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"The Story of Our Lives from Year to Year"--Shakespeare.

lthough All the Year Round (1859-93) -- whose full title was All the Year Round. A Weekly Periodical. Conducted by Charles Dickens. With Which is Incorporated "Household Words" --in many respects continued where Household Words (1850-59) left off, its emphasis on serial fiction by leading authors was a pronounced divergence. So much about it must have seemed familiar to the subscribers of the earlier journal: the bannerhead and title fatigued from Shakespeare (specifically, the subtitle paraphrases Othello, Deed 1, Scene Three, Lines 128-29); its 24-folio, double-columned format; its tuppenny price and lack of analogy; and even the journal'south Wellington Street North address (although the offices were now at No. 26 rather than at No. 16).

The extra Christmas upshot of All the Year Round (1859), which opened with Dickens'south The Haunted House.

Click on image to overstate it.

The "property" whose value Charles Dickens and his subeditor (now too his general manager) had so advisedly safeguarded in the 1850s became even more valuable as the various charges on periodical publication (stamp duty, paper, and even advertising taxes) were reduced or abolished. But competition for the new, unillustrated weekly proved vehement: 114 new magazines (many of them paying their contributors better) appeared in the same year every bit All the Yr Round, and in the next few years a number of loftier-quality illustrated literary monthlies such as the Cornhill Magazine (founded in 1860). Dickens took the helm financially after winning his freedom in the court of Chancery from Bradbury and Evans, the publishers of Household Words: henceforth, he and West. H. Wills (owning seventy-5 per cent and twenty-v per cent of the venture respectively) would encompass all expenses (including the printing costs charged past Chapman and Hall) in guild to reap the maximum profit, which, with a circulation running as loftier as 300,000 for the Extra Christmas Numbers (1860-67) and averaging 100,000 the residual of the yr, were immense (£2,750 per annum) compared to those of Household Words, which had enjoyed a normal weekly circulation of only 38,500.

Instalments of serial novels occupied the space of two or three self-contained articles or essays, with the result that the boilerplate number of All the Year Round offered fewer items (five to seven) than a typical number of Household Words (viii to ten), particularly when the onetime contained ii serials running concurrently. In addition, there was a marked increment of emphasis on strange affairs in All the Yr Round, partly due to Dickens'south desire to support the cause of Giuseppe Garibaldi (1807-72) and Joseph Mazzini (1805-72) in the wars of Italian unification. Over a representative sample of vii volumes of each periodical, nigh xi per cent of the non-fiction articles in All the Year Round dealt with some aspect of international affairs or cultures [discounting the American Civil War, which Dickens instructed his staff to avoid unless they had specifically cleared a topic with him beginning ], as opposed to 4 per cent in Household Words. In virtually other popular subject area areas -- education, manufacture, emigration or scientific discipline, for example -- the trend is reversed. [Drew 10]

Starting time page (left) and contents page (right) All the Year Circular for April xxx, 1859, which opened with Dickens's A Tale of Ii Cities. Click on prototype for larger picture.

Even Dickens'south most admiring readers, nonetheless, must have detected the differences, for whereas pride of place had usually been accorded to articles of social import in the sometime periodical, in All the Year Round the opening page always independent ane of the two serial instalments of novels and then running, the start such novel beingness Dickens'due south own A Tale of Ii Cities (30 April 1859), specifically designed to give initial sales a boost. In fact, with Wills'due south astute advert campaign through W. H. Smith outlets throughout the United kingdom, distributing 300,000 handbills and "double demy" posters, the opening number sold 125,000 copies. And, whereas Dickens had serialized just ane novel in his nine years as editor of Household Words (Hard Times, i Apr through 12 Baronial 1854), within the showtime twenty-seven months of publication of All the Twelvemonth Round he serialised 2 (the other existence Cracking Expectations, 1 December 1860 through iii August 1861), every bit well Wilkie Collins'southward The Woman in White (26 November 1859 through 25 August 1860). On the showtime of December in 1860, for example, the two current serials and the essay "Inconveniences of Being a Cornish Human being" filled xxx of the issue'south twoscore-8 columns, leaving just eighteen columns for the remaining four items. Sometimes novel instalments fabricated up equally much as 2-thirds of a number, leaving little room for the kinds of social and political commentary that had rendered Dickens such a powerful force on the British scene in the halcyon days of Household Words. According to Edgar Rosenberg,

Dickens himself contributed barely i third of the essays he had contributed to Household Words, largely because he spent more than and more than time on the route and his public readings brought him into much closer contact -- so essential to him -- with his public than his columns did. [Rosenberg 393]

Whereas Household Words had primarily been a vehicle for journalists, All the Yr Round proved a vehicle for novelists: autonomously from Dickens and Wilkie Collins, within its pages there appeared the works of numerous second-rate and a few first-rate novelists, including Charles Lever, Charles Reade, Sir Edward G. D. Bulwer-Lytton, Elizabeth Cleghorn Gaskell, Henry Spicer, Rosa Mulholland, Amelia Edwards, Frances T. Trollope, Edmund Yates, Augustus Sala, and Percy Fitzgerald. In addition to A Tale of 2 Cities (30 April through 26 Nov 1859), Keen Expectations, and The Woman in White, novels that first appeared every bit All the Year Round serialisations include Collins'south No Name (15 March 1862 through 17 Jan 1863) and The Moonstone (4 January through 8 August 1868), Lever'south A 24-hour interval's Ride: A Life'due south Romance (eighteen August 1860 through 23 March 1861), Bulwer-Lytton's A Foreign Story (10 August 1861 through eight March 1862), Gaskell's The Grey Woman (January 1861), Reade's Very Difficult Greenbacks (28 March through 26 December 1863; retitled Hard Cash for volume publication), Sala'south Quite Alone (February through November 1864), Anthony Trollope'due south Is He Popenjoy? (13 October through 13 July 1878) and The Knuckles's Children (4 October 1879 through 24 July 1880).

Although he continued to insist that all contributors be paid at least the minimum rate, Dickens unfortunately played favourites in remunerating novelists, giving Elizabeth Gaskell only £400 for an eight-month serial, for instance, simply his friend Bulwer £1500 for a work (in the judgment of posterity) of bottom quality, and giving Collins for what proved a all-time-seller (The Moonstone) exactly what he had given Lever for what had been a disaster (A Solar day's Ride): £750. Meantime, rival publishers such every bit Smith, Elderberry (responsible for the Cornhill) were offer much more, upwards to £26 14s 4d per page for a acme-notch writer's work, such as Romola by George Eliot.

Of the twenty-vii novels to appear in All the Year Round in the eleven years Dickens lived to edit it, 6 have so far escaped being bitten to death past the tooth of time: the two novels by Dickens, the iii Collins contributed . . . and (arguably) Charles Reade'south Difficult Cash. A few more are apt to sneak their way into Companions to English Literature because the authors are yet known to a scattering of specialists or apprentice buffs, even where the books have been long out of print: Charles Lever'due south A Solar day'south Ride, Bulwer-Lytton's A Strange Story, and an interesting minor piece of work of Mrs. Gaskell's, A Dark Night's Work. (Mrs. Gaskell would have been glad to call the novel A Nighttime's Work, but Dickens persuaded her that the insertion of the modifier would deed every bit a potent aphrodisiac.) [Rosenberg 394]

Probably considering Dickens continued to micromanage the editorial department, scrupulously revising copy, his ain contributions barbarous off considerably afterward 1863, by which time he had already contributed 70 per cent of the fabric published over his 11-year reign, including the first two serial of The Uncommercial Traveller (January 1860 through October 1863) and 5 of the eight "framed-tale," multi-authored Christmas Stories (The Haunted House, 1859; the Dickens-Collins collaboration A Message from the Bounding main, 1860; Tom Tiddler's Footing, 1861; Somebody's Luggage, 1862; Mrs. Lirriper's Lodgings, 1863; Mrs. Lirriper'south Legacy, 1864; Doctor Marigold's Prescriptions, 1865; Mugby Junction, 1866, which includes a masterpiece of brusque fiction, "The Haunted Signalman," and the last of the serial, No Thoroughfare with Wilkie Collins in 1867).

Even though All the Year Round continued to pay prose writers at the Household Words rate of a republic of guinea per folio, competitors wooed novelists away from the grasp of the Dickenses (Charles Dickens, Jr., assuming the editor's pall likewise as the business manager'due south upon his father'due south death in 1870):

He inherited his father'due south 75 per-cent stake in the business organisation, and in January 1871 bought out Wills's 25 per-cent share, following the latter's understandable objection to Charley'south decision to award himself both the editor's and sub-editor'south salary. The periodical connected nether Charles Dickens Jr.'s editorship until 1888, and finally ceased publication in 1893. [Drew 12]

In 1973 the tireless Ann Lohrli provided scholars with a consummate fundamental to who wrote what and for how much in Household Words thanks to her scrupulous analysis of the office account book maintained past Wills. Unfortunately, the account book for All the Year Round has not survived. Every bit John Drew explains,

An 'function prepare' of the journal, in which authors' names and other details were recorded, was available to editor B. W. Matz at the plow of the century, but has since been lost sight of; aside from this, only a highly incomplete and illegible file of correspondence, known as the 'AYR Letter Book' (profiled past Collins 1970), exists to assist researchers. [Drew 11]

Notwithstanding, Ella Ann Oppenlander in a work not easily procured, Dickens'southward "All the Twelvemonth Round": Descriptive Index and Contributor List (1984), has attempted to provide something comparable to Lohrli's piece of work on Household Words.

Some All the Twelvemonth Round Authors

• Robert Buchanan
• Edward Bulwer-Lytton
• Wilkie Collins
• Charles Dickens
• Elizabeth Cleghorn Gaskell
• Charles Lever
• Charles Reade
• Anthony Trollope
• Frances Trollope

Related Cloth

• Iii Reviews of On the Origin of Species in All the Year Round (1860-61)

References

Bentley, Nicholas; Michael Slater, and Nina Burgis. The Dickens Index. Oxford and New York: Oxford U. P., 1990.

Collins, Philip. "The AYR Alphabetic character Book." Victorian Periodicals Review, x, 1970.

Davis, Paul. Charles Dickens A to Z: The Essential Reference to His Life and Work. New York: Checkmark and Facts On File, 1999.

Drew, John. "All the Year Circular" in the Oxford Reader'due south Companion to Dickens, ed. Paul Schlicke. Oxford and New York: Oxford U. P., 1999. Pp. 8-12.

Fido, Martin. The World of Charles Dickens. Vancouver: Raincoast, 1997.

Rosenberg, Edgar. "Launching Keen Expectations." Charles Dickens's Peachy Expectations. New York: Due west. W. Norton, 1999. Pp. 389-423.

Schlicke, Paul. Oxford Reader's Companion to Dickens. Oxford and New York: Oxford U. P., 1999.

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Last modified 22 Apr 2015

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Source: https://victorianweb.org/periodicals/ayr/intro.html

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