Download `Russia in its shirt-sleeves`: Sala`s `A Journey

‘Much of Sala, and but little of Russia’: ‘A Journey Due North’, Household Words
and the birth of a special correspondent
Catherine Waters
University of Kent
When Dickens sent George Augustus Sala as a special correspondent to Russia just
after the end of the Crimean War, he launched him in what was to become his bestknown role as a journalist. For the preceding five years (as he later claimed), Sala had
been idling away his days in ‘Lazy-land,’ as ‘a slovenly, careless young ne’er-doweel,’ characterised by ‘a liking for vagabondising, sauntering, and treading
obviously and disgracefully unprofitable paths’ (The Life and Adventures of George
Augustus Sala (1896), 258-9). His ‘Lotus-eating’ was brought to an end when he
convinced Dickens that, following the cessation of hostilities, ‘the British reading
public would like to know something about Russia itself, its manners, and social
usages.’ He embarked in April 1856 for fifteen weeks to write ‘a series of descriptive
essays touching Muscovy and the Muscovites, in the pages of Household Words’
(278).
Comprising twenty-two articles which appeared in weekly instalments from 4
October 1856 to 14 March 1857, Sala’s series begins with accounts of the
transportation, communication and security networks that variously assist or impede
his progress ‘due north.’ However, not surprisingly, given the predilections already
evinced in his earlier contributions to Household Words, his keenest observations are
reserved for the spectacle of the streets and bazaars of St Petersburg. His essays are of
interest not only for their representation of one of the significant geographical and
cultural ‘others’ of the mid-Victorian imagination, but for their distinctive style,
which is vibrant and polyglot, eschewing political analysis and statistical information
in favour of the flâneur’s ‘gastronomy of the eye’ (as Balzac called it) – the vivid
metropolitan travel writing so popular with mid-nineteenth-century readers. While
criticised by some as ‘Dickensy’ mannerism, this colourful, descriptive style is an
important characterising feature of special correspondence, cultivated to represent
unseen people and events long before the advent of photojournalism, and blurring the
boundaries between literature and journalism at a time when these discourses were in
the process of professional and disciplinary formation. Like much of his later
journalism, Sala’s series was subsequently republished in a single volume (in August
1858), thus transferring his writing from the pages of the periodical to a book, and this
fact in itself says something important about the ambiguous positioning of special
correspondence in the print culture of his day.
This paper will explore ‘A Journey Due North’ as a pilot for a larger study of the role
of special correspondence in Victorian print culture and its significance for the
developing relationship between literature and journalism.