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

By John Drew, Hazel MacKenzie and Ben Winyard

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

• Language: English
• Publisher: Legend Press
• Release date: Apr 24, 2013
• ISBN: 9781789551372

Book preview

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 to write for Household Words. They were both flattered and grateful although in the end they did not contribute much. In 1850 Harriet Martineau was an established figure on the literary scene and like Gaskell was an inspired choice. Gaskell proved to be surprisingly adept in responding to the challenge of writing for the miscellany, although, as is well known, she was uncomfortable with the demands of weekly serialisation. Others like Geraldine Jewsbury, Eliza Lynn (later Linton) and Dinah Mulock (later Craik) wrote occasionally. All three were sound choices. Dickens also invited Tom Taylor and Douglas Jerrold, both of whom refused.

Why then was Household Words so successful, in comparison with the other journals, many of whom had some of the same contributors? The two reasons usually given are the quality of the original fiction—novels and stories by Gaskell, Wilkie Collins, Lynn Linton, Harriet Parr and James Payn, all of whom were, or would become, significant writers, and of course fiction by Dickens. By contrast, much of the fiction in the competing magazines was anonymous, some of it was reprinted from earlier periods, and much of it was by little-known writers.

The second reason was Dickens himself. He was a celebrity editor of a kind that had not been seen before. None of the other eponymous journals had a ‘Conductor’ with such pulling power, certainly not Douglas Jerrold, or the Howitts or Eliza Cook. Writers wanted to be published in Dickens’s journal, and then to republish their essays, stories and articles, as having been ‘first published in Household Words’. The office received, according to report, ‘whole sacks’ of material, much of which was rejected, all of which had to be read and sifted.13 Reading Michael Slater’s account of the effort Dickens put into his journal—rewriting or altering many of the articles submitted, keeping a hold on the proceedings, including the finances, while also writing David Copperfield (1849-50), Bleak House (1852-53), Little Dorrit (1855-57), undertaking public readings and amateur theatricals, one can only marvel at his energy.

In her recent book, Women’s Authorship and Editorship in Victorian Culture (2011), Beth Palmer argues that Dickens, as the ‘Conductor’ of his two journals, was regarded as a role model by the novelists Mary Elizabeth Braddon, Ellen Wood and Florence Marryat when they took charge of Belgravia (1867-99), Argosy (1865-1901) and London Society (1862-98) respectively in the 1860s and 1870s. Such was his prestige as the celebrity novelist-cum-editor she suggests, that these women novelist-editors looked back to him, rather than to the more recent successes of George Smith’s Cornhill Magazine (1860-1975) under Thackeray and his successors or to Macmillan’s Magazine (1859-1907). They sought to emulate Dickens’s ‘performance’ as editor and the control he exerted over the form, content and style of Household Words and All the Year Round. Palmer also suggests that Samuel Beeton’s emphasis on ‘the editress’, in other words Mrs Beeton, in the Englishwoman’s Domestic Magazine (1852-79) from 1854 onward, was another attempt to replicate Dickens’s all embracing ‘conducting’ of Household Words.14

Lohrli makes the point that the non-fictional content of Household Words did not differ in subject from that of other general miscellanies, and that in its social purpose it resembled the content of publications such as Eliza Cook’s Journal, or Chambers’s Journal. After reading Catherine Waters’ Commodity Culture in Dickens’s Household Words, I would add a third factor in the success of Household Words: the innovative nature of its non-fiction. Waters provides a compelling ‘tour’ or ‘excursion’ through these articles—many of them by Household Words regulars like Sala, Morley and Martineau—demonstrating their imaginative take on their subjects and the virtuoso performances of the writers.15

Household Words copied one particularly important feature of Chambers’s Edinburgh Journal. Like the earlier weekly, it was a hybrid, available in weekly issues of twenty-four double-column pages selling for two pence (Chambers’s had sixteen pages and sold for one-and-a-half pence) and in nine-penny monthly numbers with wrappers, and more substantial bound biannual volumes, the last two aimed at middle-class purchasers and readers.

Lorna Huett, in her illuminating article ‘Among the Unknown Public: Household Words, All the Year Round and the Mass-Market Weekly Periodical in the Mid-Nineteenth Century’, shows how in the format of his periodical Dickens carefully hedged his bets—deliberately choosing the cheaper paper, the dense type face and crowded double-column page layout of the cheap weeklies, but also the smaller crown octavo size of the more expensive periodicals.16 By means of the physical appearance of the miscellany and by its carefully judged contents Dickens attracted both the new readerships of the lower-middle and artisan classes and a middle-class family readership. Waters’ reading of the non-fiction is that it was aimed specifically at a middle-class readership. The ‘commodity culture’ it interrogated was one with which the middle classes of the 1850s were familiar, and in so doing it paved the way for the shilling monthlies aimed at a middle-class readership that would follow in the 1860s.

I want to conclude this paper by talking briefly about Elizabeth Gaskell’s non-fictional contributions to Household Words, about which very little has been written, and which are good examples of the way in which the contents of Household Words bridged the gap between the middle-class family readers that Dickens set out to attract and the less well educated artisan and lower-middle-class readers in whose price range the miscellany positioned itself.

Much has been written about Dickens’s hands-on approach to Gaskell’s first story, ‘Lizzie Leigh’ (1850), his suggestions for the ending of ‘The Old Nurse’s Story’ (1852), which she ignored, and their falling out over the serialisation of North and South (1854-55). In contrast Dickens rarely commented on her essays and book reviews, except to acknowledge them, often enthusiastically, in retrospect, and to pay her at above-average rates. Unlike her novels and stories, the essays and reviews were anonymous. ‘The Schah’s English Gardener’ (1852) was in the vein of real life experiences that relay knowledge of life in foreign parts. ‘Traits and Stories of the Huguenots’ (1852) blended essay and story and dealt with a period in French history that Gaskell knew well. ‘Cumberland Sheep-Shearers’ (1853) combined travel narrative, fiction, and autobiography.17 Dickens told Wills he was ‘delighted to hear of Mrs Gaskell’s contributions’ apropos of his injunction to ‘Keep Household Words Imaginative!’ in a letter written in mid-November 1852.18 Two of Gaskell’s articles are book reviews but in the Household Words mode are couched as general articles—‘Modern Greek Songs’ and ‘Company Manners’.19 Gaskell was an accomplished reviewer. She wrote for the Athenaeum in the early 1850s at the same time she was writing for Household Words, and she would become a regular reviewer for the Reader: A Review of Science, Literature and Art (1863-67), a weekly published by Macmillan. In ‘Company Manners’, she took as her subject a series of articles on Madame de Sablé, the seventeenth-century French salon hostess, which were originally published in the Revue des Deux Mondes (1829-) by Victor Cousin, and turned it into an essay on entertaining, contrasting the intellectual sparkle and vigour of the French salons, of which she had first-hand experience, with the ostentation and tedium of English middle-class dinner parties. Five months later Marian Evans reviewed the same work for the Westminster Review, the essay now known as ‘Woman in France: Madame de Sablé’, a celebration of the intellectual role French women play in their society, in contrast to the cramping restrictions imposed on their English counterparts.20 It is fascinating to compare these two reviews of the same book, one written by a novelist at the top of her game, the other by a novelist in the making, both of them judging perfectly the audience of their respective journals.21 Less than five years after North and South was serialised and ‘Company Manners’ appeared, Household Words came to an abrupt end and was succeeded by what Gaskell called ‘this new Dickensy periodical’. Her newly-minted adjective has been over-worked and quoted out of context ever since. In a letter to her friend Charles Eliot Norton she expressed anxiety about the story she was currently writing, which was not going well. ‘I know it is fated to go to this new Dickensy periodical’, she wrote ‘& I did so hope to escape it’.22 She did not escape, and ‘Lois the Witch’, one of her best stories, was published in three parts in All the Year Round in October 1859.23 Gaskell clearly regarded the new periodical as less prestigious than George Smith’s Cornhill Magazine, which was launched in January 1860 and to which she also contributed. Gaskell critics, notably Linda K. Hughes, who has edited her stories from both periodicals, are less certain that the Cornhill stories are superior, or that she sent her ‘sensational’ tales to All the Year Round and what she considered her more enduring ones to the Cornhill. I have argued that Gaskell was not ‘trading up’, as the editors of her Further Letters have suggested, when she eagerly accepted an invitation from Smith to contribute to his magazine.24

The broader question of the quality of the original fiction in All the Year Round versus that in the Cornhill and of the relative positions of the two publications must be left for another time. I want merely to note that in her phrase ‘this new Dickensy periodical’, Gaskell was inadvertently paying its ‘Conductor’ a great compliment. She intended her comment to be dismissive, if not slightly contemptuous. But she was in fact articulating what the reading public already knew—that the Dickens ‘brand’ of periodical was now firmly established on the literary scene, and its distinctiveness was