Sketches by Boz

Abstract

Composition In the

Preface to the Cheap Edition (1847) of Pickwick Papers, Dickens writes of the Magazine in which my first effusion-dropped stealthily one evening at twilight, with fear and trembling, into a dark letterbox, in a dark office, up a dark court in Fleet Street — appeared in all the glory of print; on which occasion by-the-bye, — how well I recollect it! — I walked down to Westminster Hall, and turned into it for half-an-hour, because my eyes were so dimmed with joy and pride, that they could not bear the street, and were not fit to be seen there.