Charles Dickens’s Great Expectations in All The Year Round

Abstract

The relationships between Victorian magazine editors and their contributors could be fraught with problems. On the one hand editors had a tendency to view readers as quick to take offense at material which overstepped the bounds of ‘propriety’, while on the other hand serial novelists frequently resented interference on the part of editors. As editor of Household Words and All The Year Round, Dickens had on a number of occasions found himself in disputes with contributors. During the serialization of North and South in Household Words, for example, he was at loggerheads with Elizabeth Gaskell over the length and instalment divisions of her novel.¹ In 1863, when Charles Reade’s Very Hard Cash was serialized in All The Year Round, Dickens was alarmed by Reade’s violent polemic against the Lunacy Commissioners, and he published a statement in the magazine disclaiming any agreement with Reade’s opinions.² When Wilkie Collins contributed a novel or article, Dickens worried about his colleague’s enthusiasm for shocking the middle classes.³ Such editorial nightmares were dispelled, however, when he serialized one of his own novels. Attuned to his readership, he could trust himself never to unduly offend and, being emotionally dependent upon readers’ loyalty and enthusiasm, he tended to respect their judgement.⁴