Master Humphrey’s Clock

Abstract

Two of Dickens’ novels, The Old Curiosity Shop and Barnaby Rudge, first appeared within the clumsy framework of Dickens’ weekly periodical, Master Humphrey’s Clock, which began on 4 April 1840 and ceased publication with the conclusion of Barnaby Rudge. In his childhood Dickens had read and loved the Spectator, the Tatler, and Goldsmith’s Bee, and his plan was to produce a Victorian version of the eighteenth-century periodical miscellany. Edgar Johnson has described the intended result as an ‘Arabian Nights-Gulliver-Mr Spectator Salmagundi’, and the opening chapters of the Clock seem to indicate a certain feverish anxiety to cram in as many diverse elements as possible. As Angus Wilson has not unfairly said,

It was, it must be confessed, a lazy scheme of an over-pressed young man in which he hoped to use the popularity of Mr Pickwick and Sam Weller all over again; in which a quaint old narrator, Master Humphrey, should link a series of stories; in which a contemporary taste for whimsical legend (exemplified in [R. H. Barham’s] The Ingoldsby Legends of 1837) should be exploited by making the mythical giants of London, Gog and Magog, tell many of the tales; in which travel sketches like those made so popular by the American writer, Washington Irving, would give reason for Dickens the editor to travel to Ireland and America.