Thanks to the painstaking sleuthing of Anne Lohrli through the record of payments to contributors in the office book kept by subeditor William Henry Wills, we know precisely who wrote what over the journal's nine-year existence — and how much or little each was paid:
Taken as a whole, the Household Words were a diverse group. They included an occasional poet and novelist whose works are still acclaimed — and persons so obscure that their names appear in no biographical compilation. They included writers old and young — from veteran survivors of the Romantic Age to writers who lived well into the twentieth century. They included people of all social classes — from the factory worker to the gentleman, from the self-taught to the master of arts and the honorary doctor of laws. They included men of various professions — barristers and divines, medical men and naturalists, soldiers and sailors. They included people from most parts of the British Isles and from various parts of the Empire — India, Ceylon, Australasia, as well as an occasional foreigner — American, German, Belgian, Italian, Polish, Hungarian. They included, incidentally some ninety women contributors. [24]
These contributors included, as Lohrli explains, "some ninety women contributors" among whom we find Amelia Ann Edwards (1831-92) and Adelaide Anne Proctor (1825-64). Unfortunately, the leading female writer of the age, George Eliot, declined Dickens's invitations to contribute because she was daunted by the prospect of weekly serialisation. Noted contributors included Dickens's deputy-editor, W. H. Wills, and members of the "stable" of writers Dickens patronized, encouraged, exhorted and criticized: Dickens's close friends Sir Edward G. D. Bulwer-Lytton, Thomas Noon Talfourd, Chancy Hare Townshend, John Forster, and Wilkie Collins; two colonial journalists, John Capper and John Lang; occasional contributors of fiction, including Charles Whitehead, Henry Spicer, and Thomas Wilkinson Speight; then-popular poets Edwin Arnold, Coventry Patmore, Mary Howitt, Dora Greenell, William Cox Bennett, John Critchley Prince, Thomas Miller, Mary Jane Tomkins, Elizabeth Barrett Browning, and Adelaide Anne Procter (whose pseudonym for submissions to the magazine, "Mary Berwick," Dickens failed to penetrate), and Juliana Hepzibeth Szczepanowska, nee Scott; four journalists who had been associates of Dickens at the Daily News: Dudley Costello, Frederick Knight Hunt, Sidney Laman Blanchard, and William Blanchard Jerrold; Grenville Murray, Harriet Martineau, the Rev. James White, George Meredith, Percy Fitzgerald, Leigh Hunt, Caroline Chisholm, Sheridan Le Fanu, Richard Hengist Horne, Charles Reade, T. A. Trollope, Henry Morley, H. A. Sala, James Payn, Edmund Yates, Walter Thornbury, John Hollingshead, Elizabeth Cleghorn Gaskell, Charles Lever, Eliza Lynn Linton; and letter-writers who did not contribute directly, but whose correspondence to friends and relatives back in Britain arrived at 16 Wellington Street North "through one means or another" (Lohrli 33).
Of the established group of writers who contributed mainly non-fiction prose, some wrote on subjects on which they were well informed by reason of their background, as Capper on Ceylon and India, Lang on India, Wrefordon Italy. Some wrote on subjects related to their experience and professionaltraining: Costello had been in the army, Hannay in the navy; Hunt and Morley wereboth licensed medical men; Morley, in addition, had been a schoolmaster, andbecame, in 1857, a King's College lecturer in English language and literature. Onsubjects of their special knowledge, these writers, and others of comparablebackground or experience, wrote with some authority. [Lohrli 30]
Thirty-five regulars contributed most of articles. Paul Schlicke gives the number of regular contributors as exceeding 380, and estimates the weekly magazine's normal weekly circulation as 38,500, although its initial numbers sold over 100,000 copies and the Extra Christmas Numbers over 80,000. With a fifty-per cent share to protect (his publishers had only a twenty-five per cent interest) Dickens insisted that all contributions conform to his strict standards for "family reading," since the journal would publish only wholesome fiction and journalism. He received payment as a contributor, plus a £500 annual salary for his work as editor-in-chief. Dickenstook his role as conductor seriously, carefully vetting every contribution foraccuracy, style, readability, and consistency. "Editorial revision was extensive — and drastic. Dickens sometimes rewrote articles and stories almost entirely" (Lohrli 15).
Dickens contributed many significant articles to Household Words. In addition to providing the magazine with weekly instalments of Hard Times, he published serially both A Child's History of England (1851) and The Lazy Tour of Two Idle Apprentices (1857), and contributed in his own right 108 essays and articles and collaborated on another 45. Over a quarter of the pieces in Household Words were written by Dickens's regular editorial staff of five (Dickens, Collins, Wills, Horne, and Morley), who thought themselves well remunerated at £5 per week. Another thirty writers over the decade of its existence provided the magazine with between twenty and 140 pieces each; some 200 writers each contributed just a single piece. "The stated rate of payment for prose contributions was a guinea for a two-column page" (Lohrli 21), verse being remunerated at about twice that rate. As self-appointed guardian of the Household Words purse, however, Wills paid somewhat less than the going rate for at least eighty prose contributions.
Advertisements and announcements published in Household Words followed the last item in a number. They concerned the two supplementary publications (the Household Narrative of Current Events and the Household Words Almanac), the availability of Household Words in monthly parts and in bound volumes, the extra Christmas numbers, forthcoming serials, the publication in book form of three Household Words serials (A Child's History of England, Hard Times, and The Dead Secret, and Dickens's public readings. [Lohrli 19]
Among the decade's major novelists, aside from Dickens himself and Collins (whose Sensation novels A Rogue's Life (1856) and The Dead Secret (1857) ran in the magazine), only Gaskell published novels in serial instalments in Household Words: Lizzie Leigh (three parts, March 30, 8 and 15 April 1850), Cranford (13 December 1851 through 21 May 1853), North and South (2 September 1854 through 27 January 1855), and My Lady Ludlow (19 June through 25 September 1858). The Christmas Stories, in fact "framed-tale" novellas (to three of which Gaskell contributed), became a regular feature in the "extra-double" numbers that Dickens produced in conjunction with other staff writers for the holiday season: The Seven Poor Travellers (1854), The Holly-Tree (1855), The Wreck of the Golden Mary (1856), The Perils of Certain English Prisoners (1857), and A House To Let (1858). As a miscellany emphasizing the variety of offerings, Household Words was a bargain at tuppence a week. At its winding up in May 1859, it comprised nineteen bound half-yearly volumes. Its successor departed from somewhat from its winning formula because in All the Year Round Dickens, who was still very much the "Conductor," shifted from incidental fiction to an emphasis on new, serialised novels, with A Tale of Two Cities inaugurating the new magazine on 30 April 1859.
New Discoveries
According to Jeremy Parrott, writing in 2018, new research has identified even more contributors:
Lohrli's sources of information in the 1960s and early 1970s were restricted to printed guides such as Samuel Allibone's Critical ]Dictionary of English Literature, and English and American Authors, the Dictionary of National Biography, guides to alumni of various universities, the Post Office Directories and the catalogue to the British Library. Her book has over three dense pages of acknowledgements, principally to librarians and fellow scholars around theworld with whom she was in correspondence in order to glean additional precious items of information that she was not able to access from her home in Las Vegas, New Mexico. [112]
Material related to Household Words
- Introduction to Household Words (1850-59)
- The Diverse Nature of the Contents: Household Words
- Wrapping up Household Words
- Charles Dickens and George Elgar Hicks’ representations of the General Post Office on St-Martin’s-le-Grand
- A Review of Unequal Partners: Charles Dickens, Wilkie Collins, and Victorian Authorship
Bibliography
Bentley, Nicholas; Michael Slater, and Nina Burgis. The Dickens Index. Oxford and New York: Oxford U. P., 1990.
Davis, Paul. Charles Dickens A to Z: The Essential eference to His Life and Work. New York: Checkmark and Facts On File, 1999.
Fido, Martin. The World of Charles Dickens. Vancouver: Raincoast, 1997.
Lohrli, Anne. Household Words: A Weekly Journal 1850-1859 Conducted by Charles Dickens — Table of Contents, List of Contributors and Their Contributions Based on The Household Words Office Book in the Morris L. Parrish Collection of Victorian Novelists, Princeton University Library. Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1973.
Oppenlander, Ella Ann. Dickens's "All the Year Round": Descriptive Index and Contributor List. New York: Whitson, 1984.
Parrott, Jeremy. "Lohrli Revisited: Newly Identified Contributors to Household Words." Dickens Quarterly 35, 2 (June 2018): 110-126.
Van Remoortel, Marianne. Women, Work and the Victorian Periodical: Living by the Press. London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2015.
Schlicke, Paul. Oxford Reader's Companion to Dickens. Oxford and New York: Oxford U. P., 1999.
Created 11 July 2004
Last modified 18 June 2020