ABSTRACT
At the age of forty-six - a time of life when many choose or are forced to plateau - Dickens embarked on two demanding new ventures, as a public reader of his own works, and as a publisher. Neither is strictly the province of a study of his work as a journalist, but in so far as both depar tures impacted on All the Year Round and all three pursuits were facets of the same media phenomenon, they deserve some attention. The working patterns Dickens and Wills had established for making up the weekly numbers of Household Words were stretched to the limit by his reading tours, which would take him to venues across mainland Britain, Ireland, France and the United States. A new creative rhythm was needed for writing journalism no less than fiction, for as he told his old friend De Cerjat in 1867, 'When I read I don't write. I only edit, and have the proof sheets sent to me for that purpose.'1 He relied more than ever on Wills to manage all aspects of the Commercial Department and much of the Literary work from London,2 but the increased correspondence his absences brought on shows no slacking of vigorous and detailed interest in editorial matters - he had not won outright control of his journal in order to hand it over to a subsidiary. The incessant travel which the tours involved - symptomatic of Dickens's inner restlessness - contributed to various self-projections as a traveller, 'the British Wanderer' as he styled himself,3 or, more significantly, 'The Uncommercial Traveller,' under which polyvalent guise he wrote the thirty-six articles for All the Year Round which mark the climax of his career as a journal essayist. His actual or reported circulation through hundreds of towns and cities where his periodical and books were on sale, actively boosted their circulation. Articulate working-class characters, first created for the Extra Christmas Numbers of All the Year Round, were converted into some of Dickens's most popular readings, and their voices shared the platform with him, at a time when franchise reform and increased voting rights for British artisans were topics of national debate. The readings, too, carried a political charge.4
