Tales of Two Cities

Charles Dickens’s weekly periodical, Household Words, first appeared on Saturday, 30 March 1850. Dickens’s project would embrace what Sally Ledger describes as the ‘commercial, cultural and political.’ ¹ Dickens was determined that his magazine would straddle the middle ground between the sensationalism of Edward Lloyd’s Lloyd’s Weekly Newspaper and G.W.M. Reynolds’s Reynolds’s Miscellany, and the drab, factual inclination of William Chambers’s Chambers’s Journal (1832–1956). Crucial to all of the journalism in Household Words was the idea that there would be no ‘iron binding of the mind to grim realities [but it will] cherish that light of Fancy which is inherent in the human breast.’ ² Articles would have to amuse and stir the imagination as well as inform and as Ann Lohrli has noted ‘discussion of the driest subjects was to be invested with some degree of fancy and imagination.’ ³ The use of literary allusions and fantastical imagery was encouraged alongside informative material dealing with everyday subjects in an effort to ‘traverse high and low cultural boundaries in the production of a properly ‘popular’ literature.’ ⁴ Dickens was carefully constructing a magazine that would be accessible to not only the lower-middle and working classes, but also to the middle-class reading public who were attracted to the Dickens brand – the Conductor’s name was clearly visible at the head of each edition.