Opposition and government benches both full legislators smugly quiet, attentive, and approving while our orator, who is tediously fluent, well dressed, and self-complacent, pours forth his shameless aspersions against those who have borne disinterested testimony to the truth. It is a noble and instructive sight to look down upon from our snug perch in the House of Commons while this genial remark is made. These were the condition of the Strand Union workhouse, and the deaths of the paupers Daly and Gibson. Further, lest any public writer should misunderstand his meaning, he is kind enough to particularise the cases to which sensation writing has been applied. The newspapers have, he says, written “sensationally” upon workhouse mismanagement, and an interest “wholly disproportionate to the circumstances” has been roused in the public mind. The Right Honourable Mr Gathorne Hardy, the President of the Poor Law Board, has a grievance. Below, we publish the piece - originally entitled ‘What Is Sensational?’ – which remains a great example of passionate reporting still relevant, still an inspiration to anyone who sees their role as giving a voice to those who cannot be heard. But from the newly studied margin notes, it now seems that Dickens not only supplied the idea but was chief author of the polemic. One of the most spectacular essays – an attack on a complacent establishment that could tolerate the appalling state of poor relief – had previously been attributed to one Joseph Parkinson, and presumed to be only a commission from the great man of letters. As The Independent revealed on Monday, a bound collection of the 19th century magazine ‘All the Year Round’, annotated by its editor Charles Dickens, has yielded the names of the articles’ anonymous authors among them Lewis Carroll, Elizabeth Gaskell and Dickens himself.
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