ABSTRACT
EG was one of the first to be approached by Dickens to contribute to a new venture, a weekly magazine that was eventually given the title Household Words. ‘I do honestly know that there is no living English writer whose aid I would desire to enlist, in preference to the authoress of Mary Barton (a book that most profoundly affected and impressed me)’ he wrote in January 1850. ‘I venture to ask you whether you can give me any hope that you will write a short tale, or any number of tales, for the projected pages’ (CD Letters, vol. vi, p. 22). ‘Lizzie Leigh’ was published in three parts in Household Words from 30 March to 13 April 1850 (1, pp. 2–7; 32–5; 60–5). Her new story was given pride of place in the first number, on Saturday 30 March, immediately following Dickens’s ‘Preliminary Word’ to his readers.
