In order to make literature more accessible and affordable to the general public, Charles Dickens founded a weekly, literary magazine in early 1850. Titled Household Words, the magazine was published every Saturday from March 1850 until May 1859, and sold for just twopence per issue. For the content of his magazine, Dickens needed literary contributors, and one of the first authors he approached was Elizabeth Gaskell. Dickens had asked Gaskell to join his project, being impressed with her first novel Mary Barton (1848), which dealt with similar themes he explored in his own novels, such as poverty and class conflict. Gaskell accepted his offer and became a regular contributor, her novels Cranford (1851-1853) and North and South (1854-1855) later serialised in the magazine.
Despite a positive start, the relationship between Dickens and Gaskell ultimately proved complicated. As Cranford was being serialised, it soon became clear to Gaskell that periodical writing didn't suit her. She preferred to work at her own pace and found it stressful having to meet deadlines and being urged by Dickens to submit her work. Cracks soon began to show in Gaskell's relationship with Dickens and eventually deepened during the serialisation of North and South. As editor, Dickens wanted full control over what was published in his magazine, while Gaskell sought artistic freedom in her writing. She resented Dickens' editorial interference and his insistence that she shorten her work. (Dickens had complained about the story being "wearisome to the last degree".) Gaskell had originally planned for 22 installments of her novel to appear in the magazine but was compelled to compress it into 20. With the completion of North and South, the intense collaboration between her and Dickens eventually came to an end, although she continued to contribute to Household Words and its successor, All the Year Round (with short stories). Gaskell chose to have her final novel, Wives and Daughters, serialised in The Cornhill Magazine (from 1864 to 1866), under the less demanding editorship of William Thackeray.
Incidentally, Gaskell wanted North and South to be named after its heroine, Margaret Hale, but Dickens insisted upon the title North and South. Today, the novel is one of Gaskell's best known and most popular books, along with Cranford and Wives and Daughters.
Shown below are two letters from Dickens to Gaskell, the first written before the start of their collaboration —in which he asks her to contribute to his journal— followed by a letter written after Gaskell had finished North and South. In the second letter, Dickens dismisses Gaskell’s genuine frustration during the writing process as merely a "non-lucid interval of dissatisfaction ...".
Devonshire Terrace, January 31st, 1850.
My dear Mrs. Gaskell,
You may perhaps have seen an announcement in the papers of my intention to start a new cheap weekly journal of general literature.
I do not know what your literary vows of temperance or abstinence may be, but as I do honestly know that there is no living English writer whose aid I would desire to enlist in preference to the authoress of "Mary Barton" (a book that most profoundly affected and impressed me), I venture to ask you whether you can give me any hope that you will write a short tale, or any number of tales, for the projected pages.
No writer's name will be used, neither my own nor any other; every paper will be published without any signature, and all will seem to express the general mind and purpose of the journal, which is the raising up of those that are down, and the general improvement of our social condition. I should set a value on your help which your modesty can hardly imagine; and I am perfectly sure that the least result of your reflection or observation in respect of the life around you, would attract attention and do good.
Of course I regard your time as valuable, and consider it so when I ask you if you could devote any of it to this purpose.
If you could and would prefer to speak to me on the subject, I should be very glad indeed to come to Manchester for a few hours and explain anything you might wish to know. My unaffected and great admiration of your book makes me very earnest in all relating to you. Forgive my troubling you for this reason, and believe me ever,
Faithfully yours.
P.S.—Mrs. Dickens and her sister send their love.
Tavistock House, Twenty-seventh January, 1855
My dear Mrs. Gaskell,
Let me congratulate you on the conclusion of your story; not because it is the end of a task to which you had conceived a dislike (for I imagine you to have got the better of that delusion by this time), but because it is the vigorous and powerful accomplishment of an anxious labour. It seems to me that you have felt the ground thoroughly firm under your feet, and have strided on with a force and purpose that MUST now give you pleasure.
You will not, I hope, allow that non-lucid interval of dissatisfaction with yourself (and me?), which beset you for a minute or two once upon a time, to linger in the shape of any disagreeable association with Household Words. I shall still look forward to the large sides of paper, and shall soon feel disappointed if they don't begin to reappear.
I thought it best that Willis [assistant editor] should write the business letter on the conclusion of the story, as that part of our communications had always previously rested with him. I trust you found it satisfactory? I refer to it, not as a matter of mere form, but because I sincerely wish everything between us to be beyond the possibility of misunderstanding or reservation.
Dear Mrs. Gaskell,
Very faithfully yours.
Source first letter:
The Letters of Charles Dickens, Vol. 1, 1833-1856, by Charles Dickens, edited by his Sister-In-Law & Eldest Daughter (1880)
Via:
Project Gutenberg
Source second letter: The letters of Charles Dickens, 1833-1870, by Charles Dickens (1923)
Image: Charles Dickens ca. 1852, about age 40; Elizabeth Gaskell (by George Richmond) in 1851, aged 41
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