ABSTRACT
Household words had been running for some eighteen months when Bleak House was completed at the end of August 1853. While Dickens was engaged with his book he had no time to write anything for his magazine more substantial than articles; but once the book was out of the way, he could listen to the persuasions of Forster, Bradbury and Evans, and Wills. ‘There is such a fixed idea on the part of my printers and copartners in Household Words, that a story of me, continued from week to week, would make some unheard of effect with it that I am going to write one’; so he told Miss Coutts on 23 January 1854. 354 The decision had been taken some time earlier, however. On 20 January he sent Forster a list of fourteen titles for ‘the Household Words story’, begging him to look at them ‘between this and two o’clock or so, when I will call. It is my usual day, you observe, on which I have jotted them down—Friday! It seems to me that there are three very good ones among them. I should like to know whether you hit upon the same.’ 355 Though he had not yet set himself to write, it would seem that he had already discussed the theme of the novel with Forster; for if he had not, he could scarcely have expected Forster to choose between titles for a single story so strictly committing as these: According to Cocker, Prove it, Stubborn Things, Mr Gradgrind’s Facts, The Grindstone, Hard Times, Two and Two are Four, Something Tangible, Our Hardheaded Friend, Rust and Dust, Simple Arithmetic, A Matter of Calculation, A Mere Question of Figures, The Gradgrind Philosophy.
