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All the Year Round was in many ways identical to its predecessor Household Words (1850-1859), not least because it remained a 2d. weekly (9d. monthly) conspicuously ‘Conducted by Charles Dickens.’ In two respects, however, its constitution differed. Its leading article now comprised an instalment of serial fiction, whose authorship was identified; gone were the investigative reports and satirical broadsides that had characterised leaders in the earlier incarnation.  Dickens and sub-editor W. H. Wills were now the sole partners in and proprietors of their publication. When Dickens serialised A Tale of Two Cities (1859) and Great Expectations (1860-61) in its pages, he was his own publisher; when he contracted authors such as Wilkie Collins, Edward Bulwer Lytton, Charles Reade, Frances Trollope, and Edmund Yates to contribute novels, he became their publisher as well as editor.

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Adorned with a combative motto from Shakespeare’s Henry V (‘Familiar in their Mouths as HOUSEHOLD WORDS’), Charles Dickens’s two-penny weekly magazine of original short fiction and crusading social journalism was launched to widespread publicity on 30 March 1850. Its sub-editor was W. H Wills, a former assistant editor of Chambers’s Journal, to which the new publication was typographically similar: two columns of small type on relatively thin, acidic paper (quad crown 12mo), no advertisements or illustrations, and the legend ‘Conducted by ¦ Charles Dickens’ as a running header on every spread of its 24 pages. Household Words was nevertheless something of a hybrid, available in 9d. monthly numbers with wrappers and handsome bi-annual volumes, aimed at affluent middle-class families and people of influence, no less than at working-class readers interested in ‘trading up.’

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The digitisation of the Household Words Almanac is the result of a collaboration between Dickens Journals Online and the British Library, to whom we are grateful for the supply of the high resolution images presented here. The original machine-reading of the text (OCR) was carried out by Dickens Journals Online, and the resulting transcript has been patiently corrected by volunteers participating in our Online Text Correction project. Copyright in the corrected text is made freely available by Dickens Journals Online. Permisssion must be sought from the British Library for reproduction of the page images, via djo@buckingham.ac.uk.

The Household Words Almanac was a fourpenny calendar and factual guide to annual, seasonal, domestic, and national affairs, illuminated with decorative woodcuts, devised and first compiled by Henry Morley for the year 1856. It was intended to join the parent publication and its monthly supplement, The Household Narrative of Currents Events, to complete a suite of publications  that would form a comprehensive, cheap, and widely-available compendium to the life of the times. Unlike the Narrative’s expressly linear march through time, the Almanac emphasized the cyclical nature of life.

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The Household Narrative of Current Events [was] a twopenny monthly retrospect of national, international news, and other information, published from April 1850 to December 1855 (including numbers for January - March 1850) […. It] aimed to extend the scope of the main journal in new directions, making the suite of publications a complete, cheap and widely available compendium to the life of the times.

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