22. Sketches by Boz by Charles Dickens

This one tripped me up, because I was used to pronouncing it ‘Sketches by Bozz’.

Sketches by Boz was Dickens’s first book – not a novel, but a selection of observations of London life. It was extremely successful, and Dickens, for a time, was Boz. He signed letters as Boz, published extensively in the periodical press as Boz, and even christened his first son Charles Culliford Boz Dickens. In 1842 there was a ‘Boz Ball’ in New York attended by 5,000 people. It has often been thought that the name derived from ‘Boswell’, and in fact a reviewer of Sketches by Boz called Dickens ‘a kind of Boswell to society’. But the name actually came from Dickens’s younger brother Augustus, who was nicknamed Moses (after the character in the Vicar of Wakefield, not the patriarch). Moses, pronounced ‘by a younger girl, who could not then articulate plainly’ became ‘Bozie’ or ‘Boz’. Later Dickens took 'Boz' for his pseudonym.

This rather argues that Sketches by Boz should not be pronounced ‘Sketches by Bozz’ but instead ‘Sketches by Boze’.

Consulted:
Pearson, Hesketh: Dickens, His Character, Comedy, and Career‎ (1949)
Garlington, JC: The Men of the Time; Or, Sketches of Living Notables (1853)

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