Charles Dickens | The Household Narrative of Current Events, (for the Year 1851), 1851

Charles Dickens

The Household Narrative of Current Events, (for the year 1851,) being A Monthly Supplement to Household Words, conducted by Charles Dickens. London: Office [of Household Words], 1851

8vo (236 x 150mm.), title-page, 6pp. Table of Contents and 12 parts, January - November comprising 24pp and December 16pp, publisher's green diaper cloth, covers stamped in blind enclosing lettering in gilt on upper cover, spine lettered in gilt with price 5/-, yellow endpapers, partly unopened, endpapers stained, small section front fixed endpaper partly lifted, section lacking from lower fixed endpaper, lower free endpaper pasted to final blank, later ownership inscription on title-page, binding faded and rubbed, damp-marked, lower joint rubbed with slight loss 

The Household Narrative of Current Events was a monthly retrospect of national, international news, and other information, published from April 1850 to December 1855 (including numbers for January - March 1850) The supplements in this bound copy are for January-December 1851, priced at 2d each and are paginated continuously with each part a separate but continuous signature.

Dickens’s front-page announcement of the new publication emphasised "the intimate connexion between the facts and realities of the time, and the means by which we aim, in Household Words, to soften what is hard in them, to exalt what is held in little consideration, and to show the latent hope there is in what may seem unpromising." The Narrative would "bear the world’s rough cast events to the anvil of courageous duty, and there beat them into shape".

The Narrative’s nine subdivisional headings—"Parliament and Politics", "Law and Crime", "Accident and Disaster", "Social, Sanitary and Municipal Progress", "Obituaries, Colonies and Dependencies", "Foreign Events", "Commercial Record", "Stocks and Shares", and "Emigration Figures"—indicated the interest shown by Household Words in all these topics.

LITERATURE:

John M. L. Drew, Dickens the Journalist, chapter 7. 

PROVENANCE:

GBH 1-36, contemporary shelf mark; Contemporary ownership inscription and mid-twentieth-century ownership inscriptions.