Periodicals, Journalism and the Literary Essay

Abstract

The further one goes in exploring Dickens’s professional career, the clearer it becomes that he was a very unusual kind of creative artist. Many major figures in English literature have had occupations and interests outside of literature, either from necessity or choice. T. S. Eliot’s work as a banker and, later, his long involvement with the publishing house of Faber & Faber are well known, and biographies of Anthony Trollope chronicle in exhaustive detail his full-time commitment to a civil service career in the Post Office as well as his consuming passion for fox-hunting. A man capable of persuading the postal authorities of his day to introduce the pillar box for posting letters is clearly a force to be reckoned with. However, the range and depth of Dickens’s extra-literary activities place him in a unique category. It is hard to say that any of these interests went deeper than another, apart from novel writing, but none exceeded his attachment to periodical journalism, for which his fascination never waned. The major purpose of this chapter will be to explore, and to explain, Dickens’s engagement with this area.