SELECTED JOURNALISM 1850

CHARLES DICKENS was born at Portsmouth on 7 February 1812, the second of eight children. Dickens’s childhood experiences were similar to those depicted in David Copperfield. His father, who was a government clerk, was imprisoned for debt and Dickens was briefly sent to work in a blacking warehouse at the age of twelve. He received little formal education, but taught himself shorthand and became a reporter of parliamentary debates for the Morning Chronicle. He began to publish sketches in various periodicals, which were subsequently republished as Sketches by Boz. The Pickwick Papers was published in 1836–7 and after a slow start became a publishing phenomenon and Dickens’s characters the centre of a popular cult. Part of the secret of his success was the method of cheap serial publication which Dickens used for all his novels. He began Oliver Twist in 1837, followed by Nicholas Nickleby (1838) and The Old Curiosity Shop (1840–41). After finishing Barnaby Rudge (1841) Dickens set off for America; he went full of enthusiasm for the young republic but, in spite of a triumphant reception, he returned disillusioned. His experiences are recorded in American Notes (1842). Martin Chuzzlewit (1843–4) did not repeat its predecessors’ success but this was quickly redressed by the huge popularity of the Christmas Books, of which the first, A Christmas Carol, appeared in 1843. During 1844–6 Dickens travelled abroad and he began Dombey and Son while in Switzerland. This and David Copperfield (1849–50) were more serious in theme and more carefully planned than his early novels. In later works, such as Bleak House (1853) and Little Dorrit (1857), Dickens’s social criticism became more radical and his comedy more savage. In 1850 Dickens started the weekly periodical Household Words, succeeded in 1859 by All the Year Round; in these he published Hard Times (1854), A Tale of Two Cities (1859) and Great Expectations (1860–61). Dickens’s health was failing during the 1860s and the physical strain of the public readings which he began in 1858 hastened his decline, although Our Mutual Friend (1865) displays some of his strongest writing. His last novel, The Mystery of Edwin Drood, was never completed and he died on 9 June 1870. Public grief at his death was considerable and he was buried in the Poets’ Corner of Westminster Abbey.

DAVID PASCOE was educated at King Edward School, Lytham, and Oriel College, Oxford, and is currently Lecturer in English Literature at the University of Glasgow. He has published widely on Renaissance, Victorian and Modern writers, is the author of Peter Greenaway: Museums and Moving Images (1997) and is currently completing a book on the influence of Spiritualism on British and American literature. He has also edited Thackeray’s The Newcomes and John Marston’s The Malcontent and Other Plays for the Renaissance Dramatists series.

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Dickens’s journalistic activities have rarely generated the high opinion he himself reserved for them when, late in his career, he told his American editors: ‘To the wholesome training of severe newspaper-work, when I was a very young man, I constantly refer my first successes.’¹ In 1832, after leaving his job as a solicitor’s clerk and acquiring a skill in shorthand, he became a correspondent for the Mirror of Parliament, and, two years later, was taken on as a reporter for the Morning Chronicle. Subsequently, some of the articles that he contributed to that paper between 1833 and 1836, and to other journals, the Monthly Magazine and the Evening Chronicle, were republished as his first full-length work, Sketches by Boz. After this, he concentrated his creative energies on novels. Nevertheless between 1837 and 1870, he continued to appear in newsprint; he was more than a reporter, but never other than one. On 20 May 1865, at the second annual dinner of the Newspaper Press Fund, after recalling some episodes in the life of a young journalist thirty years previously – recording important public speeches on the back of his hand, and wearing out his feet ‘by standing to write in a preposterous pen in the old House of Lords’ – Dickens confessed:

I never have forgotten the fascination of that old pursuit [cheers]. The pleasure that I used to feel in the rapidity and dexterity of its exercise has never faded out of my breast. Whatever little cunning of hand or head I took to it, or acquired in it, I have so retained that I fully believe I could resume it tomorrow, very little the worse for long disuse [cheers]. To this present year of my life, when I sit in this hall, or where not, hearing a dull speech (the phenomenon does occur), I sometimes beguile the tedium of the moment by mentally following the speaker in the old, old way; and sometimes, if you can believe me, I can find my hand going on the tablecloth, taking an imaginary note of it all [laughter]. Accept these little truths as a confirmation of what I know; as a confirmation of my undying interest in this old calling. Accept them as proof that my feeling for the vocation of my youth is not a sentiment taken up tonight to be thrown away tomorrow [hear, hear], but is a faithful sympathy which is a part of myself [cheers].²

In the first place, the discipline of reporting in shorthand amounted to a reflex manual action designed to cheat boredom by capturing the entirety of its manifestations in speech; but one might also suggest that, away from the dinner table and back at his writing desk, Dickens used this ‘old, old way’ to mould the ‘rapidity and dexterity’, and the native ‘cunning’ on which he so prided himself, and to strike the ‘imaginary note’ for which his mature journalism, that large body of miscellaneous work written between 1850 and 1870 with which this selection concerns itself, should be celebrated. Of these writings, G. K. Chesterton observed: ‘About these additional, miscellaneous, and even inferior works of Dickens, there is, moreover, another use and fascination which all Dickensians will understand; which after a manner, is not for the profane. All who love Dickens have a strange sense that he is really inexhaustible.’³ That sense of plenty, however, owes more to manner than matter, as Dickens suggested to Forster: ‘It does not seem to me to be enough to say of any description that it is the exact truth. The exact truth must be there; but the merit or art in the narrator, is the manner of stating the truth.’⁴ Describing this manner, Chesterton claimed that Dickens ‘always began with a fact’;⁵ however, in his famous essay, first published in 1938, George Orwell, clearly perplexed by such views, raised the matter of factuality. Rather than inexhaustibility, the unmistakable mark of Dickens’s prose ‘is the unnecessary detail’, and he continued: ‘Much that he wrote is extremely factual, and in the power of evoking visual images he has probably never been equalled,’ but, on the manner of Dickens’s presentation of facts, he added: ‘wonderfully as he can describe an appearance, Dickens does not often describe a process.’⁶ At the time he wrote these words, Orwell was receiving most of his income from freelance work for papers and magazines, and so it’s perhaps odd that his account nowhere makes mention of Dickens’s journalism. Yet if he had considered the articles in this selection, he would have found it impossible to maintain his line of argument, since these pieces habitually concern themselves with the inexhaustibility of process. In the journalism which follows, Dickens records goings-on about him, as he walks through London’s slums alone (‘A Walk in a Workhouse’, ‘A Sleep to Startle Us’, ‘Night Walks’), with trusted cohorts (‘A Nightly Scene in London’), or with the detective police (‘On Duty With Inspector Field’), and finds, as ever, poverty, desperation and criminality, and, just occasionally, the prospect of hope (‘A Small Star in the East’). Alternatively, his columns record the occupations and amusements of the people (‘Bill-Sticking’, ‘Epsom’, ‘Betting-Shops’) or the means by which things are fabricated, either in manufacture (‘A Plated Article’, ‘A Paper-Mill’) and, more scandalously, in the political and legal process (‘Red Tape’, ‘A Poor Man’s Tale of a Patent’, ‘Proposals for Amusing Posterity’, ‘The Murdered Person’). Walter Bagehot once described Dickens as ‘aspecial correspondent for posterity’;⁷ and certainly, the most memorable of these pieces are those in which he concentrates to set forth some sense of his own development, both as a writer and a man. In ‘Gone Astray’, he recalls how, as a youngster up from Kent, he lost his way in the City of London. After the initial terror, he soon becomes absorbed by the goings-on in the streets, and is then transported by the drama offered by a cheap theatre, before finally seeking out someone to take charge of him, and return him to his family. A later essay, ‘New Year’s Day’, is a sequence of vivid recollections of various New Years in childhood and youth, leading to accounts of time spent in Genoa in 1845 and Paris in 1856; the editors of his correspondence are right to describe it as ‘not an escape from the present to the happier past, but drawn from the timeless sources of the creative imagination’.⁸ In all these cases, what emerges from Dickens’s prose are images of worlds in flux, and evidence of an imagination at work; for though he felt acutely the responsibility of the journalist to give some account of the fact of this continuing process, he knew he could only achieve it through fancy.In many respects, the best example of his approach is ‘Lying Awake’, the article Dickens wrote for Household Words in 1852. The piece begins with a quotation from Washington Irving, whom Dickens had met in 1842, and announces that Dickens will devote this paper to ‘my train of thoughts as I lay awake’, after which the argument pulls away into a quotation from Benjamin Franklin, and into a reminiscence of Niagara Falls. From there it loops back to London, into Clare Market, and to an inquiry into the equality of sleep, ‘how many of its phenomena are common to all classes, to all degrees of wealth and poverty, to every grade of education and ignorance’. Now, the thread is broken, and Dickens finds himself revisiting the St Bernard Pass, which he saw in 1846; but once up there, he encounters a figure remembered from childhood chalked on a door in a country churchyard: a monstrous figure from which he ran. After this, his mind wanders to ‘the balloon ascents of this last season’, a craze in London in the early 1850s; but he cannot hang on to this new vehicle of thought and, in its place, hang the murderous Mannings, a married couple whose public execution had recently taken place, and so affected Dickens that he had written letters protesting against its brutality and tastelessness. He recalls a ‘curious fantasy of the mind’ involving the corpses of the murderers swinging from the gallows: ‘strolling past the gloomy place one night, when the street was deserted and quiet, and actually seeing that the bodies were not there, my fancy was persuaded, as it were, to take them down and bury them within the precincts of the jail, where they have lain ever since’. Once more,his imagination returns to the ascending balloons, which are yet again deflated by a ‘disagreeable intrusion’: ‘a man with his throat cut, dashing towards me as I lie awake’. This vision, however, is vicarious, ‘a recollection of an old story’ told by a kinsman of Dickens who once encountered a madman on the loose in Hampstead; and it eventually leads back to the balloons, and then to a consideration of the appeal of entertainments and amusements of the people. At this point, the morgue in Paris enters his mind, as it did so often; but on this occasion he is drawn to the water dripping on that ‘swollen saturated something in the corner, like a heap of crushed over-ripe figs that I have seen in Italy’. He seeks to change the subject, and turns once more to crime, to ‘the late brutal assaults’ – a spate of street crime in the capital during 1851 – and his views on judicial punishments. Again, though, the dead begin ‘to crowd into my thoughts’ and he resolves to get up and go out for a night walk, ‘which resolution was an acceptable relief to me, as I dare say it may prove now to a great many more’. The modesty of ‘I dare say’ coexists with the acceptance that what he excelled in (and what his public best enjoyed) were those works which emerged out of his nocturnal wanderings; which, in its own perverse way, is exactly what ‘Lying Awake’ amounts to. It is an extraordinary mélange of public and private, of news and recollection, of personality and impersonality; but, most crucially, the pun in its title gives some sense of the manner in which a powerful fancy may falsify the world around it.

Dickens had long harboured ambitions to be editor of his own journal. His first editorship, Bentley’s Miscellany (1837), ended when he fell out with the proprietor, Richard Bentley, over editorial interference; after poor circulation figures, the second venture, Master Humphrey’s Clock (1840), intended as an old-fashioned periodical, was quickly transformed into a vehicle for the publication of The Old Curiosity Shop and Barnaby Rudge; and the third attempt, the Daily News, ended in fiasco when, only a few days after the appearance of the launch issue, Dickens again resigned after clashing with Bradbury & Evans, his publishers. Anyway, none of these ventures offered him the freedom to blend fact with fancy which he had seen in the eighteenth-century periodicals he devoured in his youth: Addison and Steele’s Tatler and Spectator, Johnson’s Idler and Goldsmith’s Citizen of the World. In late November 1846, when he was again formulating plans for his own periodical, he told Forster: ‘I strongly incline to the notion of a kind of Spectator (Addison’s) – very cheap and pretty frequent.’ Eventually, in 1850, he came up with the idea of a weekly journal ‘for the instruction and entertainment of all classes of readers’; but the title was a problem. Forster patiently records all of Dickens’s suggestions:

‘THE ROBIN. With this motto from Goldsmith. The redbreast, celebrated for its affection to mankind, continues with us the year round.’ That however was rejected. Then came: ‘MANKIND. This I think is very good.’ It followed the other nevertheless. After it came: ‘And here a strange idea, but with decided advantages. “CHARLES DICKENS. A weekly journal designed for the instruction and entertainment of all classes of readers. CONDUCTED BY HIMSELF” ’ Still something was wanting in that also. Next day there arrived: ‘I really think if there be anything wanting in the other name, that this is very pretty, and just supplies it. THE HOUSEHOLD VOICE. I have thought of many others, as – THE HOUSEHOLD GUEST. THE HOUSEHOLD FACE. THE COMRADE. THE MICROSCOPE. THE HIGHWAY OF LIFE. THE LEVER. THE ROLLING YEARS. THE HOLLY TREE (with two lines from Southey for a motto). EVERYTHING. But I rather think the VOICE is it.’ It was near indeed; but the following day came, ‘HOUSEHOLD WORDS. This is a very pretty name’: and the choice was made.⁹

And so on Saturday, 30 March 1850, the first number of Household Words was published, bearing the Shakespearean motto (taken from Henry V), ‘Familiar in their mouths as Household Words’; and, as a vestige of the ‘strange idea’ of naming his journal after himself, the imprimatur ‘Conducted by Charles Dickens’ stood proudly at the top of every page. In the lead article, ‘A Preliminary Word’, the Conductor set out his thinking and intentions in founding the journal: ‘We aspire to live in Household affections, and to be numbered among the Household thoughts of our readers,’ who ‘in this summer-dawn of time’ will be introduced to ‘the stirring world around us, the knowledge of many social wonders, good and evil’, but will also be witness to ‘no mere utilitarian spirits, no iron binding of the mind to grim realities’.¹⁰

Dickens always held that fancy was crucial for individual well-being, acting as a possible protective against the absurdities of the age.¹¹ Young David Copperfield comforts himself with the Arabian Nights, the Tales of the Genii and various eighteenth-century novels – ‘They kept alive my fancy, and my hope of something beyond that place and time’ (ch. 4); while in Hard Times, the novel serialized in the pages of Household Words, Sissy Jupe’s father is lost in the East, ‘forgetting all his troubles in wondering whether the sultan would let the lady go on with the story’ (I ch. 9). An anonymous sonnet to Charles Dickens published in 1845 announced that he was unquestionably a ‘potent wizard! painter of great skill! / Blending with life’s realities the hues / Of a rich fancy’.¹² Certainly, he makes clear in the lead article that society needed to tenderly cherish that ‘light of Fancy which is inherent in the human breast’ or ‘woe betide’ the results. And just as Dickens had begun his literary career as a reporter – and through the powers of his own imagination, his fancy, had turned himself into a novelist – so Household Words would teach ‘the hardest workers at this whirling wheel of toil, that their lot is not necessarily a moody brutal fact, excluded from the sympathies and graces of imagination’. His journalism would ‘show to all, that in all familiar things, even in those which are repellant on the surface, there is Romance enough, if we will find it out’. Even such hideous manifestations of progress, ‘towering chimneys spirting out fire and smoke upon the prospect’, find a place in his vision, for these ‘swart giants, Slaves of the Lamp of Knowledge, have their thousand and one tales, no less than the Genii of the East’.¹³

Hence, contributors were encouraged to observe his ‘solemn and continual Conductorial Injunction’: ‘KEEP HOUSEHOLD WORDS IMAGINATIVE.’ He wrote to W. H. Wills, his most trusted editorial lieutenant, on 16 October 1851: ‘I have been looking over the back Numbers. Wherever they fail, it is in wanting elegance of fancy. They lapse too much into a dreary, arithmetical, Cocker-cum-Walkingame [authors of mathematical texts] dustyness that is powerfully depressing.’ In this harsh utilitarian age, fancy could not be allowed to be defeated by over-rationalization and mathematical precision; and if it were on the verge of extinction Dickens would have to take the necessary editorial steps to protect it. He soon became notorious for cutting and revising submissions to render them more fanciful and told E. de la Rue that ‘I diffuse myself with infinite pains through Household Words, and leave very few papers indeed, untouched’;¹⁴ an admission which Percy Fitzgerald may also have heard when he observed how the journal ‘displays his complete personality and is permeated with it, for the reason that he took such infinite unflagging pains to make himself present’.¹⁵ The result of Dickens taking ‘infinite pains’ with his contributors’ copy, was, for them, often just painful. Take, for instance, the experience of Henry Morley, a professional writer and man of letters, who had worked on Household Words since its inception; but who, by 1852, was exasperating its editor. Dickens wrote to him on 31 October of that year:

I am afraid you do not give sufficient consideration to some of your papers in Household Words. They are not to be done without trouble; and the main trouble necessary to them is, the devising of some pleasant means of telling what is to be told. The indispensible necessity of varying the manner of narration as much as possible, and investing it with some little grace or other, would be very evident to you if you knew as well as I do how severe the struggle is, to get the publication down into the masses of readers and to displace the prodigious heaps of nonsense and worse than nonsense which suffocate their better sense. I know of such ‘perilous stuff’ at present, produced at a cost about equal to the intrinsic worth of its literature and circulating six times the amount of Household Words.

My confidence in the ability of such people to receive and relish a good thing, is so far from being in the least shaken by this knowledge that I only feel the more strongly that the good thing must be done at its best. And what I particularly want to impress upon you is, that it is not enough to see a thing and go home and describe it, but that the necessity is, for ever upon us of patiently considering how to describe it so as to give some fanciful attraction or new air.

The disgruntlement may have begun late in the previous year when Dickens edited Morley’s account of a visit to the Free Grammar School in Barnet, north of London, and came across this passage:

A sentence carries us a hundred miles and brings us to our journey’s end. We pass through the little station house, and march on the high-road to Thistledown. That little country town is not far distant, as we see by the grey tower of its church, which peeps over the trees in yonder valley. It is a dull October afternoon; no blue whatever in the sky, no wind whatever in the trees.¹⁶

Dickens once wrote to his friend and biographer John Forster to tell him of ‘the dreadful spectacle’ he had made of someone’s proofs – ‘which look like an inky fishing-net’. Since Morley’s account makes the dullness of the autumn day duller still, Dickens knew that a net needed to be cast over the copy. After Dickens’s attentions, the passage in ‘A Free and Easy School’ read:

You put on the coat of Fortunatus, as a railway wrapper, and go with me as invisible companion. A sentence brings us to our journey’s end. We pass through the little station house, and scorning the small fly at the door, which has blown itself into a railway omnibus, we march upon the high-road to Thistledown. That little country town is not far distant, as we see by the grey tower of its church, which peeps over the trees on yonder hill.

It is a dull October afternoon; no blue whatever in the sky, no wind whatever in the trees. On each side of the broad high-road, the fields are puffed up into notice by a series of undulations, as if it were determined that no effort should be spared to make the greatest possible display of melancholy oaks, and red and yellow copses, and every variety of autumn foliage which Nature has just now on hand. Dulled as we are by the dulness of the atmosphere, and little cheered by the dead leaves which make our path untidy, yet our London eyes are brightened at the first sight of a veritable five-barred gate, framed in blackberries. But blackberries, again, are melancholy things; they take our thoughts back to the days of trustful childhood, when we could crop those little joys by the wayside, and did not know that they are only safe while they are sour, and that the over-sweet have constantly a maggot coiled within. Alas for the experience of life. There goes the omnibus fly.¹⁷

This exhibits all those creative touches which show Dickens’s imagination at work, even in the editor’s chair. He adds an allusion to Fortunatus, always one of his favourite tales; but here the invisible cloak which concealed the hero is replaced by a travelling blanket.¹⁸ The reduction of the length of the next sentence sensibly shortens the journey time. Tempus fugit; but, after all, Barnet was only twenty-five miles from the Household Words office. Look, too, at the way the carriage known as a fly, has first ‘blown itself into a railway omnibus’ – so implying that the (by now) flyblown interior of the coach might be a more suitable home for an insect than the station-house of the railway – and then returns to the scene at the close of the passage, immediately after Dickens has shown its origin (remembered from ‘trustful childhood’) as the maggot in a putrefying blackberry. The fields are ‘puffed up into notice’, putting on a show of decay, their action never far removed from the kind of distension that would characterize those bodies at the morgue in ‘Lying Awake’, ‘swollen [and] saturated… like a heap of crushed over-ripe figs’; while the description of ‘the red and yellow copses’¹⁹ makes it sound like the tree trunks in the copses are turning into the trunks of corpses, carrying degeneration into unexpectedly familiar forms. In depicting the way no effort is spared by the processes of Nature, Dickens’s prose is effortless; but then, even in an interpolated passage such as this, he is attempting nothing less than a darkly personal view of ‘The Experience of Life’. His ambitions were inevitably so high for the journalism with which he was involved; for he was aiming for nothing less than an absolute engagement with the processes of the world around him: the way it was run, its goings-on, its falling into decay and final ends. He concluded his letter to Morley with the following observation:

… frequently it appears to me that you do not render justice to your many high powers, by thinking too slightingly of what you have in hand, instead of doing it, for the time being, as if there were nothing else to be done in the world – the only likely way I know of, of doing anything.

It was concentration on ‘the time being’ that Dickens missed in Morley’s work, and yet so valued; that, and, with it, the ability to record everyday phenomena with a fanciful attraction, ‘as if there were nothing else to be done in the world’.

Such concentration made for some wondrous and strange writing, especially when directed against satirical targets. For instance, in ‘Lively Turtle’, an attack on the City of London’s opposition to much-needed sanitary reforms, a city alderman is mocked and transformed into a turtle; or in ‘Red Tape’, where Dickens imagines seeing a massive ‘red tapeworm’ which has been removed from the belly of a bureaucrat; or in ‘The Murdered Person’, an essay ostensibly dealing with the demise of a famous killer, where everything funnels down into the idea that the body of the United Kingdom itself has been abused and killed off by its corrupt and incompetent politicians. Such images, Dickens maintained, could provide the mass reading public with an alternative to the junk reading – ‘Bastards of the Mountain, draggled fringe on the Red Cap, Panders to the basest passions of the lowest natures’ – whose existence was a national disgrace, but also a threat to his own success. Moral crusading was never the intention; patronizing readers, Dickens maintained, was ‘as great a mistake as can be made’, so ‘don’t think that it is necessary to write down to any part of our audience’ (12 October 1852). It did occasionally happen though. Rather than reporting on a serious industrial dispute, ‘Railway Strikes’ shows Dickens putting words into the mouths of the striking railwaymen in order to give comfort to his readers; while ‘To Working Men’ is hollowly patronizing, as Dickens knew as he wrote it that most of those to whom it was addressed would never be able to read it. Describing Household Words’s manner of handling material of social criticism, one contemporary reviewer wrote, ‘isolated blemishes in the social system are magnified through the hazy medium of exaggerated phrases to the dimensions of the entire system, and casual exceptions are converted into a universal rule and practice’.²⁰ To a large extent, this exaggeration and twisting had its origins in Dickens’s personality, and in his contributors’ attempts to imitate his style – their following, as Fitzgerald said, its ‘forms and “turns” and blemishes’.²¹

The adventurer in the old fairy story, climbing towards the summit of the steep eminence on which the subject of his search was stationed, was surrounded by a roar of voices, crying to him, from the stones in the way, to turn back. All the voices we hear, cry Go on! The stones that call to us have sermons in them, as the trees have tongues, as there are books in the running brooks, as there is good in everything! They, and the Time, cry out to us Go on! With a fresh heart, a light step, and hopeful courage, we begin the journey.

This is Dickens at his most pompous and conceited. Unlike the hero in fairy tales of old, constrained by dissenting voices, he imagines the public sustaining him, urging him on in his quest. Yet for all this public support, he finds it hard to leave his old private self behind, since, amid the stones and trees, Dickens has buried allusions to As You Like It, in whose pastoral people find themselves after fleeing the horrors of the public world. Sweet, indeed, are the uses of adversity: Duke Senior now lives a newly private existence, and, ‘exempt from public haunt, / Finds tongues in trees, books in the running brooks, / Sermons in stones, and good in every thing’. A noble ideal, to seek to discover good in everything, and one that Dickens, like Mr Mould in Martin Chuzzlewit,²² sought to live by; nevertheless, what was more valuable to him than the final product – goodness – was the continuing process of discovery.

During the 1850s, that sheer act of continuation was a necessary thing not simply to Dickens’s journalistic activities; it was also, paradoxically, a means of grounding himself. Worn out by work and worry, he was curiously rootless; a nomad convinced that somewhere – London, Dover, Folkestone, Calais, Boulogne, Paris – may be the ideal place. ‘If I couldn’t walk fast and far, I should just explode and perish,’ he wrote to Forster in 1854; and Dickens’s greatest journalism would not exist were it not for those trips he made not only between Britain and the Continent, but also between the past and the present; fiction and fact; the fancy and the reality. Household Words was, he told Leigh Hunt in January 1855, a ‘great humming top… always going round with the weeks, and murmuring “Attend to me” ’. And though he did attend to this toy, whipping his contributors, he was always on the move with a multitude of extra ventures: writing novels, speeches, plays; managing charities; organizing expeditions; giving readings; undertaking wanderings. As he oscillated between one activity and the next, it’s not surprising that there is such a correspondence between his novels and his journalism at the time. Many of his most successful characters emerge, albeit fleetingly, in newsprint: Julia Mills, Dora’s friend in David Copperfield, surfaces in ‘Our Watering-Place’; Mrs Gamp, the chaotic umbrella-wielding nurse in Martin Chuzzlewit, turns up in ‘Please to Leave Your Umbrella’; and Mrs Pipchin, the proprietress of the children’s boarding-house in Brighton in Dombey and Son, makes an unwelcome reappearance in ‘New Year’s Day’. As Humphry House has suggested: ‘The best commentaries on many parts of his novels are his own articles and short stories, and articles and stories he supervised as editor.’²³ Hence, ‘Pet Prisoners’, Dickens’s polemical piece against the ‘separate system’ of prison discipline, is recalled in ch. 61 of David Copperfield, which shows Uriah Heep and Littimer as repentant inmates at Pentonville. Several commentators have shown how material gathered in Preston for ‘On Strike’ was used in Hard Times, which began in Household Words two months later in April 1854; and on 30 August 1856, by which time Little Dorrit was nine months old, Dickens published ‘Nobody, Somebody and Everybody’, an article written in the same ironic vein as the most topical chapters of the novel originally envisaged as ‘Nobody’s Fault’.²⁴

On 13 December 1856, he described to an actor friend, W. C. Macready, how he was balancing ‘Golden Marys [the special Christmas issue of Household Words for 1856], Little Dorrits, Household Wordses’ while at the same time organizing a private performance.

Calm amidst the wrack, your aged friend glides away on the Dorrit stream, forgetting the uproar for a stretch of hours, refreshes himself with a ten or twelve miles’ walk – pitches head-foremost into foaming rehearsals – placidly emerges for Editorial purposes – smokes over buckets of distemper with Mr Stanfield aforesaid – again calmly floats upon the Dorrit waters.

He was pushing himself to the limit, but it was a necessary labour in order to keep his head above the deluge. Without the pressure, he would have sunk into the oblivion he feared; he had seen his father go under and would not allow himself the same fate. Moreover, work took his mind away from home; his marriage had long been falling apart, and in May 1858 it was finally dissolved by a formal separation. The period prior to this had been especially difficult, with the need to choose sides between the couple’s oldest friends, and the obligation – increasingly pressing – to scotch rumours of an affair with Ellen Ternan or a dalliance with his sister-in-law Georgina Hogarth; an obligation which eventually led to the extraordinary step of Dickens publishing a personal statement in Household Words (included in this selection). On 12 June 1858, the entire front page of the journal was given over to an announcement headed by the word ‘Personal’ and signed ‘Charles Dickens’, which, in oddly stilted phrases and vague allusions to ‘some domestic trouble of mine, of long-standing’, gave him an opportunity to acknowledge the separation, and quash the rumours:

By some means, arising out of wickedness, or out of folly, or out of inconceivable wild chance, or out of all three, this trouble has been made the occasion of misrepresentations, most grossly false, most monstrous, and most cruel – involving, not only me, but innocent persons dear to my heart, and innocent persons of whom I have no knowledge, if, indeed they have any existence – and so widely spread, that I doubt if one reader in a thousand will peruse these lines, by whom some touch of the breath of these slanders will not have passed, like an unwholesome air.

The ‘unwholesome air’ of the rumours was like a miasma surrounding the journal itself; and it was almost as if Dickens was seeking to move the whole affair into the sphere of sanitation and public health. He had assumed that his friends Bradbury and Evans, who published his novels, and who printed and partly owned Household Words, would also publish the notice in their comic magazine Punch. Not surprisingly, they elected not to do so, but for Dickens this betrayal was insupportable. After a reading tour in Ireland and the north of England, he broke off relations with his publishers, withdrew from the editorship of the magazine, blocked their attempts to continue with it, and, most crucially, started up another journal of his own.

The announcement of All the Year Round contained a promise to continue the policy of Household Words in offering ‘that fusion of the graces of the imagination with the realities of life, which is vital to the welfare of any community’; and like its predecessor, it provided a medium for the publication of his novels, most notably Great Expectations (1860–61). But in other respects it was a departure from the informal tone of the previous magazine, which had moved far away from his ideal. When planning Household Words in October 1849, he wrote to Forster:

Now to bind all [the magazine] together, and to get a character established as it were which any of the writers may maintain without difficulty, I want to suppose a certain SHADOW… in which people will be perfectly willing to believe, and which is just as mysterious and quaint enough to have a sort of charm for their imagination, while it will represent common-sense and humanity.

Years later, his new journal would offer him the opportunity to modify the idea to his own personality, as in a series of articles written between 1860 and 1868, he set himself up as ‘The Uncommercial Traveller’. The immediate inspiration for the persona was the work Dickens had undertaken in late 1859, preparing a speech for a benefit dinner for the Commercial Travellers’ Schools. He told this gathering that he had considered whether anything could be done with the word Travellers; ‘and I thought whether any fanciful analogy could be drawn between those travellers who diffuse the luxuries and necessities of existence’, and other groups of travellers actual and metaphorical. In the first essay, the character introduces himself: ‘Figuratively speaking, I travel for the great house of Human Interest Brothers, and have rather a large connexion in the fancy goods way.’ Those fancy goods – ‘the luxuries and necessities of existence’ – are manufactured out of raw materials mined, in turn, from sources familiar to any reader of Dickens: prisons; theatres; dockyards; workhouses; slums; legal chambers; recollections of childhood in Kent and London, and of journeys to the Continent. ‘Literally speaking, I am always wandering here and there from my rooms in Covent-garden, London – now about the city streets: now about the country by-roads – seeing many little things, and some great things, which because they interest me, I think may interest others.’ Despite the humility, Dickens knew he was approaching the ideal of his journalistic ambitions; that the public interest was converging with his own private fancies.

As perhaps befits their origin in the Shadow, these late essays are darker, but show the obsession with death and mortality that he had added, seemingly incidentally, to Morley’s copy, and which he had sought to expunge from ‘Lying Awake’. In ‘Travelling Abroad’, memories of journeyings on the Continent, the narrator notes that whenever he is in Paris he is ‘dragged by invisible force into the Morgue’. That verb has a peculiar force, since one of the corpses on view, as in the earlier piece, is that of a drowned man, this one, no doubt, dragged from the Seine. A few paragraphs later, the traveller takes a river bath, but while relaxing in the water is ‘seized with an unreasonable idea that the large dark body was floating straight at me’, and so flees in terror. ‘Some Recollections of Mortality’ features yet another visit to this ‘obscene little Morgue, slinking on the brink of the river’ to see a newly recovered body carried in an airy procession: ‘Was it river, pistol, knife, love, gambling, robbery, hatred, how many stabs, how many bullets, fresh or decomposed, suicide or murder?’ These are the staples of what a journalist might call human interest, that angle of inquiry which secures a continued readership. Unfortunately, the old man has died after being struck by falling masonry, and since this is ‘not much’ of a story, it requires embellishment:

He was calm of feature and undisfigured, as he lay on his back – having been struck upon the hinder part of his head, and thrown forward – and something like a tear or two had started from the closed eyes, and lay wet upon the face. The uncommercial interest, sated at a glance, directed itself upon the striving crowd on either side and behind.

That ‘something like’ announces the dissimulation, since he wished the tears to be river water dripping from his eyes; but in reporting the detail, the fancy is ‘sated at a glance’. He finds it difficult to look any longer at the corpse; for now, the real interest is not in the body, but in others’ reactions to it.

‘Night Walks’ is the most extraordinary of these essays, and again seems to recall ‘Lying Awake’. The narrator, unable to sleep, undertakes a nightmare tour of London, now inhabited by the ‘enormous hosts of dead [who] if they were raised while the living slept, there would not be the space of a pin’s point in all the streets and ways for the living to come out into’. Imagining himself into a state of ‘houselessness’, the traveller returns once again to familiar haunts: Waterloo Bridge from whose parapets the suicides jump, as was reported in the Household Words piece ‘Down With the Tide’; the theatres of Covent Garden, visited in ‘Where We Stopped Growing’; Newgate Prison, an account of which appeared in Sketches by Boz; and Bethlehem Hospital for the Insane, where the heart of the essay emerges:

And the fancy was this: Are not the sane and the insane equal at night as the sane lie a dreaming? Are not all of us outside this hospital, who dream, more or less in the condition of those inside it, every night of our lives?

That ‘more or less’, however, announces the gap between liberty and limitation, fancy and fact; and it’s a gap just wide enough for a writer like Dickens to step through. This is what the discipline of occasional journalism offered him in the last twenty years of his life: the private freedom to record the increasingly pressing shapes of his most fanciful visions, which coexisted with the compulsion to touch the realities which his novels could only reach out towards. This doubleness explains the extraordinary encounter with a beggar, which forms the climax of ‘Night Walks’:

The creature was like a beetle-browed hair-lipped youth of twenty, and it had a loose bundle of rags on, which it held together with one of its hands. It shivered from head to foot, and its teeth chattered, and as it stared at me – persecutor, devil, ghost, whatever it thought me – it made with its whining mouth as if it were snapping at me like a worried dog. Intending to give this ugly object money, I put out my hand to stay it – for it recoiled as it whined and snapped – and laid my hand upon its shoulder. Instantly, it twisted out of its garment, like the young man in the New Testament, and left me standing alone with its rags in my hands.

In the first place, the peculiarity of this lies in the impersonal objectivity of the pronouns; this creature is subhuman (‘beetle-browed’, ‘a worried dog’, an ‘ugly object’), and unworthy of the simplest humane grammatical distinction. However, after the attempt to offer money fails, the tone changes markedly, with the comparison with the young man in the New Testament. Dickens probably has in mind Mark 14: 51–2, where the young acolyte of Jesus, after the men attempt an arrest, drops his linen cloth and flees, naked. In alluding in this manner, who does Dickens think he is? Hardly the ‘persecutor, devil, ghost’ he offers himself as; but possibly a reporter offering sensational revelations about the urban underworld. Most obviously, however, he fancies himself (if only momentarily) as a kind of copper; someone whose hand – whose journalistic shorthand – could reach out to apprehend and move the world around him. But, standing in the early hours of the morning ‘alone with its rags in my hands’, Dickens must have realized that, at times, even his imagination was not potent enough to capture the human body breathing beneath the tattered fabric; at times even his inexhaustibility could be exhausted.