History
Household Words was published every Wednesday from March 1850 to May 1859. Each number cost a mere tuppence, thereby ensuring a wide readership. The publication's first edition carried a section covering the paper's principles, entitled "A Preliminary Word":
| “ | We aspire to live in the Household affections, and to be numbered among the Household thoughts, of our readers. We hope to be the comrade and friend of many thousands of people, of both sexes, and of all ages and conditions, on whose faces we may never look. We seek to bring to innumerable homes, from the stirring world around us, the knowledge of many social wonders, good and evil, that are not calculated to render any of us less ardently persevering in ourselves, less faithful in the progress of mankind, less thankful for the privilege of living in this summer-dawn of time. | ” |
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—-Charles Dickens |
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Theoretically, the paper championed the cause of the poor and working classes, but in fact addressed itself almost exclusively to the middle class. Only the name of Dickens, the journal's "conductor," appeared;. Articles were unsigned (although authors of serialized novels were identified) and, in spite of its regularly featuring an "advertiser," unillustrated.
In order to boost slumping sales Dickens serialized his own novel, Hard Times, every week between April 1 and August 12, 1854. It had the desired effect more than doubling the journal's circulation and encouraging the author who remarked that he was, "Three parts mad, and the fourth delirious, with perpetual rushing at Hard Times".
That Dickens owned half of the company and his agents, Forster and Wills, owned a further quarter of it was insurance that the author would have a free hand in the paper. In 1859, however, owing to a dispute between Dickens and the publishers, Bradbury and Evans, it was replaced by All the Year Round in which he had greater control.
The journal contained a mixture of fiction and nonfiction. A large amount of the non-fiction dealt with the social issues of the time.
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