Introduction

Abstract

This is a book about Dickens’s journalism and the journalistic career which produced it. The trajectory it traces differs significantly, in its dynamics and uncertainties, from the familiar contours of the career of Dickens the novelist. However, the aim of the study is not to offer partial thoughts on Dickensian biography, nor a critical reading of the relationship of the journalism to the novels, but to survey the texts which compose the ‘canon’ of Dickens’s journalism themselves, and the contexts of their production, as a three-dimensional field of its own. I think this is worth doing because, notwithstanding the wealth of important twentieth-century studies illuminating myriad aspects of the writer’s life and craft, a book of this kind has never been published before.¹