Charles Dickens as journalist

And yet he never abandoned journalism. He loved the way newspapers and periodicals allowed him to be in regular touch with his public, almost a member of the family.  Over the course of his literary career he was associated – as contributor and often as editor – with The Monthly Magazine, Bell’s Weekly Magazine, The Morning Chronicle, The Evening Chronicle, Bentley’s Miscellany, The Daily News,  Household Words and All the Year Round.  As the chief “conductor” of Household Words, he claimed that one year he read  900 manuscripts submitted for consideration, and accepted about one in 80. His own novels appeared there – and later in All the Year Round – as serials, yet he still found time to comment on topics in the news and, in scholar Michael Slater’s summary, editorialize about “Red Tapism, ‘flunkeyism,’ ‘toadyism,’ ministerial and administrative incompetence, phoney patriotism, party-political games, legal injustices.”

Always fascinated by crime, Dickens would even hang out with Scotland Yard detectives – one inspector, he recalls, possessed a particularly “reserved and thoughtful air, as if he were engaged in deep arithmetical calculations”– and record some of their cases. He is, in effect, the complete newspaperman: part police reporter, part investigative journalist, part Op-Ed columnist, part feature writer. And that’s not all. In the view of one informed authority – the 20th-century press baron Lord Northcliffe – Dickens ranks as “the greatest magazine editor either of his own or any other age.”

Consider one of his most scathing pieces of reportage: “The Paradise at Tooting.” Here, with savage indignation, Dickens lays out the conditions at a kind of orphanage, where scores of children died of cholera: “The dietary of the children,” he wrote, “is so unwholesome and insufficient, that they climb secretly over the palings and pick out scraps of sustenance from the tubs of hog-wash.”

Yet even the crusader Dickens could still revert occasionally to New Yorker-style casuals, such as “Our English Watering-Place,” an essay about a seaside resort in off season. At one point he visits the resort’s library and discovers that a Miss Julia Mills has read all the romance novels on the shelves. And not only that: “She has left marginal notes on the pages, as ‘Is not this truly touching? J.M.’ ‘How thrilling! J.M.’ ‘Entranced here by the Magician’s potent spell. J.M.’ She has also italicized her favourite traits in the description of the hero as ‘his hair, which was dark and wavy, clustered in rich profusion around a marble brow, whose lofty paleness bespoke the intellect within.’ It reminds her of another hero. She adds, ‘How like B.L. Can this be mere coincidence? J.M.’ ”

Apart from all his short articles, polemics, and reviews, Dickens’ also published two books that may be loosely called  travelogues: the rather sour "American Notes" and the rather bland "Pictures of Italy." Nonetheless, as he wrote in an essay called “The Long Voyage,” all his life he had delighted in “travel books”:

“When the wind is blowing and the sleet or rain is driving against the dark windows, I love to sit by the fire, thinking of what I have read in books of voyage and travel. Such books have had a strong fascination for my mind from my earliest childhood; and I wonder it should have come to pass that I never have been round the world, never have been shipwrecked, ice-environed, tomahawked, or eaten.”

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