control was eventually to lead to its
being disbanded and replaced with All
The Year Round. Faced with public
speculation concerning the break-up of
his marriage, Dickens used the front
page of Household Words to print a
"Personal" announcement intended to
scotch rumours: that he felt able to use
his journal to air such a private and
delicate matter is in itself testimony to
the extraordinary way he regarded
Household Words as the vehicle for his
words. When the publishers Bradbury
and Evans refused to carry the same
announcement in their other magazine
Punch, Dickens set about severing all
connections with them, disbanding
Household Words (their 25% stake in
which Bradbury and Evans refused to
relinquish) and setting up his new
periodical. Stone implies that Dickens'
outrage at the treatment of his
"Personal" announcement was a pretext,
and that what Dickens in fact objected
to was the fact that his publishers had
any, even a merely putative, control
over the operation. With All The Year
Round "the last faint cloud on his
authority - a publisher with a minority
interest who might stand between him
and total freedom - had been
removed"15. Again, Dickens had
considered a variety of titles before
deciding on All The Year Round -
including Charles Dickens' Own. His
editorial policies made sure it was his
own. Even on the exhausting reading
tours which occupied so much of his
time in the latter years of his life, he
spent time reading manuscripts and
proofs. He was to remain editor until
the end of his life.
What this brief survey indicates is
Dickens' developing concern with
making his röle as editor as free from
interference as possible. Another
important strand to Dickens' conception
of himself as a journalist was his desire
for a journalistic persona or mask. This
is evident as early as Master Humphrey's
Clock, and when beginning Household
Words he returned to it. On October 7
1849 he wrote of his desire "to get a
character established as it were...l want
to suppose a certain SHADOW ...I want
to have all the correspondence
addressed to him"16. Nothing came of
this idea, but it was to reëmerge during
the life of All The Year Round as the
Uncommercial Traveller. It is almost as
if Dickens wanted a separate character,
a part of himself, to stand on one side
as the personification of his paper.
Nothing demonstrates his intense
concern for, and identification with, his
journalistic writings better than this.
2.
Several points emerge from a survey of
Dickens' career as a journalist. Not the
least important is its ubiquitous
presence in his life, not just in the
practical sense of his being continually
occupied in it, but in the aesthetic sense
of journalism's ramification for his
conception of literary art. He saw
editorship not merely as a secondary
source of income and employment, but
as cognate with literary art. In 1841 he
toyed with the notion of writing a
novel in the accepted Victorian way -
the way preferred by Trollope and
Thackeray17 - which is to say, writing
the entirety in advance and only
publishing it in weekly - or monthly -
sections when it was complete. He
quickly abandoned this plan, despite
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