ABSTRACT
They came to be called Dickens's 'young men' during the 1850s. As well as George Augustus Sala and Edmund Yates they included Blanchard Jerrold, Sydney Blanchard, William Moy Thomas, Walter Thornbury, John Hollingshead, James Payn, Percy Fitzgerald, and Andrew Halliday.1 Most of them, but not Yates, were frequent contributors to Dickens's weekly, Household Words. Wilkie Collins, who rapidly acquired an independent reputation, was never one of them. Sala and Yates took longer than Collins to make names for themselves, and some of the others never did. Sala's celebrity, chiefly as a special correspondent, leader-writer, and weekly columnist, dated from the early sixties; Yates's, as an editor and newspaper proprietor, from the seventies, after Dickens's death. In their maturity, Sala and Yates were less strongly influenced by Dickens than critics, biographers, and literary historians have often assumed. Their novels, which brought both of them some acclaim in the sixties, are much less 'Dickensian' than the reviewers expected and often perceived them to be, and as journalists both achieved their greatest success in styles and modes that Dickens never attempted at all. At the time of Dickens's death in 1870, and for the remainder of their lives, they continued to proclaim their reverence for him as man and writer and to remind the world how intimately they had been associated with him. But their narratives of their literary careers, Yates's Recollections and Experiences and Sala's Things I Have Done and People I Have Known and The Life and Adventures of George Augustus Sala, make it clear that other mentors and models influenced them at least as strongly in their early years. Both of them knew Thackeray and benefited from his advice and encouragement, and as struggling young writers they identified more with Pendennis than with David Copperfield. They both owed much to the friendship and professional guidance of the then-celebrated novelist and entertainer, Albert Smith, before and after they came to Dickens's notice; and Yates as a novice was befriended by and collaborated with another of the most popular novelists of the forties and fifties, Frank Smedley. When they started to write novels themselves, they believed their inspiration came as much from Balzac as from Dickens.
