ce coat
for a shabby blue, he stood by the door collarless and buttoned up, the
very personification, I thought, of a close sailer to the wind.... Not
long after this Macrone sent me the sheets of 'Sketches by Boz,' with a
note saying they were by the gentleman [Dickens] who went with us to
Newgate. I read the book with amazement at the genius displayed in it;
and in my note of reply assured Macrone that I thought his fortune was
made, as a publisher, if he could monopolize the author." This picture
is very graphic. But it must be accepted with a grain of salt.

The 'Sketches by Boz, Illustrative of Every-Day Life and Every-Day
People,' Dickens's first printed book, appeared in 1835. A further
series of papers, bearing the same title, was published the next year.
"Boz" was the nickname he had bestowed upon his younger brother
Augustus, in honor of the Moses of the 'Vicar of Wakefield.' The word,
pronounced through the nose, became "Boses," afterwards shortened to
"Boz," which, said Dickens, "was a very familiar household word to me
long before I was an author. And so I came to adopt it." The sketches,
the character of which is explained in their sub-title, were regarded as
unusually clever things of their kind. They attracted at once great
attention in England, and established the fact that a new star had risen
in the firmament of British letters.

Dickens was married on the 2d of April, 1836, to Miss Catherine Hogarth,
just a week after he had published the first shilling number of 'The
Posthumous Papers of the Pickwick Club: Edited by Boz.' The work
appeared in book form the next year. Its success was phenomenal, and it
brought to its author not only fame but a fixed sum per annum, which is
better. It assured his comfort in the present and in the future, and it
wiped out all the care and troubles of his past. It was in itself the
result of an accident. Messrs. Chapman and Hall, attracted by the
popularity of the Sketches, proposed to their author a series of monthly
articles to illustrate certain pictures of a comic character by Robert
Seymour, an artist in their employment. Dickens assented, upon the
condition that "the plates were to be so modified that they would arise
naturally out of the text." And so between them Mr. Pickwick was born,
although under the saddest of circumstances; for only a single number
had appeared when Seymour died by his own hand. Hablot K. Browne
succeeded him, signing the name of "Phiz";