Drawn from Life: Categorical Specificity and Popular Sketch Writing from Mary Russell Mitford to Charles Dickens

Literary sketches were a popular genre throughout the Victorian period, pioneered in the 1820s with Mary Russell Mitford’s Our Village (1824-32) and Charles Dickens’ Sketches by Boz (1833-36), both of which went through many editions across the century. Sketches were a commercially useful form since they suited periodical publication (and republication) and could be collected into volumes for different markets. Such versatility was matched in the genre’s capacity to straddle fiction and non-fiction, enabling writers to engage with diverse subjects and disciplinary fields. This essay takes up the analytic challenge presented by such versatility, arguing that one of the fundamental techniques popularised by writers like Mitford and Dickens was a descriptive technique in which specific categories of phenomena are described in place of particulars. Categorical specificity enabled writers to generate an illusion of truthful depiction that was specific enough to be convincing but remained expansive enough to function across different publication contexts. Beyond its commercial value, the technique also poses questions about the nature of representation which, as this essay demonstrates, had important political implications for a newly industrialised society – a fact not missed by Victorian commentators who interrogated the “truth” of the representational categories such writing presented.