Explorations Read-Aloud: “Sketches by Boz” by Charles Dickens

Every Friday, at 11:00 am, on the library’s YouTube Channel and Facebook Page, the library will stream a brand new recording of local thespian, Joseph Coté reading aloud selections from a wide variety of fascinating and entertaining books of fiction and non-fiction.

For March 22, Coté will read aloud from Charles Dickens’ book Sketches by Boz.

Summary:  Charles Dickens’s first published book at age twenty-four, Sketches by Boz heralded an exciting new voice in English literature. This richly varied collection of observation, fancy and fiction shows the London he knew so intimately at its best and worst – its streets, theaters, inns, pawnshops, law courts, prisons, omnibuses and the river Thames – in honest and visionary descriptions of everyday life and people.

Through pen portraits that often anticipate characters from his great novels, we see the condemned man in his prison cell, garrulous matrons, vulgar young clerks and Scrooge-like bachelors, while Dickens’s powers for social critique are never far from the surface, in unflinching depictions of the vast metropolis’s forgotten citizens, from child workers to prostitutes.

A startling mixture of humor and pathos, these Sketches reveal London as wonderful terrain for an extraordinary young writer. 

Sketches is a remarkable achievement, and looks towards Dickens’s giant novels in its profusion of characters, its glimpses of surreal modernity and its limitless fund of pathos and comic invention.

Click the links to find the library’s YouTube Channel and Facebook Page.

Thoughts to share? Book ideas to suggest?
Contact Joseph at friday-explorations@usa.net