Charles Dickens & the Mid-Victorian Press, 1850-1870

John Drew, Hazel MacKenzie, Ben Winyard

• Publisher: University of Buckingham Press
• Year: 2013
• ISBN:
  9781789551372
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: Literary Biographies
• Index: Literature

Charles Dickens effectively re-invented periodical literature in the nineteenth century, with his phenomenally popular serialised novels published in the weekly magazines 'Household Words' and 'All the Year Round' between 1850 and 1870.

Already a world-famous author, Dickens was often the principal contributor of these periodicals, and with that position of power, he was able to direct the gaze of his readership. Through he platform, he was able to encourage public conversation around the issues that most concerned him: poverty, crime, education, public health, women, social welfare and reform.

This is a collection of essays from Dickens Journals Online, edited by Hazel MacKenzie and Ben Winyard, exploring both the fiction and the journalism in 'Household Words' and 'All the Year Round', and how they impacted both society in general, and the the wider publishing world.

Contributors include:

• Laurel Brake
• Koenraad Claes
• Iain Crawford
• Daragh Downes
• John Drew
• Judith Laura Foster
• Holly Furneaux
• Ignacio Ramas Gay
• Clare Horrocks
• Louis James
• Patrick Leary
• Hannah Lewis-Bill
• Helen Mckenzie
• Pete Orford
• David Parker
• David Paroissien
• Robert L. Patten
• Jasper Schelstraete
• Paul Schlicke
• Joanne Shattock

SECTION 1

Household Words and the ‘Community of Print’ 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 Reynolds’s Miscellany (1846-69), at Number 7. Situated nearby were Lacy’s Theatrical Bookshop and the Lyceum theatre. The location of the journal’s newly-established office was obviously congenial, apart perhaps from the proximity of Reynolds, combining as it did Dickens’s literary and theatrical interests. As Shannon observed, it gave substance to the reference in ‘A Preliminary Word’ in the first issue of Household Words (30 March 1850) to those ‘tillers of the field into which we now come [...] whose high usefulness we readily acknowledge and whose company it is an honour to join’.¹ The inhabitants of Wellington Street were his fellow writers, editors and proprietors, part of the ‘community of print’ 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 Cook’s 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. Blackwood’s 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 Fraser’s Magazine (1830-82) for March 1847, ‘The Condition of Authors in England, Germany, and France’, underlined a gradual change in literary life. ‘Literature has become a profession’, Lewes wrote. ‘It is a means of subsistence, almost as certain as the bar or the church’. ‘The real cause’, he went on, was ‘the excellence and abundance of periodical literature’.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 ‘A Preliminary Word’ in the second volume of the Dent Uniform Edition of Dickens’ Journalism, Dickens wanted to distinguish Household Words from mass circulation publications like Reynolds’s Miscellany, and Lloyd’s Weekly Newspaper (1842-1931) with their ‘villainous’ [his word] sensational fiction on the one hand and Chambers’s Edinburgh Journal (1832-1956) on the other.⁶ Chambers’s, Dickens wrote, was ‘a somewhat cast-iron and utilitarian publication as congenial to me, generally, as the brown paper packages in which Ironmongers keep Nails’.⁷ Yet as both John Drew and John Sutherland note, Chambers’s 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 Chambers’s.⁸ Unlike the Penny Magazine (1832-45), founded at the same time, Chambers’s 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 ‘penny novel journal’ as Wilkie Collins referred to them in his article ‘The Unknown Public’ (21 August 1858), was a tainted form.⁹ Margaret Oliphant identified the Family Herald and the London Journal by name in her Blackwood’s article ‘The Byways of Literature: Reading for the Million’ published in the same month as ‘The Unknown Public’ and making the same points as Collins.¹⁰

Weeklies directed at a similar readership but with a social agenda had a different reputation. Howitt’s Journal (1847-48), a self-proclaimed magazine of ‘popular progress’ along with its precursor, the People’s 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 Sartain’s Union Magazine (1848-52), a Philadelphia-based monthly. In the same year, 1849, she was busy recruiting writers for her protégé Eliza Cook’s new journal. In the case of Elizabeth Gaskell, this time she was unsuccessful. Eliza Cook’s 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. Sharpe’s London Magazine (1845-70), promising ‘Entertainment and Instruction for General Reading’, was aimed at the same readers as Household Words, ‘the middle and lower walks of society’. 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 Sharpe’s 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 Sharpe’s, for Chambers’s Journal—she was responsible for recruiting Dinah Mulock, another Household Words contributor, for Chambers’s—and she wrote for it herself. Later she recruited writers for the St. James’s 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 weekly’s run. But the majority of contributions to Household Words, and this was Lohrli’s important point, came from little known writers who sent in articles unprompted, just as they might have done to Chambers’s Journal, Sharpe’s, Bentley’s Miscellany (1837-68), Ainsworth’s Magazine (1842-54) or to Fraser’s Magazine.¹²

In terms of the invitations he extended to individuals, Dickens’s 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 ...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• Acknowledgements
• Contributors
• Foreword
• Introduction
• Map
• Section 1
• Section 2
• Section 3
• Section 4
• Index