1850-1859 Household Words

Description

First Edition, Rebound

The complete run of 'Household Words', the English weekly magazine edited by Charles Dickens. Issued every six months, these bi-annual volumes are all first editions.

Complete in nineteen volumes, including every issue from 30th March, 1850 to 28th May, 1959. Rebound, with each volume retaining its original title page.

Adorned with a motto from Shakespeare’s Henry V ‘Familiar in their Mouths as Household Words’, Charles Dickens’s two-penny weekly magazine of original short fiction and social journalism was launched to widespread publicity on 30 March 1850, featuring no advertisements or illustrations.

The publication contained a mix of short fiction and non-fiction, and serialised some popular works, including 'Cranford' and 'North and South' by Elizabeth Gaskell, and 'The Dead Secret' by Wilkie Collins'. The non-fiction has a focus on social matters; while the paper advertised itself as championing the causes of the working classes and the poor, it actually addressed itself primarily to middle class audiences. 

Of just under four-hundred contributors, around were women - Elizabeth Gaskell, Harriet Martineau, and Eliza Lynn Linton prominent amongst them - but the majority of the articles were written by a small group of male staff writers - W. H. Wills, Henry Morley, Wilkie Collins, and R. H. Horne - or by ‘regulars’ whom Dickens trained to write in a recognisably 'Dickensian' manner, and who complied with their editor’s broadly liberal agenda.