Commodity Culture in Dickens's Household Words: The Social Life of Goods

In 1850, Charles Dickens founded Household Words, a weekly miscellany intended to instruct and entertain middle-class readers. While serving as editor until the last issue was published in May 1859, Dickens filled the journal with articles about various commodities that raise wider questions about how far society should go in permitting people to buy and sell goods and services, in other words, how far the laissez-faire market should extend.Although studies of Victorian commodity culture have tended to focus on the novel, the conjunction of scholarly interest in Victorian periodicals and material culture is prompted by recognition of the major role the press played in disseminating knowledge and information about the proliferating world of goods and the spectacles of consumption it entailed. At the same time, periodicals like Household Words were themselves commodities that relied on their marketability for survival. This book provides a cultural study of the journal's representation of commodities that also records the changing relationship between people and things exposed in the contributors' attempts to come to terms with the development of urban commodity culture at mid-century.