Dickens, Journalism, Music

'Household Words' and 'All The Year Round'

Robert Terrell Bledsoe

• Publisher: Continuum
• Year: 2012
• Print ISBN:
  9781472526878
• Edition: 1
• eBook ISBN:
  9781441130990
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: English Literary Criticism
• Index: Literature

Dickens, Journalism, Music presents the first full analysis of the articles on music published in the two journals conducted by Charles Dickens, Household Words and its successor, All the Year Round. Robert Bledsoe examines the editorial influence of Dickens on articles written by a range of writers and what it reveals about his own developing attitude to music and its social role in parks, community singing groups, music halls and on the streets. The book also looks at the difference between the two journals and how the greater coverage of classical music and opera in All the Year Round reflects the increasing importance of music to Dickens in his later life.

Chapter 1

Household Words: 1850–1859

I Dickens Conducts “The General Improvement of Our Social Condition”

Journalists before Dickens report that good music improves the working class. George Hogarth observed in 1835 that there were provincial choral societies performing Handel’s oratorios in the 1830s, stating that the “influence” of music on the working class performers and audience members “is of the most salutary kind” (Musical History, 431). Hogarth cites Montesquieu’s Spirit of the Laws approvingly: “Music is the only one of all the arts which does not corrupt the mind” (Musical History, 432).¹ Instrumental music, at any rate, is unlikely to corrupt, although vocal music may, given the right words (or the wrong words). The “salutary” influence of music supports general social improvement. By the middle of the century, as Dave Russell observes, “belief in music’s efficacy as a social healer had taken deep root” (Popular Music in England, 26). Dickens’s editorial goals meshed smoothly with this belief. Singing classes, street music, organ-playing, organ-grinding, music made by foreigners, and music made at home—these are not only potentially entertaining but also conducive to the improvement of public order promoted by Dickens as the editor of Household Words (HW).²

Late in December 1849, Dickens’s publishers, Bradbury and Evans, distributed a handbill announcing plans for publishing a “Weekly Miscellany of General Literature, Conducted by Mr. Charles Dickens,” a miscellany that had a mission before it had a name: it would be “[d]esigned for the Entertainment and Instruction of all classes of readers and to help in the discussion of the most important social questions of the time” (Stone, Uncollected Writings, 1:18 plate 4). Asking Elizabeth Gaskell to help his enterprise, Dickens wrote to her on January 31, 1850, stating that its purpose was to be “the raising up of those that are down, and the general improvement of our social condition” (Pilgrim Letters, 6:22).

At first, he conceived of a journal with a persona: a kind of benevolent Shadow, commenting on the events of the day, which his readers would come to perceive as a “new thing: a sort of previously unthought of Power going around” (Pilgrim Letters, 5: 623). He told Forster that he imagined that when something happened, his readers would ask themselves: “What will the Shadow say about this, I wonder? What will the Shadow say about that? Is the Shadow here?” (Letters 5: 623). If properly conceived, he thought, the concept of the Shadow could be a central image for the journal because it was a kind of “creature. . . which people will be perfectly willing to believe, and which is just mysterious and quaint enough to have a sort of charm for their imagination, while it will represent common-sense and humanity.” And it was to be “everyone’s inseparable companion” (5: 623). In G. A. Sala’s “Shadows,” the pretender, Charles Stuart, in old age, is at the opera, listening to a performance of Gluck’s Orfeo at an unnamed Italian theatre. As the old man listens to Orpheus’s “sublime lament”—“Che farò senza Euridice”—the narrator wonders whether music has “touched some cracked chord of the cracked lyre” and whether “the strains he has heard tonight [have] some mysterious connection (as only music can have) with his youth” (HW, vol. 5, July 24, 1852: 451. Italics added). Music and memory form the connection between an old man and his younger self, his double. The concept of the Shadow shadowing readily lends itself to mirroring and doubling, central elements of Dickens’s fictional imagination. It is therefore easy to understand its appeal to his imagination as an editor. As Sala puts it, “most of us have our Doubles” (450).

Forster’s response to Dickens’s enthusiasm for shadowing was not encouraging: the plan was not “practicable,” he maintained. The shadow did not make it to the title of the journal; nevertheless, Anne Lohrli’s title index lists 10 “shadows” articles in Household Words (Lohrli, 506). The shadow’s spirit is also at work in essays by the “Roving Englishman” and, in All The Year Round, “Our Eye-Witness.”

Dickens let Forster know what titles he was considering and rejecting. There were many candidates.³ He told Forster he had settled on Household Words, and on the 4th of February, he mentioned the title proudly to Angela Burdett-Coutts (Pilgrim Letters, 6:28). A few weeks later, the first issue appeared. Dated Saturday March 30, 1850, its masthead bore the title in large print: Household Words. A Weekly Journal. Conducted by Charles Dickens. Above the title came the epigraph from Henry V: “‘Familiar in their Mouths as Household Words’—Shakespeare.” Below the title, every week, was printed the issue number. Then came the official issue date, which was always Saturday, although it was really available for sale the preceding Wednesday, and finally the price: 2d (two pence), half a penny more than Chambers’s. There were double columns on 24 easy-to-read pages, and that length held for most of the 479 issues published, with 19 exceptions that contained only 20 pages (Lohrli, 19 note 52).

Forster tells us, approvingly, that the journal as finally conceived was exactly what had been promised in the handbill in December. In a letter to Angela Burdett-Coutts, Dickens wrote that part of the subtitle of the “new Miscellany” would state that the publication was “designed for the instruction and entertainment of all classes” (Pilgrim Letters, 6:28). The phrase “all classes” appears to mean “two classes”: the upper half and the lower half.

Both halves of the population should be respectable. It is true that Dickens the novelist satirizes the blush-prone respectability of the “young person” as an inconvenient “institution” (notably in Our Mutual Friend, Book 1, chapter 11, “Podsnappery”). He also laughs at Mrs. Grundy: in The Mystery of Edwin Drood, Miss Twinkleton’s squeamish self-censorship causes her when reading aloud to interpolate “passages in praise of female celibacy” where the text provides love scenes. Nevertheless, Dickens’s novels accommodate the requirements of squeamish readers, as do his journals.

In the first issue of Household Words, March 30, 1850, Dickens addresses his readers directly about the journal’s concerns and goals. Like Wordsworth, (“Bliss was it in that dawn to be alive”), Dickens affirms that he is “thankful for the privilege of living in this summer-dawn of time.” A goal of the new journal will be to promote class harmony and to “bring the greater and the lesser in degree, together, . . . and mutually dispose them to a better acquaintance and a kinder understanding” of one another (“Preliminary Word,” 1). Like David Copperfield, who calls attention to his own highly developed sense of responsibility by being “thoroughly in earnest” (DC, chapter 42), Dickens assures readers that he understands “the great responsibility of such a privilege.” He too enters on his task “in an earnest spirit” (“A Preliminary Word,” HW, vol. 1, March 30, 1850: 1–2).

As the journal’s conductor, Dickens “took immense pains. . . with numbers in which he had written nothing.” Forster comments on “the strong feeling of personal responsibility” Dickens shows in his role of editor (Forster, Life, Book 11, chapter 3). From that perspective, the phrase at the top of each two-page spread of Household Words—“conducted by Charles Dickens”—is a striking aspect of Dickens’s approach to editorship. Dickens conducts the players in a journalistic orchestra who, under Dickens’s direction, perform “home music” (one of the titles Dickens considered for the journal before settling on Household Words). “Conducted by” was an apt phrase, but it was not a new one: for years, Chambers’s Edinburgh Journal had been announcing itself as “conducted by William and Robert Chambers.”⁴

“Conductor” Dickens takes the “miscellaneous” format and creates what John Drew terms “an elaborate vision of how a multi-authored journal might project a powerful single identity into the public sphere” (Dickens the Journalist, 106). With few exceptions, articles are anonymous. Consistently, the magazine’s articles advocate amelioration, improvement, and reform. Dickens publishes articles that criticize spiritualism, ongoing social problems, and parliamentary hot air.⁵ Forster uses the word “radical” several times to describe Dickens in the 1840s. George Orwell wrote that his was “radicalism of the vaguest kind,” adding “and yet, one always knows that it is there” (Dickens, Dali, and Others). After Household Words was well under way, Walter Bagehot remarked that Dickens the journalist “describes London like a special correspondent for posterity.” Bagehot, however, does not admire Dickens’s view of social evils. Along with those he has taught to be his “parrot-like imitators,” Dickens is an advocate of “sentimental radicalism” and is “utterly deficient in the faculty of reasoning.” (National Review, 7 [October 1858]: 458–86).

The desire for a single “conductor’s” identity can be seen in the way Dickens expresses himself when he approaches potential contributors. For example, Dickens writes to Elizabeth Gaskell on January 31, 1850, two months before the first issue appeared, asking her to consider writing for the new journal. He reaches out to her in flattering terms, asking for “a short tale, or any number of tales,” assuring her that her contributions would both “attract attention and do good” (Pilgrim Letters, 6:22) and explaining that all contributions would be published anonymously, even his own. That way the pieces in each issue taken as a whole “will seem to express the general mind and purpose of the Journal.”

Dickens the conductor suppresses his own ego in some interesting ways. An example is his reaction to the passage in Gaskell’s Cranford, where Captain Brown is killed by “them nasty cruel railroads.” As Gaskell originally wrote the passage, just before the accident, Captain Brown was reading the latest number of Pickwick. Dickens changed that to “the gallant gentleman was deeply engaged in the perusal of Hood’s Poems, which he had just received” (“Our Society at Cranford,” HW, vol. 4, Dec. 13, 1851: 271, 272). “With my name on every page of Household Words,” Dickens explains modestly, “there would be—or at least I should feel—an impropriety in so mentioning myself” (Pilgrim Letters, 6:548–9). When Cranford was published in volume form, Gaskell changed her text back to “a number of ‘Pickwick.’”

Dickens enjoyed establishing this policy more than Gaskell enjoyed having her work altered because of it. Some see Dickens as being domineering to women contributors in particular. Others see his editorial interventions as politely hidden manifestations of more general rivalry with other authors (or competitors).⁶ To counter the view of Dickens’s editorship as a series of acts of aggression, we have testimony that he was generous and nurturing. For example, Eliza Lynn Linton writes that he was “absolutely free from the petty vice of jealousy” in his collaborations with Wilkie Collins, though she confirms that “the hand of the master was ubiquitous and omnipotent” (My Literary Life, 72). In some cases, authors’ objections to Dickens’s editorial changes may reflect their touchiness or their professional naiveté. Young Henry Morley, for example, found his articles “frequently altered” (Solly, Morley, 154). Mostly he “suffered in silence” because “Mr. Wills had told him how they were bothered by contributors, especially ladies, objecting to alteration” (Solly, 161). Morley’s biographer regards his silent grumbling as a passing phase: “At a later date he would probably have admitted there was more reason for the prunings and alterations made in his Household Words papers than he now saw” (Solly, 163).

At times, some of the contributors seem to be carrying on a conversation with the Chief and his novels, while the Chief converses with Himself. Editorial meddling never stops. The early ban on references to Dickens on grounds of “impropriety,” however, is modified, as Lohrli shows (“With My Name on Every Page”). For example, in 1865, All The Year Round reminds readers that “there is a passage in an obscure work of fiction called Hard Times” that is “almost prophetic” (“Election Time,” vol. 13, July 22, 1865: 607) and quotes a full paragraph from Book 2, chapter 2 satirizing James Harthouse’s elder brother.⁷ As early as 1908, B. W. Matz called attention to Dickens’s practice:

This introduction of the characters from his own books into his articles frequently occurs. . . . The Barnacle family, and the Circumlocution Office; Lady Dedlock, Cousin Feenix, and both Mr. and Mrs. Gamp furnish more than one comment, as does also Mrs. Harris, the famous friend of the latter.

He frequently brings in his Boodles, Doodles, Coodles; his Cobbs, Dobbs; his Bolters, Colters, Jolters, &c, an effect he used in Little Dorrit. (Fortnightly Review, May 1: 831)

In the first volume of Household Words, W. H. Wills quotes F. K. Hunt’s Fourth Estate : “Where Journals are numerous, the people have power, intelligence, and wealth; where Journals are few, the many are in reality mere slaves” (“The Appetite for News” HW, vol. 1, June 1, 1850: 240). Dickens wanted to “help one half of the world really to know how the other half lived” (Morley, Of English Literature, 372). In Twice Round The Clock, G. S. Sala asserts vehemently that “public amusements—indoor and outdoor amusements—are eminently conducive to public morals, and to the liberty and happiness of the people. Music, dancing, and dramatic representations, free from grossness and turbulence” must be encouraged (375). The mission is a journalistic version of Horace’s ars poetica. Produce a journal that is both dulce and utile. Make it sweet (and so attract readers) and make it useful (and so improve them).

As we have noted, Dickens explained in the “Preliminary Word” in the first issue: “one main object of our Household Words” is “to bring the greater and the lesser in degree, together, upon that wide field, and mutually dispose them to a better acquaintance and a kinder understanding” (HW, March 30, 1850: 1). Household Words asserts Dickens’s social concern for virtue not only in the “Preliminary Word” but also in the tribute to the memory of Wordsworth by William Weir later in the first volume (“William Wordsworth,” HW, May 25, 1850: 210–213). Weir quotes lines from The Excursion, “the greatest of his works” (212). Without virtue there is no order, Wordsworth reminds us. Weir concludes that Wordsworth’s lines “are indeed worthy to become Household words:”

The discipline of slavery is unknown

Amongst us—hence the more do we require

The discipline of virtue; order else

Cannot subsist, nor confid...

Table of contents

• Cover-Page
• Half-Title
• Continuum Studies
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• Acknowledgements
• Abbreviations
• Introduction
• Chapter 1: Household Words : 1850–1859
• Chapter 2: All The Year Round : 1859–1870
• Chapter 3: Chorley's World and All The Year Round
• Chapter 4: Music and Friendship
• Epilogue
• Notes
• Appendix
• Works Cited
• Index