ABSTRACT
Charles Dickens's remarkable career as a public performer of his fiction was the first major professional innovation to emerge from the tumult of his ruined marriage and infatuation with Nelly. The second was his decision, late in 1858, to leave Bradbury and Evans and Household Words to create his own weekly magazine All the Year Round, a decision that altered fundamentally the form that Dickens's novels would take for years to come. With its short topical pieces, occasional poems, light political commentary, and serialized fiction, All the Year Round resembled Household Words and other contemporary magazines in many of its particulars. It had, to be sure, a more international feel, which Dickens cultivated by making the magazine less reliant on English topics du jour than Household Words had sometimes been, largely to accommodate the American readers he expected to reach by selling the right of publication in the United States to New York journalist Thomas Coke Evans for £1,000.
