never mine.
His enthusiasm for editorship
was undimmed, however; less than two
months later, he embarked upon a new
project. He approached the publishers
Chapman and Hall proposing a new
weekly periodical, Master Humphrey's
Clock. The publishers were to put up all
capital and to bear all costs, but
Dickens hoped for unrestricted editorial
control: he stipulated "that the contents
of every number [be] as much under
my control, and subject to as little
interference as those of a number of
Pickwick or Nickleby10. In other words,
he wanted to bring the creative
freedom of the novelist to the business
of running a periodical.
J
Master Humphrey's Clock evinced
another particular technique -a
controlling narratorial voice or mask
(master Humphrey himself) which
disguised Dickens' identity. He was to
return to this editorial device in later
publications.
In the meantime, Dickens gave himself
over to the business of single-handedly
editing a journal. The enterprise was
not a success, the periodical swiftly
losing the pretence at miscellaneous
articles and instead being dominated by
the weekly parts of Dickens' The Old
Curiosity Shop and Barnaby Rudge.
Dickens' conception had been from the
first literary - he had written to John
Forster citing the 18th-century Spectator
as a model, and mentioning Gulliver's
Travels and the Arabian Nights. There
was something escapist in Dickens'
plans for the magazine:
symptomatically, not only was Barnaby
Rudge historical fiction, but all the short
pieces Dickens wrote were set in the
sixteenth or seventeenth centuries. For
whatever reason, Dickens was not
planning journalism that interacted
with modern society. Although sales
were good during the height of The Old
Curiosity Shop's popularity, they
dropped sharply when serialisation of
the novel ended - another indication
that the journal qua journal, stripped of
fiction, was not a popular conception.
At the completion of Barnaby Rudge, on
September 7th 1841, Dickens
discontinued publication.
He now, for the only time in his
life, had nothing to do with journalism
for an extended period. When offered
the editorship of the New Monthly in
August 1841 he declined it. "My
experience of Magazine editing..." he
wrote in explanation, "has been by no
means a pleasant one"11. This was the
time of his first visit to America, of the
American Notes and Martin Chuzzlewit.
But Dickens could not stay out of
journalism for very long. By July 1845
he was enthusiastically espousing a
plan to edit a new periodical for
Bradbury and Evans - The Cricket. It
would be "partly original partly select;
notices of books, notices of theatres,
notices of all good things, notices of all
bad ones; Carol philosophy"12. Within
weeks, Dickens had abandoned that
idea for another editorial enterprise - a
36
Customers at 186 Strand, showing copies of Master
HumphreyClock
