The Amusements of the People and Other Papers

This new volume of the first-ever annotated edition of Dickens' journalism begins with examples of his work (never before collected) as a young reporter for the great Liberal paper The Morning Chronicle - reports of grand public ceremonials and rowdy elections as well as highly entertaining theatre reviews, all marked by touches of what we now think of as quintessentially Dickensian humor. Between 1837 and 1849 Dickens wrote, alongside his hugely successful novels, many articles and reviews. They were published anonymously in the famous Radical weekly The Examiner, and a generous selection of them is presented here. Whether the subject be a botched attempt to put an end to the West African slave trade, crime statistics, ghosts, panoramas, the horrors of a parish baby-farm, or outdated royal ceremonial, Dickens writes here with all the linguistic verve and passionate energy characteristic of his great novels. This is equally true of the pieces he began writing on a weekly basis for his own journal Household Words from 1850 onwards. This volume covers the first eighteen months of the paper's existence; we find Dickens celebrating such things as cheap theatres and the new detective police, satirising the follies and ineptitude of politicians, campaigning for workhouse reform and for more humane treatment of animals driven to slaughter, lambasting Pre-Raphaelite painting, and generally keeping a finger of genius on the pulse of what he called "the moving age". For the Dickens reader there are innumerable fascinating links to be made between all this remarkable journalism and the great novels; while for all those more widely interested in the social and cultural history of early Victorian England this volume offers truly a wealth of material.