The digitisation of the Household Words Almanac is the result of a collaboration between Dickens Journals Online and the British Library, to whom we are grateful for the supply of the high resolution images presented here. The original machine-reading of the text (OCR) was carried out by Dickens Journals Online, and the resulting transcript has been patiently corrected by volunteers participating in our Online Text Correction project. Copyright in the corrected text is made freely available by Dickens Journals Online. Permisssion must be sought from the British Library for reproduction of the page images, via djo@buckingham.ac.uk.

The Household Words Almanac was a fourpenny calendar and factual guide to annual, seasonal, domestic, and national affairs, illuminated with decorative woodcuts, devised and first compiled by Henry Morley for the year 1856. It was intended to join the parent publication and its monthly supplement, The Household Narrative of Currents Events, to complete a suite of publications  that would form a comprehensive, cheap, and widely-available compendium to the life of the times. Unlike the Narrative’s expressly linear march through time, the Almanac emphasized the cyclical nature of life.

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