Commodity Culture in Dickens's Household Words

The Social Life of Goods

Catherine Waters

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2016
• Print ISBN:
  9780754655787
• eBook ISBN:
  9781351950411
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: Literary Criticism
• Index: Literature

In 1850, Charles Dickens founded Household Words, a weekly miscellany intended to instruct and entertain an ever-widening middle-class readership. Published in the decade following the Great Exhibition of 1851, the journal appeared at a key moment in the emergence of commodity culture in Victorian England. Alongside the more well-known fiction that appeared in its pages, Dickens filled Household Words with articles about various commodities-articles that raise wider questions about how far society should go in permitting people to buy and sell goods and services: in other words, how far the laissez-faire market should extend. At the same time, Household Words was itself a commodity. With marketability clearly in view, Dickens required articles for his journal to be 'imaginative,' employing a style that critics ever since have too readily dismissed as mere mannerism. Locating the journal and its distinctive handling of non-fictional prose in relation to other contemporary periodicals and forms of print culture, this book demonstrates the role that Household Words in particular, and the Victorian press more generally, played in responding to the developing world of commodities and their consumption at midcentury.

Chapter 1
Introduction

On 1 June 1850, two months after the appearance of its first number, Household Words published an article by its sub-editor, W.H. Wills, marvelling at the growing 'Appetite for News.'¹ Wills begins by describing the eagerness with which the 'city clerk emerging through folding doors from bed to sitting-room, though thirsting for tea, and hungering for toast, darts upon that morning's journal,' while' [e]xactly at the same hour, his master, the M.P., crosses the hall of his mansion,' enters the breakfast-parlour and 'fixes his eye on the fender, where he knows his favourite damp sheet will be hung up to dry.' Elsewhere, in like fashion, the 'oppressed farmer' cannot 'handle the massive spoon for his first sip out of his sèvres cup till he has read of ruin in the "Herald" or "Standard."' and the 'financial reformer' cannot 'know breakfast-table happiness till he has digested the "Daily News," or skimmed the "Express."'² Wills's description of these avid journal readers captures the 'mass ceremony' of simultaneous consumption identified by Benedict Anderson as a key factor forming the imagined community, across a range of social classes, that is the hallmark of modern national identity.³ The extent of the nation's immense appetite for news can be gauged, Wills writes, not only in the circulation figures suggested by the number of 'newspaper stamps which were issued in 1848 (the latest year of which a return has been made),' but in the 'printed surface' sent forth by the press, which amounted 'in twelve months to 349,308,000 superficial feet' in daily papers alone: 'If to these are added all the papers printed weekly and fortnightly in London and the provinces, the whole amounts to 1,446,150,000 square feet of printed surface, which was, in 1849, placed before the comprehensive vision of John Bull.'⁴ Not content with the abstract economic measure provided by the stamp tax, Wills's mind-boggling statistics regarding the material substance of the periodical press emphasize its identity as a thing, as well as a commodity. They illustrate the peculiar focus upon matter, and its making into consumable objects, that characterizes Household Words's engagement with mid-Victorian commodity culture.

Founded and 'Conducted' by Dickens from 1 March 1850 to 28 May 1859, Household Words was a weekly miscellany, costing twopence, which aimed to 'instruct' and 'entertain' its middle-class readers, as well as helping 'in the discussion of the most important social questions of the time.'⁵ The choice of the title 'Conductor' is singular. While the OED records two examples of its use for the management of a journal—in 1799 and 1843—both of these usages are plural, and Dickens's choice of this term when 'Editor' might more automatically suggest itself indicates not only his strong hand in the editorial selection process, but his influence upon the writing of his contributors, especially in relation to the journal's non-fiction prose. He plays upon the artistic role of a music conductor: 'the director of an orchestra or chorus, who indicates to the performers the rhythm, expression etc. of the music by motions of a baton or the hands' (OED 6.). According to Percy Fitzgerald, the youngest amongst the journal's established group of contributors, '"Conducting" was the fitting word, for, like the manager of a theatre, [Dickens] had to find and direct suitable men and characters, study his public, play upon their feelings, follow and divine their humours, amuse and divert by the agency of others, and, when that failed him, by his own.'⁶ In keeping with mid-century periodical convention contributions were generally unsigned; but no effort was made to keep authorship secret and, as a result of the invaluable work of Anne Lohrli on the Household Words Office Book (to which this study is enormously indebted), most contributors have been identified.

Dickens positioned his new venture in the periodical market carefully, employing a novel combination of cheapness of form and price with respectability of content. As he had written to Forster of his plans as early as 1846. 'it should be something with a marked and distinctive and obvious difference, in its design, from any other existing periodical.'⁷ Distinguishing Household Words from the villainous fare of the penny bloods on the one hand, and such 'cast iron and utilitarian' competitors as Chambers's Edinburgh Journal⁸ on the other, he aimed to raise the quality of the cheap press with his serialization of original fiction, poetry and informational articles on a wide range of topics. As Fitzgerald later observed, ' [i]t is only when contrasting Household Words with its penny or three-halfpenny contemporaries that we see at once what a new and original thing it was'⁹; for as well as the high literary quality of its fiction—contributed by some of the most celebrated authors of the day—the journal was most significantly distinguished by its imaginative non-fiction prose, which blurred the boundary between journalism and literature with cultural effects that have yet to be properly recognized, as we shall see.

Published in the decade of the Great Exhibition of 1851, Household Words appeared at a key moment in the emergence of commodity culture in Victorian England. As Thomas Richards, Andrew Miller and others have argued, the Great Exhibition marked a watershed in the development of a specifically capitalist form of representation centring upon the spectacle of the commodity.¹⁰ It was, says Richards, 'the first outburst of the phantasmagoria of commodity culture. It inaugurated a way of seeing things that marked indelibly the cultural and commercial life of Victorian England.'¹¹ While the 'birth of consumer society' has been located by historians Neil McKendrick, John Brewer and J.H. Plumb in eighteenth-century Britain and its evidence of 'a convulsion of getting and spending,'¹² these processes were also part of an ongoing development to which new mass production techniques, and changes in retail practices and advertising, contributed as the capitalist economy matured. By the middle of the nineteenth century, ordinary men and women were experiencing the pleasures and pains of consumer choice on a scale hitherto unknown. The widening of this new class of potential purchasers of non-essential goods is one of the features that distinguishes commodity culture in mid-Victorian Britain from its eighteenth-century origins. As Thad Logan argues, the bourgeois home became crowded with newly mass-produced objects that were 'not primarily functional,' but rather participated 'in a decorative semiotic economy.'¹³ What you owned said something not only about your disposable income, but about who you were, as the possibility of 'communicating status or other forms of social relationship through commodities was no longer restricted to the upper classes.'¹⁴

Dickens's fictional interest in the objectification and commodification of subjects, and his animation of objects which seem, in his novels, to take on a life of their own, have long been recognized by critics. In her influential analysis of the English novel's form and function in 1953, Dorothy Van Ghent identified Dickens's characteristic 'transposition of attributes'—between, for example, Mrs Joe and her apron stuck all over with pins, or Mr Jaggers and his huge forefinger—as symptomatic of a world in which 'the qualities of things and people were reversed': 'people were becoming things, and things ... were becoming more important than people.'¹⁵ Critics since have often noted Dickens's use of clothing, appurtenances, gestures, or verbal tics to establish character, and his preoccupation with animism, anthropomorphism, and reification as part of this process. J. Hillis Miller, for example, argues that the 'metonymic reciprocity between a person and his surroundings, his clothes, furniture, house, and so on is the basis for the metaphorical substitutions so frequent in Dickens's fiction.'¹⁶ Herbert Sussman and Gerhard Joseph argue for the widespread acceptance 'that an interchange between animate human subject and inanimate object characterizes his world view.'¹⁷ But as Murray Roston has shown the development of commodity culture at mid-century may provide a more specific context for examining the interest of Dickens and his contemporaries in the changing relationship between people and things.¹⁸ In Capital, Marx famously describes the process of reification by which commodities become 'social things': the commodity's fetishization consists in the process of mystification by which the social character of men's labour appears to them as a relation between the products of their labour. Here we see an inversion in the 'natural' relation between people and things, as objects acquire a life of their own and come to dominate those who produce them. As Roston has argued, the principle of demonic animism in Dickens's fiction can be related to the inception of a commodity culture dependent upon the taste of the consumer rather than the producer: 'It is, I suggest, that new quality of the age which Dickens grasped so shrewdly and incorporated into his fiction as a distinctive literary mode, seeing within the proprietary selection of goods a method of differentiating character.'¹⁹ Thus, Dickens employs the possessions, homes, and habiliments of his characters 'as animated external emblems of their inner being.'²⁰

The critical recognition of Dickens's peculiar treatment of subject-object relations in his fiction has fed into a growing interest in Victorian material culture over the last decade or so.²¹ These studies have focussed upon the nineteenth-century novel and the welter of consumer goods through which its effects of realism are generated. In the most recent of them, Elaine Freedgood presents a compelling argument for the existence of 'thing culture,' a form of object relations that preceded commodity culture and was not necessarily characterized by the processes of abstraction, alienation and spectacularization associated with the commodity form.²² Freedgood distinguishes between metaphoric and metonymic modes of reading the things of the Victorian novel in order to restore attention to their materiality, and to uncover the fugitive meanings hidden within such hitherto unnoticed objects as calico curtains in Mary Barton, or 'Negro head' tobacco in Great Expectations. Arguing against the critical tendency to 'conflate things and commodities,'²³ she works to distinguish their 'objectness' from the abstractness of their exchange value, noting that 'although we are all commodity fetishists now, and our literary criticism often reflects this problem, our nineteenth-century forebears may well have maintained a more complex relat...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Dedication
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• General Editors' Preface
• Acknowledgements
• 1 Introduction
• 2 Advertising Fictions
• 3 The Genuine Article, the Sham, and the Problem of Authenticity
• 4 'The Key of the Street'
• 5 'Men Made by Machinery'
• 6 Worldly Goods
• 7 'Trading in Death'
• 8 'Fashion in Undress'
• Bibliography
• Index