Complete and unabridged, with 48 full-page plates by Thomas Gainsborough, George Morland and Luke Fildes. Dickens's first book: fifty-six pieces on London — the streets before dawn, the pawnbroker's, Newgate, a christening, the omnibus, Seven Dials — written for newspapers at twenty-three under the name Boz. Cruikshank illustrated them, and the money from the copyright helped him marry two months after publication. Everything he did later is here in outline: the crowds, the tenderness, and the eye that stops on exactly the wrong detail. Forty-eight plates of street markets, tavern rows and theatre crowds by Cruikshank and Rowlandson carry the noise and comedy of the London these sketches first set down.