrator points out that the items for sale at a pawnbroker's shop "mark the character of a neighborhood," and proceeds to analyze several such shops in different quarters, imagining sympathetically the "misery and destitution" implied in the sale of clothes whose "make and materials tell of better days.(27) A subsequent sketch, "The Pawnbroker's Shop," carries this idea a step further. Dickens presents a series of vignettes involving several female customers which, taken together, form a Hogarthian gallery depicting a poor woman's descent into vice. We first see a young girl, hardened by want, selling a few trinkets given to her "in better times"; then a gaudily dressed prostitute, whose "practised smile is a wretched mockery of the misery of the heart," and who looks at the young girl with a faint sense of recognition; and finally a drunken, slovenly woman whom the narrator calls "the lowest of the low." He goes on to point out that each woman is destined to follow in the others' footsteps, and that "the last has but two more stages--the hospital and the grave."(28) The outward appearance of each woman reflects her place in this inexorable progress.