Reprinted Pieces

Sketches, essays and half-fictions Dickens wrote for his own magazine and gathered afterwards: a walk through a London workhouse, a bill-sticker, a Christmas tree, the police at work, a schoolroom and a ghost story that is not one. The pieces were written to fill a weekly and read like a novelist thinking aloud between novels. A Christmas Tree and the detective-police pieces are the most anthologised, and the shabby-genteel ones are better. Thirty plates by painters including John Atkinson Grimshaw and Alfred Sisley follow Dickens through the London streets and river light his essays inhabit.