Sketches by Boz (Penguin Classics)

Collecting a rich and strange mixture of reportage, observation, fancy and fiction centered on the metropolis, Sketches by Boz was quite a pupil-catching first novel for Charles Dickens. Published when he was 24, he writes of being out walking the London streets, in theatres, pawnshops, courts, prisons, along the Thames and on the omnibus, missing nothing, recording and transforming urban and suburban life into new terrain for literature.