Dickens's first important work was his _Sketches by Boz_, a series of papers in which he describes various aspects and phases of the life of the English lower middle class. Though somewhat crude in style and occasionally even vulgar in tone, these papers are seldom completely commonplace, and many of the characteristics of the mature Dickens can be discerned there in embryo. They have a distinction of manner and a suggestion of creative power which is unmistakable, and they mark the dedication of Dickens to his especial task, the sympathetic though exaggerated painting of the poorer middle classes. While Thackeray took his stand on the universal sham and corruption of our social system, lashing hypocrisy and showing up the rottenness which lay hidden beneath the whited sepulchres of society, Dickens revealed the treasures which were buried beneath the rubbish-heap designated as the "poorer middle classes." Just as Thackeray's novels are glorified _Books of Snobs_, so Dickens's novels are, for the most part, glorified _Sketches by Boz_. His early works, though called novels, are undisguisedly a series of sketches loosely strung together. _Pickwick_, of course, is absolutely episodic. It was begun to supply the letterpress to a series of drawings by a popular artist, and when Dickens commenced he had no aim except to get his characters into such amusing situations as would afford scope to the illustrator. As the book goes on, however, it begins to get hold of Dickens, and the change is seen especially in the character of Pickwick, who begins as an elderly crank about whom Dickens does not care a jot, but develops into one of the most lovable old gentlemen of fiction. However, the fact remains that _Pickwick_ has not the remotest vestige of a plot, and can by no stretch of the imagination be called a novel. Again, _Oliver Twist_, as Chesterton remarks, is really not a novel, and might, without losing much, have been published as a series of papers entitled _The Workhouse, A Thieves' Den_, and so on. _Nicholas Nickleby_ might similarly have been published as a series of papers entitled _A Yorkshire School, A Provincial Theatre_, and so on. The fact that all these sketches are strung together on the lives of those shadowy personages Oliver Twist and Nicholas Nickleby does not at all affect their real character. After _Nicholas Nickleby_ the books begin to lose, to some extent, this sketchiness, that is, the episodes are more closely and skilfully interwoven into a connected whole, but still Dickens, the novelist, never quite emerges from Boz, the essayist.