Charles Dickens & the Mid-Victorian Press, 1850-1870

With the phenomenally popular weekly magazines Household Words and All the Year Round, Charles Dickens effectively re-invented periodical literature in the nineteenth century. Already enjoying huge stature as a world-famous author, Dickens was often the principal contributor of the journals that carried the novels serialized within them. As, by his own term, the“conductor” of the weekly magazines, he was able to direct the gaze of his readership, easily eliding fiction and non-fiction, to those things that most concerned him – poverty, crime, education, public health, women, and social welfare and reform. This collection of new essays from a rich variety of contributors, explores the journalism and fiction in Household Words and All Year Round and their relationship to the wider publishing world. The essays were presented at the Dickens Journals Online Conference launched in March 2012.