Dickens as Journalist
Adam Roberts
l.
There is no major theoretical or
analytical study of Dickens as
journalist, distinct from Dickens as
novelist: the implication in most critical
discussions is that his journalism was
peripheral to the main body of his art,
useful chiefly for occasional illumina
tion of Dickens' attitudes on this or that
point. This is surprising. For Dickens,
journalism was not a peripheral
activity; it was his lifelong concern,
something fundamentally and radically
connected with his literary aesthetic.
From his first job as a reporter at the
age of nineteen1, until his death in
1870, hardly a week went by when he
was not intimately involved in journa
listic or editorial concerns. The years
1841-5 and 1846-8, when he was not
actively involved, provide the only
exceptions to this: otherwise his work
as reporter or editor occupied his whole
life. F.J.H. Darton suggests that Dickens
regarded his first attempts at fictional
creative composition as "side issues" to
his journalistic career2. Certainly, it is
possible to argue that, for Dickens, the
relationship of a journalist to his public
was the paradigm of which the novelist
and his readership provided merely a
variation. This essay seeks to
demonstrate that reading
Dickens'journalism out of context
misrepresents its fundamental
coherence. Particularly in the later
period, with the journals Household
Words and All The Year Round, Dickens
maintained an absolute, authorial
control over the total output of his
journalism. As a result, these journals
need to be thought of as unified
productions.
Dickens' journalistic career passed
through six distinct phases3, from his
first work transcribing Parliamentary
speeches to what Harry Stone has
called "what he had always yearned
for: absolute mastery of a great popular
weekly, and with that mastery the
unhampered power, day in and day
out, to extend his personal influence
into every corner of English life"4. His
beginnings were humble: after learning
shorthand specifically "with a view to
trying what I could do as a reporter"5,
he took a job on the parliamentary
journal, the Mirror of Parliament. This
first journalistic work taxed Dickens'
stamina and shorthand skills, but did
little else: "being a parliamentary
reporter meant stenography more than
creativity" as Fred Kaplan puts it6.
Dickens' dilligence at the work,
however, procured him work for a new
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