Fumbling Toward Narrative? - Charles Dickens’s Sketches by Boz (1836-39) in the Literature-Film Adaptation Course

Oct 15, 2026

Essay examining how Jeffrey E. Jackson uses Charles Dickens’s Sketches by Boz (1836-39) to teach Victorian literature and early film history through adaptation pedagogy. Argues for a book-history lens emphasizing the materiality of literary texts and the anticipation of film adaptation challenges within textual history. Describes classroom sequencing that begins with an unfilmed, genre-indeterminate illustrated book to frame discussions of narrative, genre, and pre-narrative cinema.

LanguageEnglish

CategoryLiterature

FormatPDF

Pages34

Reading Time52 min

AccessFree to download

Fumbling Toward Narrative?

Teaching film with Dickens’s Sketches by Boz

Book-history lens and materiality of literary texts

Classroom focus: genre, narrative, and early film examples

Dickens’s adaptation significance and connections to popular entertainment

Fumbling Toward Narrative?: Charles Dickens’s Sketches by Boz (1836-39) in the Literature-Film Adaptation Course Jeffrey E. Jackson Monmouth University In an article in the November 2015 number of The CEA Critic (“Apples to Apples: A BookHistory Approach to Film Adaptations in the Classroom”), I modeled an approach to teaching film that “can bring film and literature together in mutually illuminating ways”(Jackson 296) . I argued then for a “book-history lens for teaching adaptation,” averring that an insistence on “the materiality of literary texts” and the notion that a “book is a medium” raises the possibilities that a literary text is always already adapted into a “material, visual instantiatio[n]” and that “the challenges and problems posed by the process” of adapting literature to film “are, to a large degree, anticipated by and inscribed in the literary work’s textual history”(Jackson 295-296) . 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 further 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 such periodicals as the Morning Chronicle, the Monthly Magazine, the Carlton Chronicle, and Bell’s Weekly Magazine during his uncertain early years of parliamentary reporting and other journalism. Publisher John Macrone reissued Dickens’s early writings (along with assorted original pieces written strictly for Sketches) in two volumes accompanied by new illustrations by renowned illustrator and caricaturist George Cruikshank. Sales and reviews were encouraging enough to lead to a “Second Series” of Sketches by Boz, a republishing of further pieces by Dickens, appearing in 1837, and both series were ultimately collated and reissued asthe one-volume Sketches by Boz,“New Edition, Complete” in 1839. Sketches’s unfamiliarity tomy students and its very strangeness as a book has the effect of destabilizing assumptions they might bring to a literature and film course. I begin my class by assigning various selections from Sketches, though its content has never been filmed: this alone signals from the outset that the course will not be based exclusively on a series of book-vs-adaptation comparisons. More importantly, however, I have found that 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. As Dickens’s first book, Sketches by Boz has long been seen as marking his ascension to full-time professional authorship even as it anticipates the famous novels that would follow. As Dickens’s friend John Forster would write of Sketches,“[T]he first sprightly runnings of [Dickens’s] genius” are apparent, even if his later works would have “so much more perfect form and fullness”(76) . In my class, I like to stress how, to me, 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 ofthe 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. I begin this essay with a general discussio

FAQs

What teaching approach does Jackson use to connect film and literature?

Jackson models a “book-history lens for teaching adaptation,” emphasizing the materiality of literary texts and treating a book as a medium that anticipates adaptation challenges within its textual history.

Why does Sketches by Boz work well in the class despite having no film adaptations?

Its unfamiliarity destabilizes students’ assumptions, and its fragmentary, illustrated, genre-indeterminate form helps introduce early film history while keeping the course from relying only on direct book-versus-adaptation comparisons.

How does Jackson connect Dickens’s Sketches to early cinema?

He likens the shift from Dickens’s fragmentary journalistic sketches to later full-length novels to the progression from 1890s early fragmentary non-narrative film entertainments toward narrative works such as A Trip to the Moon and The Great Train Robbery.

Oct 15, 2026

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