Introduction

This book examines the way in which Charles Dickens’s weekly family journal Household Words imagines and structures the world. The complexities that this book will address are suggested in the three quotations above. Ackroyd’s defi nition of Dickens as the ‘most English’ of writers is a commonplace today, yet Dickens himself repeatedly points out, as the extract from Dombey and Son shows, that it is virtually impossible to defi ne what ‘genuine English’ characteristics actually are. Household Words forms an arena in which the complex and often contradictory strands of the question of national identity can be untangled or, indeed, knotted anew. As the quotation from Dickens’s ‘Preliminary Word’ shows, the journal considers Britain as both isolated from and intertwined with other nations. Clearly, the relationship between Dickens’s work and the English national character is more complicated than is usually expected of this ‘most English’ of writers.