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The 1830s saw an upsurge in cheap miscellanies of general reading material for the broadest of readerships. From the outset of his career, Charles Dickens was fascinated by the possibilities of addressing such an audience, but not until 1850, with his founding of the 2d. weekly magazine, Household Words, did he achieve his ambition of editing such a periodical. The chapter traces the development of this project, and shows how Dickens embraced hybridity of form and content to establish a secure place for his new journal in the crowded mid-century marketplace, one that straddled class identifiers. In 1859, the journal was incorporated into a new publication, All the Year Round, which carried an instalment of serial fiction as the opening article, rather than a specially-written leader. The switch anticipated the establishment of a series of upmarket monthlies that also privileged fiction over journalism, and gave Dickens and his sub-editor the opportunity to establish early readerships for their brand abroad—in Europe, the colonies, and above all in America. Two postscripts to the chapter outline the afterlife of Dickens’s weeklies following his death in 1870, and their resurrection, in digital form, in the twenty-first century.

This short paper offers an overview of the development and methodology of the 'Dickens Journals Online (DJO)' project, which has adopted unusual means in order to prepare a digital edition of the weekly journals edited by Dickens between 1850 and his death in 1870. It considers ways in which contemporary users of the site and supporters of the project, who are actively involved as online correctors and moderators of the site content — a kind of latter day subeditor — respond to the journals’ contents in similarly emotive and sentiment-driven ways as the original readers.

‘He was a great novelist,’ G. K. Chesterton wrote in a brief introduction to Dickens’s Reprinted Pieces from Household Words, ‘but he was also … a good journalist, and a good man. It is often necessary for a good journalist to write bad literature. It is sometimes the first duty of a good man to write it/As usual, Chesterton flaunts his talent for Wildean paradox, omitting only to add ‘That is all’ after his climax. From the dualist perspective of aesthetically-demarcated high and popular cultures, it may have been possible to view good journalism and ‘bad literature’ as compatible judgements, but modern readers, accustomed to reading in the broader church of cultural studies, may want the matrix of quality, style,1 and medium to be probed a little further. One way to consider the problem of Dickens’s style is to recall the career in journalism which the last eight chapters have endeavoured to trace, and consider the many different formats of journalism and journalistic discourse which such a career imposed: starting with the periphrasis and ‘unnecessary detail’ of penny-a-line items in the British Press, verbatim transcriptions of parliamentary speech in the Mirror of Parliament, selective reports of the debating along with puff verses in the True Sun, graduating to the descriptive ‘re-staging’ of election contests in the Morning Chronicle, editorial banter in Bentley’s Miscellany, theatre reviews in the Examiner, leader-writing in the Daily News and The Examiner, and so forth.

The fivepenny Sunday weekly which Leigh Hunt founded and edited until 1821 still occupied a distinctive niche in the newspaper world of the 1840s. Its early outspoken republicanism (which had warned the youthful Dickens of the ‘existence of a terrible banditti, called “The Radicals,” whose principles were that the Prince Regent wore stays, and that nobody had a right to any salary, and that the army and navy ought to be put down’) had given way to an intellectual radical tradition on Albany Fonblanque’s installation as editor-cum-manager in 1830, while its excellent, independent coverage of drama and literature remained a selling point amongst well-to-do Whig and Liberal readers throughout the country.1 As much a review as a political print, for most of its life only three to four of the sixteen pages of The Examiner contained original matter, the rest being supplied from cuttings and digests of the week’s news. As Fonblanque aged and mellowed, and following Forster’s official appointment as Editor in November 1847, it steered a slow but firm course towards respectability and the political centre-ground, without breaking openly with Benthamite thought. Whilst growing ever more critical of the working class aspirations represented by Chartism and the Ten Hours movement, the paper during Forster’s ten-year editorship gave unqualified support to the new Liberal prime minister Lord John Russell and the ‘best-conditioned middle class in the world,’ advocating what Carlyle considered the essentially conservative ‘theory of human affairs prevalent in fashionable Whig circles.’

Attempts at describing a periodical are stupid, it might be argued, pace George Eliot, for who can all at once describe a periodical? Even when it is presented to us we only begin that knowledge of its appearance which must be completed by innumerable impressions under different circumstances. We recognize the alphabet; we are not sure of the language.1

At the age of forty-six — a time of life when many choose or are forced to plateau — Dickens embarked on two demanding new ventures, as a public reader of his own works, and as a publisher. Neither is strictly the province of a study of his work as a journalist, but in so far as both departures impacted on All the Year Round and all three pursuits were facets of the same media phenomenon, they deserve some attention. The working patterns Dickens and Wills had established for making up the weekly numbers of Household Words were stretched to the limit by his reading tours, which would take him to venues across mainland Britain, Ireland, France and the United States. A new creative rhythm was needed for writing journalism no less than fiction, for as he told his old friend De Cerjat in 1867, ‘When I read I don’t write. I only edit, and have the proof sheets sent to me for that purpose.’1 He relied more than ever on Wills to manage all aspects of the Commercial Department and much of the Literary work from London,2 but the increased correspondence his absences brought on shows no slacking of vigorous and detailed interest in editorial matters — he had not won outright control of his journal in order to hand it over to a subsidiary. The incessant travel which the tours involved — symptomatic of Dickens’s inner restlessness — contributed to various self-projections as a traveller, ‘the British Wanderer’ as he styled himself,3 or, more significantly, ‘The Uncommercial Traveller,’ under which polyvalent guise he wrote the thirty-six articles for All the Year Round which mark the climax of his career as a journal essayist.

The pleasant fiction that the papers of the Pickwick Club are ‘edited’ by ‘Boz’ from Tetters and other MS. authorities’ is one that is often ignored after the opening chapter, but an editorial tone, and the differing registers of parliamentary reporting which ‘Boz’ was so adept at transposing, remain in fact a notable feature of the early numbers of the serial. Until October 1836, the instalments interlaced with various political and parliamentary reports for the Chronicle: with the shortlived ‘New Series’ of ‘Sketches by Boz’ for the morning paper, with the anti-Sabbatarian pamphlet, two papers for the Library of Fiction, and so forth. It is worth noting how closely the early Pickwick numbers, with their interpolated tales, descriptive sketches after Irving and Poole, and their self-conscious segueing of parliamentary periphrasis into vivid street slang, replicate the miscellaneity and juxtapositions of Dickens’s already established journalistic output. Indeed, as the opening chapter establishes, the ‘Transactions of the Club’ are designed to ‘bear a strong affinity to the discussions of other celebrated bodies’ and are reproduced by the editor on the grounds that ‘it is always interesting to trace a resemblance between the proceedings of great men.’ For those who recalled the famous compromise reached between Brougham and Canning in April 1823, over an insult eventually accepted on the basis that it was meant in a ‘political’ rather than a ‘personal’ sense,1 the end of the chapter makes explicit that Pickwick was premised as a Swiftian satire on actual Parliamentary sayings and doings, a kind of mock Mirror of Parliament: ‘Mr BLOTTON (of Aldgate) rose to order.… Mr BLOTTON would only say then, that he repelled the hon. gent.’s false and scurrilous accusation, with profound contempt. (Great cheering.)

‘I am of the streets, and streety’ proclaimed Sala, in one of his reports from St. Petersburg for Household Words. Dickens himself was streety, if not streetier, but as Bagehot sensed (and Butor would agree), there is a connection between streets and newspapers: and Dickens was a man of newspapers, and newspapery — even when he played at travelling, acting, or being an Author. His account, as David Copperfield, of the discovery of his calling (‘nature and accident … made me an author, I pursued my vocation with confidence’) is bald and unconvincing in ratio to its lack of corroborative details. The proposal, the streets, the notes and memoranda, the blue ink and manuscript paper, the galley proofs, consultation, revision and correction, columns of newsprint, onto the news-stand, bookstall or shelf, and out into the streets again: these were the ancillary movements of the Dickens creative process and product, periodically repeated and renewed. Everything discussed in this study, apart from American Notes, passed through it. There is, and always has been, something faintly anomalous about the critic poring over Pickwick Papers or Bleak House in a handsomely-bound hardback, and trying to assess Dickens in that lumpish form without that vital dramatic unity of time which his original periodical readers instinctively appreciated, because he accompanied them as an observant outside-passenger on their journey forward through the nineteenth century.

The years Dickens spent as reporter and sub-editor of the Mirror of Parliament were years in which, as he later reminisced to a certain Maria Winter, ‘the qualities which have done me most good since’ — earnestness, energy, giant-killing determination — ‘were growing in my boyish heart.’ As ‘pocket Venus’ Maria Beadnell, Mrs Winter had been the ‘driving force’ of Dickens’s ambitions since 1829, for her father was a high-ranking City bank clerk, who clearly did not look kindly on a suitor from an impoverished background.1 In November 1831 the hapless John Dickens had been gazetted, and he was to be arrested for debt for a second time in November 1834. Nevertheless, he and Barrow set to work to help Charles to something more permanent and secure than the freelance and sessional work he had been picking up. The plan was to ‘puff him for a job on the reporting staff of the Morning Chronicle, the most respected of the Whig dailies and the most serious rival to the ascendancy of The Times.

London, 1830. In the topographical watercolours of George’ sidney’ Shepherd and George Scharf, the city is depicted not as a placid, neoclassical panorama — a civilization resting on its laurels — but as a place of accelerating change and incongruous juxtapositions. It looks like a spectacularly unregulated building site, what Dickens was later to call in an article about the engineering works at Euston, ‘an unsettled neighbourhood.’ It was unsettled physically and also politically, with the death of George IV in June, a General Election in July, newspaper reports in August of the Paris revolution, the reassembly of Parliament in October, and, in November, after 47 years out of office, the return of a Whig-led government, bringing representatives of radical new partnerships between the middle and working classes into untried alliance with the party aristocracy. Planned legislation, much of it imbued with Benthamite social philosophy acting through the newly-appointed Commissions, included reform of Parliamentary representation, a complete overhaul of town corporations, ‘improvements’ to the Poor Law, and, in return for the support of the hundred Irish MPs under the fiery leadership of Daniel O’Connell, its corollary at every turn was the condition of Ireland and the Irish. By 1832, armed rebellion, revolutionary uprisings in major cities, were not just a ‘spectre’ imaged by later historians, but a real and present danger. Not only was the reform programme furiously debated, but the precise manner in which the contests were recorded and mediated to the country was the subject of intense, and, in stylistic terms, subtle scrutiny.

Dickens’s predicament as he foresaw the close of the Chuzzlewit serial was serious: the publishing depression continued, sales were disappointing, money was still owing to Chapman & Hall. His thoughts returned once more to the idea of a miscellany, the establishment of a periodical in which he would share much greater and more permanent profits than those available to an author of individual books. The printers Bradbury and Evans, to whom he was secretly planning to transfer his publishing affairs, were keen to build on their success as publishers of Punch. But, he told Forster in November 1843, he was ‘afraid of a magazine — just now.’ The time and chances of success were not right, and Dickens was also tired, and ‘afraid of putting myself before the town as writing tooth and nail for bread, headlong, after the close of a book taking so much out of one as Chuzzlewit.’ His main fear of any project was of being ‘forced (as in the Clock) to put myself into it, in my old shape.’ The elusive editorial cum managerial role he sought was proving hard to pin down, and the only alternative was escape: ‘to some place which I know beforehand to be CHEAP,’ and to ‘enlarge my stock of description and observation by seeing countries new to me.’1

In the summer of 1841, in the midst of a severe agricultural and commercial depression, and as Barnaby Rudge rolled on from its Scott-like beginnings towards its Carlylean conclusion, Lord Melbourne’s weak administration tottered. The new-look Conservatives under Peel, together with the group who had crossed the house in the so-called ‘Derby Dilly’ (the Whig defectors Stanley, Graham, Richmond and others) combined forces with the ultra-Radicals for whom Melbourne’s cautious, aristocratic Whiggery had been too little, too late. Posterity has long since pardoned Peel and vindicated his equivocations — by 1870 Forster could claim ‘we were [ignorant] how much wiser than his party the statesman then at the head of it was’ — but in 1841 his involvement in the repressive measures of 1819 had not been forgotten by the public or press, nor had his initial opposition to Catholic Emancipation and Parliamentary Reform. His efforts to rebrand the Tories as a party of enlightened Conservatism made him appear shifty and deceitful, and he was loathed by Liberals, who equally feared a return to the reactionary politics of a previous era or the usurping of their own position as the party of moderate reform. Until the end of Peel’s administration in June 1846, Dickens’s talents as a journalist, and support as a popular public figure, were repeatedly sought after by different opposition movements and pressure groups.