The Vann Victorian Collection: Magazines

Master Humphrey’s Clock

Dickens, Charles. Master Humphrey’s Clock. Illus. George Cattermole and Hablot Browne. London, 1840–1841. Print.

Master Humphrey’s Clock was a weekly magazine (April 4, 1840 – December 4, 1841) edited and completely written by Dickens. In it he published two of his novels, The Old Curiosity Shop and Barnaby Rudge.

In The Old Curiosity Shop, with the death of the character Little Nell, Dickens recreated, and relived, the death of his sister-in-law, Mary Hogarth, who died in 1837 at age seventeen in his arms, an event that traumatized him. Readers of the serial could sense that Nell was dying. Many wrote to beg him to let her live. In Boston Harbor as a clipper ship bringing the latest installment of the novel approached the wharf, eager readers crowded onto it and shouted out to sailors on deck, “Is Little Nell dead?”

This illustration from The Old Curiosity Shop pictures the villain Daniel Quilp, a moneylender set to cheat and ruin the lives of others.

Page of a book is shown. Three quarters of the page is filled with paragraphs. The bottom quarter of the page is a drawing. A dog on the right is tied with a chain. The dog tries to jump at a man in front of him. The man has a hat in his right hand and is raising it in front of him.

One book is propped on top of a stack of two books. They are all a brown color. The book on top has golden clock on it, but is otherwise plain.

Open book. Page on the left has a drawing of three men in the middle. Page on the right has a drawing at the top, with paragraphs at the bottom. A small drawing is on the left of the first paragraph.

Household Words

Dickens, Charles. Household Words. London, 1850. Print.

Dickens edited the weekly magazine Household Words from March 1850 until May 1859. The price, a mere 2p, insured it a vast audience. Dickens serialized the novels of many writers but only one of his own, Hard Times, in the magazine, although his A Child’s History of England appeared there as well. He had intended to publish Hard Times in part issue in twenty monthly installments but published it in the magazine to bolster slumping sales.

Page of a paper. It is titled Household Words at the top, with two columns of paragraphs. The page is framed by thin black lines. The number on the bottom right is 210.

Top view of an open book. Page on the right is titled Household words, page on the left is two columns of paragraphs.

All the Year Round

Dickens, Charles. All the Year Round. London, 1859. Print.

Dickens edited the weekly magazine Household Words from its inception in May 1850 to November 1859, leaving the editorship over a dispute with the publishers, Bradbury and Evans. He then founded another magazine, All the Year Round, which began publication in January 1860. He continued as editor until his death in June 1870.

Two of his novels, A Tale of Two Cities and Great Expectations, were published in All the Year Round.