Fumbling Toward Narrative?: Charles Dickens's _Sketches by Boz_ (1836-39) in the Literature-Film Adaptation Course

Abstract

In this essay, I discuss my use of Charles Dickens’s Sketches by Boz (1836-39) in my undergraduate Victorian literature and film class as a way of expanding the possibilities for teaching film with literature. Dickens’s first published book, Sketches by Boz, First Series (1836) is an anthology of essays, articles, journalistic ephemera, and short stories Dickens wrote as early as 1833 for a variety of periodicals. Sketches’s unfamiliarity to my students and its very strangeness as a book has the effect of destabilizing assumptions they might bring to a literature and film course, signaling from the outset that we will not proceed lockstep through a series of book-vs-adaptation comparisons with fidelity to the book providing the underlying metric. Moreover, Sketches by Boz in a film and literature course can provide a useful way of introducing students to film’s early history and discussing the issues it raises. The tentative, uneven process by which Dickens’s fragmentary journalistic sketches of the 1830s yielded to the full-length, sprawling novels for which he is famous furnishes a useful analogue to the process by which the early, fragmentary, non-narrative film entertainments of the 1890s would yield to such narrative works as Le Voyage dans la Lune (A Trip to the Moon) (1902) and The Great Train Robbery (1903), initially, and, later, the feature-length narrative films of D. W. Griffith—analogous historical arcs I like to call “fumbling toward narrative.” Generically indeterminate and often metanarrative while straddling the material formats of periodical journalism and published books, Dickens’s Sketches sets us up as a class for conversations about genre, narrative, and material media—ultimately allowing us to question the desirability of narrative in literature or in film.