The name that we have chosen for this publication expresses, generally,
the desire we have at heart in originating it.
We aspire to live in the Household affections, and to be numbered among
the Household thoughts, of our readers. We hope to be the comrade and
friend of many thousands of people, of both sexes, and of all ages and
conditions, on whose faces we may never look. We seek to bring into
innumerable homes, from the stirring world around us, the knowledge of
many social wonders, good and evil, that are not calculated to render
any of us less ardently persevering in ourselves, less tolerant of one
another, less faithful in the progress of mankind, less thankful for
the privilege of living in this summer-dawn of time.
No mere utilitarian spirit, no iron binding of the mind to grim
realities, will give a harsh tone to our Household Words. In the bosoms
of the young and old, of the well-to-do and of the poor, we would
tenderly cherish that light of Fancy which is inherent in the human
breast; which, according to its nurture, burns with an inspiring flame,
or sinks into a sullen glare, but which (or woe betide that day!) can
never be extinguished. To show to all, that in all familiar things,
even in those which are repellant on the surface, there is Romance
enough, if we will find it out:—to teach the hardest workers at this
whirling wheel of toil, that their lot is not necessarily a moody,
brutal fact, excluded from the sympathies and graces of imagination; to
bring the greater and the lesser in degree, together, upon that wide
field, and mutually dispose them to a better acquaintance and a kinder
understanding—is one main object of our Household Words.
The mightier inventions of this age are not, to our thinking, all
material, but have a kind of souls in their stupendous bodies which may
find expression in Household Words. The traveller whom we accompany
on his railroad or his steamboat journey, may gain, we hope, some
compensation for incidents which these later generations have outlived,
in new associations with the Power that bears him onward; with the
habitations and the ways of life of crowds of his fellow creatures
among whom he passes like the wind; even with the towering chimneys
he may see, spirting out fire and smoke upon the prospect. The swart
giants, Slaves of the Lamp of Knowledge, have their thousand and one
tales, no less than the Genii of the East; and these, in all their
wild, grotesque, and fanciful aspects, in all their many phases
of endurance, in all their many moving lessons of compassion and
consideration, we design to tell.
Our Household Words will not be echoes of the present time alone, but
of the past too. Neither will they treat of the hopes, the enterprises,
triumphs, joys, and sorrows, of this country only, but, in some degree,
of those of every nation upon earth. For nothing can be a source of
real interest in one of them, without concerning all the rest.
We have considered what an ambition it is to be admitted into many
homes with affection and confidence; to be regarded as a friend
by children and old people; to be thought of in affliction and in
happiness; to people the sick room with airy shapes ‘that give delight
and hurt not,’ and to be associated with the harmless laughter and
the gentle tears of many hearths. We know the great responsibility of
such a privilege; its vast reward; the pictures that it conjures up,
in hours of solitary labour, of a multitude moved by one sympathy; the
solemn hopes which it awakens in the labourer’s breast, that he may
be free from self-reproach in looking back at last upon his work, and
that his name may be remembered in his race in time to come, and borne
by the dear objects of his love with pride. The hand that writes these
faltering lines, happily associated with _some_ Household Words before
to-day, has known enough of such experiences to enter in an earnest
spirit upon this new task, and with an awakened sense of all that it
involves.
Some tillers of the field into which we now come, have been before
us, and some are here whose high usefulness we readily acknowledge,
and whose company it is an honour to join. But, there are others
here—Bastards of the Mountain, draggled fringe on the Red Cap, Panders
to the basest passions of the lowest natures—whose existence is a
national reproach. And these, we should consider it our highest service
to displace.
Thus, we begin our career! The adventurer in the old fairy story,
climbing towards the summit of a steep eminence on which the object of
his search was stationed, was surrounded by a roar of voices, crying
to him, from the stones in the way, to turn back. All the voices _we_
hear, cry Go on! The stones that call to us have sermons in them, as
the trees have tongues, as there are books in the running brooks, as
there is good in everything! They, and the Time, cry out to us Go on!
With a fresh heart, a light step, and a hopeful courage, we begin the
journey. The road is not so rough that it need daunt our feet: the way
is not so steep that we need stop for breath, and, looking faintly
down, be stricken motionless. Go on, is all we hear, Go on! In a glow
already, with the air from yonder height upon us, and the inspiriting
voices joining in this acclamation, we echo back the cry, and go on
cheerily!