Sketches by Boz 3. "Mrs. Joseph Porter, Over the Way" and "Horatio Sparkins" (1834)

The Kindle edition that I am using in this adventure (Delphi Classics) mercifully decided to include a separate table of contents including the sketches in their originally published order, together with the dates and magazine titles each piece appeared in. This is exactly what I intend to do: read all of Dickens's works in the order in which they were published, and having them arranged like that in this edition saves me from doing the work myself.
After "A Dinner at Poplar Walk", in January 1834, the Monthly Magazine published "Mrs. Joseph Porter, Over the Way" (SB 53), a very amusing piece of literature of local customs and manners - indeed, what these sketches are meant to be - which reminded me a little bit of Mariano José de Larra's "El castellano viejo". On this occasion, however, rather than a disastrous birthday dinner, the focus of the satire is an amateur performance of Othello. A Iago on Wellington boots, a prompter without spectacles, among many other disasters, turned Shakespeare's tragedy into an impossible comedy. "The audience went home at four o'clock in the mornign, exhausted with laughter, suffering from severe headaches, and smelling terribly of brimstone and gunpowder [you'll have to read why]. The Messrs. Gattleton, senior and junior, retired to rest, with the vague idea of emigrating to Swan River early in the ensuing week". 


Rather more bitter is the next sketch to be published, "Horatio Sparkins" (SB 49), which appeared also in the Monthly Magazine in February, 1834. Reminiscent of Jane Austen's Mrs Bennett, the Maldertons, anxious to mingle exclusively in any society above their own, are intrigued about a Horatio Sparkins which everyone takes to be a sort of Mr Darcy. A prospect candidate for one of their daughters, they invite him to dinner and find him to be an excellent, learned, intelligent young man, so they can only imagine that he must be a barrister. They try by all means to prevent him from learning that Mrs Malderton's brother - Mr. Jacob Barton, who had invited himself to meet the young man - is a grocer. The reader feels that this Mr. Sparkins is not exactly what everyone expects him to be and, certainly, the surprise is served just at the very end. Needless to say, none of the you Malderton girls got married, or, as the narrator had it: "The daisies have thrice bloomed on Camberwell-green; the sparrows have thrice repeated their vernal chirps in Camberwell-grove; but the Miss Maldertons are still unmated. Miss Teresa's case is more desperate than ever; but Flamwell is yet in the zenith of his reputation; and the family have the same predilection for aristocratic personages, with an increased aversion to anything low". 


One cannot say that things have changed that much, can one? Vanitas vanitatis.