Dickens's sketches and visual studies

The aim of this paper is to offer new insights into Dickens's texts by using the critical perspective of contemporary visual studies. To this end, I intend to analyse the genre of the ‘sketch’ which, towards the end of the 18th century and at the beginning of the 19th, operates both in and across the verbal and visual text. Exploring the very first production of Charles Dickens, namely Sketches by Boz (1836), I shall examine the translation of the visual image of London into the verbal one. My suggestion is that visual studies allow to set a specific focus on the techniques of the observer and thus we are enabled to identify in Dickens the point of departure from the existing visual conventions and into 19th-century visual culture.