The Key of the Street

Abstract

The title of George Augustus Sala’s first article in Dickens’ Household Words points to the connections between urban life, Victorian print culture, and the rapidly evolving nature and role of the periodical press in the middle decades of the nineteenth century that are the focus of both of these two books. In their exploration of these subjects, both Peter Blake’s George Augustus Sala and Mary L. Shannon’s Dickens, Reynolds, and Mayhew on Wellington Street make extensive use of a wide range of visual materials, and both authors, Shannon especially, have been well-served by their publisher in the quantity and quality of the images they are able to include. The most basic difference between the two authors’ approaches, however, is encapsulated in their very divergent readings of the one illustration that they have in common: Cruikshank’s vignette for the title page of Sketches by Boz, which shows the artist and Dickens ascending in a balloon, waving flags to a cheering crowd that watches them from the ground below.