Carly Jones on Household Words

A response to Shu-Fang Lai’s article, ‘Fact or Fancy: What Can We Learn about Dickens from his Periodicals "Household Words" and "All the Year Round"?’

The foundation of Shu-Fang Lai’s article derives from a comment that one of Dickens’ friends made about the periodicals, claiming that Dickens put “himself, his thoughts, feelings and inspirations into each column.” In his article, Shu-Fang Lai questions the accuracy of this comment and after claiming that Dickens’ complete supervision over the periodical “defies common sense,” he underlines Dickens’ reliance in his sub-editor, William Henry Wills. Lai looks at primary sources in the form of letters to highlight the communication occurring between the sub-editor and Dickens whilst he was away with his family or busy with amateur theatricals. These letter confirm that Dickens wasn’t always able to oversee his periodicals before they were published as Will asserts that when the periodical, “has had the benefit of your revision, the touches you have given to it have improved it to a degree that seems to me marvellous.”

Shu Fag Lai continues to assert that Wills had a huge input in the content of Household Words and uses Lehmann’s (a member of staff from the satirical periodical Punch,) declaration that Wills was Dickens’ “alter ego” and Dickens himself even referred to Will as his “other self.” After discussing Wills’ input concerning content, Lai turns to describe the importance of style in Household Words along with the importance that the periodical’s demographic included the working class. Lai interestingly underlines that Dickens couldn’t get all his contributors to write in the way that he wished them to, that is without pretention, Latin and complicated language. An anonymous article, “Dr. Browns ‘Fallen Leaves’” is given as an example of someone who only makes one contribution to Household Words, presumably as his contribution fallen did not fit what Dickens’ wanted.

On a positive note, Lai’s article provides premises for an individual’s more in depth research on the editors input to the periodicals. It would also be interesting to research how closely the topics and style used in the articles, written by Dickens and other contributors, influence the serialised stories. One prime example is Dickens’s article ‘On Strike’ (published 11 February 1854) which seemingly influenced the content of Elizabeth Gaskell’s serialized novel, North and South. It seems in this article that her fictional strike at Milton is based on the real strike at Preston that Dickens discusses in his ‘On Strike’ article. Lai’s title asks, ‘what can we learn from Dickens?’ It however, seems to me that Lai should assert in his title that his article is concerned with Dickens’ position as editor of Household Words and not Dickens as a person.