SECTION 1 Household Words and the âCommunity of Printâ in the 1850s
Joanne Shattock
ARISING from her research on the print culture network that existed on Wellington Street, near the Strand, Mary L. Shannon has noted that from the Household Words office at 16 Wellington Street North, Dickens could see the office of the weekly Athenaeum (1828-1921) at Number 14, the office of the Morning Post (1772-1937) at Number 18, that of the Examiner (1808-81), edited by his friend John Forster at Number 5, and the office-cum-residence of G. W. M. Reynolds, proprietor of Reynoldsâs Miscellany (1846-69), at Number 7. Situated nearby were Lacyâs Theatrical Bookshop and the Lyceum theatre. The location of the journalâs newly-established office was obviously congenial, apart perhaps from the proximity of Reynolds, combining as it did Dickensâs literary and theatrical interests. As Shannon observed, it gave substance to the reference in âA Preliminary Wordâ in the first issue of Household Words (30 March 1850) to those âtillers of the field into which we now come [...] whose high usefulness we readily acknowledge and whose company it is an honour to joinâ.1 The inhabitants of Wellington Street were his fellow writers, editors and proprietors, part of the âcommunity of printâ to which his new weekly miscellany was to be a spectacularly successful addition.
Shannon could have gone on to point out the offices of Bradbury and Evans, the publishers of Household Words and the proprietors of Punch (1841-2002), at nearby Bouverie Street, where the weekly dinners of the Punch staff were held. On the other side of the Strand, at 142, the radical publisher John Chapman was soon to enter into negotiations to purchase the Westminster Review (1824-1914) in 1851. Moving further towards the City, on Fleet Street, Eliza Cook had established the office from which she conducted Eliza Cookâs Journal from 1849 to 1854. In the other direction, across Trafalgar Square at 22 Pall Mall, the Edinburgh publisher William Blackwood had opened his London office in 1840. Blackwoodâs Magazine (1817-1980) continued to be edited and printed in Edinburgh but from 1852, when his son John Blackwood became head of the firm as well as editor of the magazine, the London office became increasingly important for its dealings with London-based authors and contributors. The Edinburgh firm of W. & R. Chambers had opened a London office in 1842 for the same reason. Elsewhere in London in 1850 G. H. Lewes and Thornton Hunt were raising funds to establish their radical weekly The Leader (1850-60; see Map, p. xxiii).2
Not all of these publications were direct competitors of Household Words but their proliferation in the early 1850s emphasises two important points: the propitious timing of Household Words and the concentration of journal production in London. In his 1976 study of Victorian Novelists and Publishers, John Sutherland identifies the 1850s as a period in which improvements in communications (the railways and the penny post), the technological advances in printing and book production, the increase in the spending power of the middle classes and the newly acquired literacy of the lower classes came together to produce ideal circumstances for fiction publishing.3 The same could be said for periodical publishing, and in particular for periodicals selling for under a shilling.
Another factor in the success of Household Words was the availability of writers, both male and female, professionals who actively sought paid work from the press and expected to earn a living from it. A frequently cited article by G. H. Lewes in Fraserâs Magazine (1830-82) for March 1847, âThe Condition of Authors in England, Germany, and Franceâ, underlined a gradual change in literary life. âLiterature has become a professionâ, Lewes wrote. âIt is a means of subsistence, almost as certain as the bar or the churchâ. âThe real causeâ, he went on, was âthe excellence and abundance of periodical literatureâ.4
I have argued elsewhere that this professional literary life, which brought with it social respectability and some financial security, operated through intricate networks of writers, editors, publishers and proprietors, networks that were more elaborate and extensive at mid-century than in earlier periods. They also included more women writers. The way Household Words tapped into these networks is one of the aspects of the journal I want to explore.5
As Michael Slater points out in the headnote to âA Preliminary Wordâ in the second volume of the Dent Uniform Edition of Dickensâ Journalism, Dickens wanted to distinguish Household Words from mass circulation publications like Reynoldsâs Miscellany, and Lloydâs Weekly Newspaper (1842-1931) with their âvillainousâ [his word] sensational fiction on the one hand and Chambersâs Edinburgh Journal (1832-1956) on the other.6 Chambersâs, Dickens wrote, was âa somewhat cast-iron and utilitarian publication as congenial to me, generally, as the brown paper packages in which Ironmongers keep Nailsâ.7 Yet as both John Drew and John Sutherland note, Chambersâs was in many ways the inspiration for Household Words, its influence apparent in the physical similarity of the layout of their double column pages, a fact which Drew attributes to W. H. Wills having been formerly assistant editor of Chambersâs.8 Unlike the Penny Magazine (1832-45), founded at the same time, Chambersâs contained fiction and it aspired to reach a middle-class as well as an artisan and lower-middle-class audience.
There were other cheap and highly successful weeklies that serialised fiction. The London Journal; and Weekly Record of Literature, Science and Art (1845-1928) was a penny publication with a circulation of half a million at its peak in the 1850s. Some of its fiction was original, but it also published reprints of older novelists including Walter Scott. The Family Herald or Useful Information and Amusement for the Million (1842-1940), its chief competitor, favoured historical romances and domestic fiction, most of it anonymous or pseudonymous. Both publications were more respectable than those published by Lloyd and Reynolds, but the weekly penny magazine, or âpenny novel journalâ as Wilkie Collins referred to them in his article âThe Unknown Publicâ (21 August 1858), was a tainted form.9 Margaret Oliphant identified the Family Herald and the London Journal by name in her Blackwoodâs article âThe Byways of Literature: Reading for the Millionâ published in the same month as âThe Unknown Publicâ and making the same points as Collins.10
Weeklies directed at a similar readership but with a social agenda had a different reputation. Howittâs Journal (1847-48), a self-proclaimed magazine of âpopular progressâ along with its precursor, the Peopleâs Journal (1846-48), sold for one-and-a-half pence and contained fiction by Elizabeth Gaskell, Harriet Martineau and Eliza Meteyard and contributions by Samuel Smiles. The Howitts were a well-connected literary couple at the centre of several networks. Mary Howitt in particular was known for her patronage of younger women writers. In 1849 she had recruited Harriet Martineau and Elizabeth Gaskell, two writers whom Dickens also set out to attract to Household Words, to write for Sartainâs Union Magazine (1848-52), a Philadelphia-based monthly. In the same year, 1849, she was busy recruiting writers for her protĂ©gĂ© Eliza Cookâs new journal. In the case of Elizabeth Gaskell, this time she was unsuccessful. Eliza Cookâs Journal sold for between a penny and a penny-and-a-half, and published work by Julia Kavanagh, Samuel Smiles, Eliza Meteyard and Cook herself. Sharpeâs London Magazine (1845-70), promising âEntertainment and Instruction for General Readingâ, was aimed at the same readers as Household Words, âthe middle and lower walks of societyâ. It was a sixteen-page weekly, containing fiction and selling for a halfpenny, but it became a shilling monthly in 1848 (the title changed to Sharpeâs London Journal. It was edited for a while by the novelist Frank Smedley, and serialised several of his novels, and then by Anna Maria Hall, wife of Samuel Carter Hall.11
Like the Howitts, Anna Maria Hall and her husband were very well networked. Anna Maria actively recruited writers for Sharpeâs, for Chambersâs Journalâshe was responsible for recruiting Dinah Mulock, another Household Words contributor, for Chambersâsâand she wrote for it herself. Later she recruited writers for the St. Jamesâs Magazine (1861-1900) which she edited between 1861 and 1868.
Many of the writers for Household Words were drawn from these existing networks. In her analysis of the contributors to Household Words, Anne Lohrli divided the 390 known contributors into several groups. The first was the inner core of staff comprising the sub-editor, W. H. Wills, R. H. Horne, Henry Morley, who wrote the largest number of articles of all (300), and Wilkie Collins. After that there were some thirty-five regulars, not all of whom remained for the full nine years of the weeklyâs run. But the majority of contributions to Household Words, and this was Lohrliâs important point, came from little known writers who sent in articles unprompted, just as they might have done to Chambersâs Journal, Sharpeâs, Bentleyâs Miscellany (1837-68), Ainsworthâs Magazine (1842-54) or to Fraserâs Magazine.12
In terms of the invitations he extended to individuals, Dickensâs judgement was astute. Elizabeth Gaskell was known to him through Forster and through the Chapman and Hall connection. She had in fact been introduced to Chapman and Hall by William Howitt. The Howitts, whom he knew from their Journal, were also invited ...