Charles Dickens: the journalist as novelist, the novelist as journalist

Abstract

Described by Walter Bagehot as a novelist who was \u27a special correspondent for posterity\u27, Charles Dickens began his professional writing career as a journalist: first as a parliamentary reporter, then as the author of sketches for daily and weekly papers (later collected as Sketches by Boz). His first \u27novel\u27, The Posthumous Papers of the Pickwick Club, began life as a series of monthly sketches to accompany some sporting prints by a well-known illustrator, and was reviewed (as were Oliver Twist, and Nicholas Nickleby) as a magazine or miscellany rather than a novel. Throughout his extremely successful career as a novelist, Dickens published his fiction in weekly or monthly parts, and much of it appeared first in magazines. Dickens was himself the founder and editor (or, as he put it, \u27conductor\u27) of two popular general interest magazines, Household Words and All the Year Round. This lecture looks at a range of Dickens\u27s writings in a variety of forms, exploring the relationships between the fiction and the journalism and the relationship between writer and audience. It looks at Dickens as a flaneur, a social commentator and investigator and a representer (or creator) of a particular version of Victorian urban modernity