Dickens as a journalist

Beginnings: 1829-1836

Throughout his career Charles Dickens was associated in various ways with journalism.
Having ended his brief period of formal education at fifteen, he took a job as a solicitor’s clerk, which he disliked intensely. He began learning shorthand according to the current system, Gurney’s, in preparation for a career as a reporter. It was the first step in his pursuit of an ambition to become a financially-independent, professional writer and he was a skilled practitioner of shorthand.

1829 to 1831: Reporter at Doctors’ Commons
1831 to 1832: Parliamentary reporter for The Mirror of Parliament
1832 to 1834: Reporter for The True Sun
1833 (1 December): His first published story 'A Dinner at Poplar Walk' was published in The Monthly Magazine
1834 to 1836: Reporter for The Morning Chronicle

'A Dinner at Poplar Walk' was later re-named 'Mr Minns and his Cousin'. Dickens’s Sketches were originally published in various periodicals between December 1833 and October 1836. They were collected and published as a two-volume edition in February 1836.

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Opening the windows on 'This summer dawn of time': 1850-1859

1850 saw the beginning of another kind of published work by Dickens. From then until the end of his life, he contributed to, published and edited or ‘conducted’, two weekly journals which appeared continuously from 1850 to 1870, Household Words (1850-9) and its very similar successor All The Year Round which ran from 1859 and after Dickens’s death continued under the editorship of his son, Charles Dickens Jr., until 1895. Amongst its varied contents there appeared serialised novels by a range of writers, including, Mrs Gaskell and Dickens himself.

In addition, from 1850 to 1855 he published a factual digest called Household Narrative of Current Events which appeared as a monthly supplement to the weekly journal.

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1859 - 1870

Dickens separated from his wife Catherine in May 1858. Characteristically he published a statement (‘Personal’ June 12, 1858) in Household Words, which he also wanted published in Punch, which was also printed by his printers, Bradbury and Evans. When they refused, he decided to close the journal, no longer work with them, and undertake the complete running of a replacement journal to be called All The Year Round. He was to have a 75% share and his sub-editor W H Wills 25%. He published the first issue of the new journal on 30 April 1859, with the opening episode of A Tale of Two Cities as its leading article. It was later to serialise Great Expectations. It followed the same editorial principles as its predecessor and was very successful, with circulation as high, at times as 300,000.

There were new developments too. Dickens introduced, in January 1860, a series of articles with a central narrator-figure called ‘The Uncommercial Traveller’, which contains some of his most mature writing in the periodical essay form.

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