The Novelist as Journalist in Hard Times, 1850–7

Abstract

During the time in which he was engaged in writing about David Copperfield’s authorial self-fashioning, Dickens was also attempting to bring to fruition a scheme which had long formed part of his own authorial self-conception — the scheme to ‘conduct’ a periodical in which he ‘could speak personally’ to the readers of his novels.¹ At the end of March 1850, some eight months before Copperfield finished its run, the first number of Dickens’s magazine Household Words appeared. From this point on, as Peter Ackroyd points out, Dickens was to engage for the rest of his life ‘in laboured and often difficult editorial work, day by day, week by week, correcting the articles of others, cutting and reshaping, entitling, collaborating with other writers, corresponding, dealing with printers and distributors’ (Ackroyd, 622). Of course, as I have emphasized in earlier chapters, Dickens began his writing life as a journalist, working for daily and weekly newspapers and periodical miscellanies of various kinds. He had maintained his contact with the newspaper and periodical press after the success of Pickwick writing reviews for The Examiner between 1837 and 1843, and becoming founding editor of the Daily News in 1846 (although he resigned after only seventeen issues).

To the wholesome training of severe newspaper-work, when I was a very young man, I constantly refer my first successes.

Dickens, quoted in Life, I: 51