Special Correspondence: Reading Dickens’s Journalism

‘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.