Journalism and Fiction: The Education Debate in Household Words and Selected Novels by Charles Dickens

The relationship between journalism, fiction and education are examined through the important contribution of Charles Dickens’s novels and Household Words to the on-going debate about schools, pedagogy and teachers. By drawing on primary and secondary literary and historical sources, I argue that alongside his treatment of education in his novels more importance needs to be given to progressive ideas that Dickens advanced directly as author or co-author of articles, or indirectly as ‘conductor’ of Household Words. The importance of education was evidenced by the fact that over the lifetime of Household Words, one thousand articles or references were devoted to the subject. Dickens’s pre-eminent status in Victorian England and the wider world meant that he contributed enormously to raising the profile and literary quality of the education debate among a diverse and wide English reading audience. Liberal, crusading journalism associated with Household Words was aimed at revealing abuses in private schools, which could be established by anyone without a teaching qualification or even a rudimentary knowledge of pedagogical theories and practices. Educational themes are examined in Dombey and Son, David Copperfield and Hard Times; fictional representations of education which made an important contribution to the reform agenda in Victorian England.