Charles Dickens and The Morning Chronicle newspaper.

The Morning Chronicle.The Circumlocution Office2018-10-31T14:54:17+00:00

The Morning Chronicle was a London based newspaper which gave the Victorian author Charles Dickens his first paid writing job.

History.

The Morning Chronicle was a newspaper founded in 1769 in London, England,and published under various owners until 1862, when its publication was suspended. There was two subsequent attempts at continued publication.

From 28 June 1769 to March 1789 it was published under the name The Morning Chronicle and London Advertiser. From 1789 to its final publication in 1865 it was published under the name The Morning Chronicle.

Charles Dickens and The Morning Chronicle.

Charles Dickens was engaged to write for The Morning Chronicle in August 1834, under the editorship of John Black. It was his first regular paid salary for writing.

Dickens was employed primarily as a parliamentary reporter. He would travel the country to report on political speeches, often getting about by coach and horses as this time was before the railways.

The Morning Chronicle was a liberal publication and John Black was a supporter of social reform. His paper was a rival to the more conservative newspaper The Times. It was whilst working at The Morning Chronicle that Dickens was encouraged to write about subjects he took an interest in and he began publishing short stories under the pseudonym ‘Boz’.

George Hogarth.

It was whilst working at The Morning Chronicle that Charles Dickens met George Hogarth, his future father-in-law. Hogarth had previously been editor of a provincial newspaper in Halifax but moved to the The Morning Chronicle as music and drama editor, around the turn of 1833 – 1834. By June of 1834 the remainder of the Hogarth family had moved down to London to be with him, settling on a semi-rural location at Queen’s Elm, off the Fulham Road, Brompton.

Sister Paper.

In January 1835, The Morning Chronicle produced a sister paper, The Evening Chronicle, which Dickens would also go on to write for.

Future.

Charles Dickens would carry on writing for The Morning Chronicle until 1836, when he resigned – following the success of the publication of Sketches by Boz and The Pickwick Papers – to concentrate on his own writing. In 1846 he set up a rival newspaper, The Daily News.