IANDAGNALL COMPUTING / ALAMY STOCK PHOTO


Dickens, however, was not long for the


newspaper world. He was a vigorous editor – but only when he got round to editing. John Forster, who had from the first advised


Dickens not to take the job, rapidly came to the conclusion that The Daily News was a bad experience for its editor who would not take advice or accept criticism. “Dickens was so intensely fixed on his own opinion and in his admiration of his own works,” he said. Dickens did not put it like that but he revealed


to Forster that he was planning to resign and return to his previous day job of writing novels. He then had the nerve to inform poor Bradbury and Evans that, given the amount of railway shareholders who had backed the launch, it looked as if the paper was in the grip of Victorian Fat Controllers. (This may have been a good point but it had not prevented him from accepting the job in the first place.) And another thing – the management had been interfering in the hiring of a sub. He then took a two-day break and handed in his resignation. Declaring that he was absolutely worn out, he persuaded Forster to take over as editor.


On the face of it, those 17 issues were a tiny detour on his literary highway; AN Wilson’s recent study, The Mystery of Charles Dickens, contains only two brief references to The Daily News. Yet it was his journalism which enabled him to escape from his impecunious background and move in circles where people earned money from the words they produced.


Dickens was a fierce social reformer and the The Daily News remained a radical one for years. George Bernard Shaw and HG Wells were contributors. In 1901, it was bought by Quaker George Cadbury and campaigned for pensioners and against the Boer War. Merged with the Daily Chronicle in 1930, it remained a radical paper until it was taken over in 1960 by the Daily Mail and its DNA disappeared in the bloodstream of the Daily Dacre.


The best story his paper never covered was


about the most famous Victorian writer in the world, the young actress Ellen Ternan and the lovenest in Peckham. All of this was kept secret for the sake


THE BRITISH LIBRARY


After working as a humble legal clerk, he learnt the dark art of the shorthand which gave him a leg-up to legal reporting and, in time, the parliamentary gallery. His treatment of politicians in his novels feels like revenge for all those speeches he had to endure before rattling back to London by carriage to deliver his copy before The Times reporter filed. The paper he left behind was selling only 4,000 copies a day, one-sixth of the circulation of The Times, and Dickens declared it was not long for this world. In fact, its circulation at one point reached 150,000.


of Dickens’ reputation and, to conceal the detours necessary to visit her in South London, he had to have at his fingertips the details of the journey he would have made if he had taken the train directly to the family home in Essex. Claire Tomalin, whose The Invisible Woman


described the liaison of Ternan and the author, came across the rumour that Dickens had not died, as announced, in his own house but in Peckham. If true, this would mean that Ellen would have had to bundle the body into a horse-drawn cab and whip it away it to Essex, where his death could be safely announced. Think what Dickens could have made of this melodramatic material, in a novel or The Daily News. Sadly, the Inimitable was not in a position to write it.


theJournalist | 17


UNIVERSALIMAGESGROUP


Looking back to:


1846


Page 1  |  Page 2  |  Page 3  |  Page 4  |  Page 5  |  Page 6  |  Page 7  |  Page 8  |  Page 9  |  Page 10  |  Page 11  |  Page 12  |  Page 13  |  Page 14  |  Page 15  |  Page 16  |  Page 17  |  Page 18  |  Page 19  |  Page 20  |  Page 21  |  Page 22  |  Page 23  |  Page 24  |  Page 25  |  Page 26  |  Page 27  |  Page 28