When Boz became Inimitable

[erratum]

The origin of the famous descriptor attached to Dickens’s equally famous pseudonym is generally mentioned in the context of one or other of two incidents. The first is noted by Forster:

about half-way through the publication of Pickwick, his old teacher [William Giles] sent a silver snuff-box with admiring inscription to “the inimitable Boz,” … [“Inimitable”] was for a long time the epithet we called him by.

(7; bk. 1, ch. 1 and 205 fn; bk. 3, ch. 2)

Dickens responded to Giles in an undated letter, sending a copy of the one-volume Pickwick Papers (published November 1837), and regretting that Oliver Twist was not yet in volume form: (it was to appear so in November 1838) (Letters 1: 429).

“[A]bout half-way through […] Pickwick” suggests that Giles made contact in about January 1837. However, Dickens’s reference to Oliver Twist in his response; the substance of the inscription, which alludes to Dickens’s “devotion […] to […] the melioration of the condition of the distressed;” and the particular admiration Giles later expressed for the workhouse sequences of Oliver (Long, passim) all suggest that Giles wrote after reading at least the opening chapters of that serial (which appeared in February 1837). Further, if, as seems probable, Dickens responded promptly to the gift, Giles may be assumed to have written sometime – perhaps soon – after November 1837, when the Pickwick volume appeared. The editors of Letters, however, on the basis of Dickens’s handwriting, suggest that the response may have been made in August 1838, perhaps bringing forward the date of Giles’s letter to not long before this.

The second frequently mentioned early use of “inimitable” occurs in Dickens’s editorial response in the February 1837 number of Bentley’s Miscellany to a potential contributor: “The person who addressed to the Publisher a manuscript […] with a request that it might receive ‘a few touches from the inimitable Boz’, is an impudent imposter. …”

These two usages of “inimitable,” although notable, were not the earliest occasions on which the epithet appeared in connection with Boz and his works. The word, suggesting “unmatched,” “distinctive,” “distinguished” or just “admirable,” was fairly freely attached to a very wide range of persons and objects in the press of the time. A non-exhaustive survey of readily available British newspapers and other periodicals during 1836–37 revealed over six hundred examples.

With regard to the works of Boz, the first usage we noted in a non-exhaustive search of London periodicals occurred on 14 February 1836, just six days after the publication of the first edition of the first series of Sketches, when the Satirist (p. 51) noted that the pieces were “in their way inimitable.” On 12 March the Morning Post (p. 6) regretted that space limitations precluded it reproducing “an inimitable specimen” from the work. On 19 June the Satirist (p. 199) again mentioned “‘Boz,’” the author of the inimitable “‘Sketches,’” and, on 3 July, noting the fourth number of Pickwick (in which Sam Weller famously first appears), the same periodical referred to “the inimitable ‘Boz’” (p. 210).

On 31 December, the Morning Post, (p. 4) noted that the first number of Bentley’s Miscellany would contain “a new Pickwick paper [it was The Public Life of Mr Tulrumble] by the inimitable “Boz.” Thereafter, further instances in which “inimitable” was associated with Boz and his works occurred: by the following February, William Macrone was announcing in London periodicals (for example the Observer 19 February p. 1) “New and improved Editions of the inimitable SKETCHES by ‘BOZ’.”

All but the last of these usages occurred well before both of the two familiar examples noted above. Although the inscription on his former teacher’s gift may have encouraged Dickens to adopt “The Inimitable” as a nickname, Giles (and the Miscellany’s rebuffed correspondent) appear to have been using a descriptor that had already achieved considerable currency.