These Times of Ours, 1858–70

Abstract

Dickens’s career as a novelist and journalist took another turn with the collapse of his marriage in 1858, when he severed his long-standing connection with Bradbury and Evans. This firm had printed all of Dickens’s books from Pickwick onwards, and had published all of his novels from the mid-1840s. They were also the publishers of his periodical Household Words. The break came when Bradbury and Evans refused to reprint in Punch (another of their periodical titles) the extraordinary public announcement of his innocence of marital wrongdoing which Dickens had issued in Household Words on 12 June 1858, in an attempt to silence harmful rumours about his personal circumstances, including suggestions that he had left his wife for his sister-in-law, Georgina Hogarth. All the Year Round was launched as the successor to Household Words in April 1859, carrying much the same weekly mix of entertainment, instruction and topical journalism as before. The announcement of the new periodical affirmed its editor’s continuing commitment to ‘that fusion of the graces of the imagination with the realities of life, which is vital to the welfare of any community’.