It is not possible to go further considering things British without mentioning Charles Dickens, the greatest of all novelists. You want to dispute it? He wrote six original masterpieces, none of them a sequel or series, all quite unlike the others, all immortal. Let’s count them, doubters. Pickwick Papers, Oliver Twist, A Christmas Carol, A Tale of Two Cities, David Copperfield, Great Expectations.  There’s a couple of other not bad efforts like Bleak House, Hard Times and Dombey & Son but leave that… The point is no one else wrote more than three, in fact hardly anyone managed more than two. He’s that much better than the rest.
    If you still want to quibble, take into account the pressure he put himself under to write them, meeting his own deadline for his own publication of most of them. The man is a colossus.
    In fact he was too much of a colossus for me at that time, for I was far from being able to take on those vast tomes. Moreover, the education department’s policy of forced reading in fact made them objects of horror to me. I don’t know how many times I sat in the classroom, slaving over the muddy journey of the Dover mail over the hill, or got turned upside-down in the graveyard on Romney Marsh, or attended the meeting of the Pickwick Club, but that was as far as I got with each of them. Those grim, Everymen editions offered no inspiration, nor enough distinction for me to tell one from another, and so each class I began again, not realising nor remembering I’d read them before. No one bothered to correct this, for the teachers had not yet caught on to the notion that I could read, if slowly. Since I was supposedly dyslexic, there wasn’t any reason to pay me any attention. They sat me down the back of the class and ignored me as best they could, looking away whenever I raised my eyes.
    So I went up and down on the spot with Dickens, for a year at least after I was actually competent to read him, intimidated and unconfident, never really getting off the ground. If your memory's any good, you recall that Rosely had already read me one of them, but it was many years before I realised that the author of A Christmas Carol was also responsible for these vast tomes.
    Sketches by Boz is, chronologically at least, Dickens first work. It’s really a collection of short pieces that were published one by one, before Dickens became any sort of novelist. They have a certain charm and character but are of interest only to fans and students these days. In turn, I read them after I had completed all of his other works, got bored and gave up a lot but kept coming back until the task was done. But they really belong here, at the beginning, when the world little suspected the enormous power of the man to come.