Collaborative Dickens. Melisa Klimaszewski
collaborators’ styles, George A. Sala’s “What Christmas Is in the Company of John Doe” was reprinted in Harper’s with Dickens identified as its author, and as late as 1971, the New York Times printed it as “Christmas with John Doe” by Charles Dickens.26 The story contrasts its predecessors with a refreshingly bleak declaration at its opening: “I have kept (amongst a store of jovial, genial, heart-stirring returns of the season) some very dismal Christmases” (11). Thomas Prupper then recounts terrible situations that have accompanied the holiday and details the year when he was arrested for debt on Christmas Eve. Although the prison inmates celebrate with traditional fare, Prupper cannot enjoy eating in such a hopeless place: “But what were beef and beer, what was unlimited tobacco, or even the plum pudding, when made from prison plums, boiled in a prison copper, and eaten in a prison dining-room?” (15). Once released, Prupper spends New Year’s Day with “a pretty cousin” who becomes his wife, and he concludes the story by demonstrating that the legacy of his brief incarceration brings no shame; rather, he jokes openly about not naming their first child after the prison (16). Sala’s vision may have shaped Dickens’s imagination, as the dismal atmosphere of prison saturating Prupper’s mindset resonates with Arthur Clennam’s experience in Dickens’s Little Dorrit (1855–57), whose title character is not named for a prison but is born in one. The story of John Doe takes on even greater significance in beginning to treat serious or distressing situations as appropriate Christmas topics.
Depicting the least nostalgic Christmas experience of the collection, Miss Eliza Griffiths’s “The Orphan’s Dream of Christmas” moves the number toward the types of pieces that characterize future Christmas numbers as Dickens abandons the concept of using stories simply to list “What Christmas Is” and approaches storytelling as a communal act that unites readers, listeners, and tellers even across boundaries of life and death. Sala’s story maintains a cheerful, sometimes self-mocking tone that leads to a happy ending, but Griffiths’s verse does not find its way to uplifting cheer. The poem opens with a solitary, weeping eight-year-old girl looking out of a workhouse window on Christmas Eve (16). Her parents and siblings have all died, and she dreams of death, Heaven, and Jesus—only to die herself at some point during the night. This verse indirectly challenges Dickens’s opening formulation of welcoming denizens of “the City of the Dead” to the fireside in “What Christmas Is as We Grow Older” by describing the Christmas of a family who is not fortunate enough to age at all.
Focusing on another orphan, Samuel Sidney’s “What Christmas Is After a Long Absence” changes the number’s tone yet again with a tale of emigration to South Australia that harkens back to the colonial emphasis of the first Christmas number. Facing greater obstacles than anticipated in the unfamiliar landscape, Charles imagines himself “constantly in danger from savage blacks” (17). He lists indigenous human beings alongside animals such as dingoes, uses “rude words, and even blows” to discipline his workers, and fears “the wild mountainous songs of the fierce aborigines, as they danced their corrobberies, and acted dramas representing the slaughter of the white man, and the plunder of his cattle” (18). Reinforcing the idyllically white “country” places of Martineau’s contribution, Charles is lonely when Christmas comes around and comforts himself with memories of “the Christmas time of dear old England” (18). Sixteen years later, having made the natives “tame” in his part of the bush colony, Charles returns home to search for a wife (19). Welcomed heartily, he glories especially in the “delicate-complexioned” women, appreciating a “fair white face” above all else and in contrast to his own suntanned skin (18–19). Returning to Australia with a new wife and about twenty relations, the Christmas visit enables Charles to expand the imperial project while escaping the class snobbery of England (20).
Pretension remains identified as a national flaw in Theodore Buckley’s “What Christmas Is If You Outgrow It,” but the lack of framing continues to challenge the 1851 number’s pace right up to its conclusion. Buckley’s story presents a plot that future Christmas number stories will repeat: an ungrateful son rises in social stature above his parents, then disloyally takes them for granted. Horace DeLisle, son of a respected country parson, becomes increasingly arrogant while away at school as he falls into debt and neglects his studies. His debauched character manifests most hurtfully when he leaves home before Christmas to resume carousing with friends. The story does not follow Horace to his implicit demise, ending instead with the general caution, “You may be quite sure that you have grown too fast, when you find that you have outgrown Christmas. It is a very bad sign indeed” (23). The number then concludes with another contribution from Horne, “The Round Game of the Christmas Bowl,” which comes “originally, from Fairy-Land” (23). Players convene to toss symbols of pride into a huge bowl of ice, which liberates them from troubles, and as they dance and sing, “the heat of the Christmas hearts outside causes the Offering which each has thrown in, to warm to such a genial glow, that the heat thus collectively generated, melts the ice” (24). The stress on communal offerings and the effect of the collaboratively produced heat then shifts suddenly (and rather mind-bendingly) back to the individual as the melted water transports participants home to the beds in which they dream (24).
So ends the 1851 Christmas number in a vision of individual Christmas happiness enabled by communal endeavor. Although the 1851 number is, as a collection, fairly weak in quality because of the redundant Christmas fantasies, this concluding story connects directly to the opening piece for 1850, which links individual memories of childhood to the notion that a stranger may be observing and judging one’s Christmastime recollections. The 1850 number establishes important foundations and traditions from which the future numbers consistently draw but that the 1851 number does not necessarily enhance, leading one to feel a keen need for the kind of narrative organization that Dickens devises for 1852. Had the numbers stagnated as loose assemblages of fairly random thoughts about Christmas, their future would probably have been limited and unimpressive. Beginning in 1852, however, the framing that emerges significantly advances what the multivocal collections are able to accomplish.
2
Reading in Circles: From Numbers to Rounds
(1852–53)
A Round of Stories by the Christmas Fire (1852) and Another Round of Stories by the Christmas Fire (1853) are the first Christmas numbers for which Dickens uses a loose concept to hold the contributions together. Although the Christmas fire acts as a reliably familiar symbol, the relationships of the people telling tales around it and the stories of the Rounds are fraught with complication. The contributions for the two Rounds, which come from thirteen authors, range from parables to ghost stories to poems of intense loss. Each piece bears the title of its teller: the host, the guest, the schoolboy, and Uncle George, for instance. In drawing upon oral storytelling modes with the round structure, Dickens creates a narrative atmosphere in which collaboration exists as part of a repetitive, polyphonic form.
Attention to the complicated narrative structure of these numbers reveals a Dickens whose contributors’ voices often destabilize his own. Considering the vocal qualities of the round as a form illuminates a new interpretive angle for the musical metaphor in Dickens’s role as the “conductor” of Household Words. Calling the 1852 and 1853 collections Rounds also implies a circular form that links each segment to the others through the others; this circle has a center, but its top changes depending on the tilt of one’s ear. Laurel Brake speaks of the periodical press “articulating eloquently . . . a cacophony of presence and absence.”1 The sometimes-jarring juxtapositions of tales in these collections can certainly feel cacophonous, and the loudest voices in the din sometimes come from the unnamed contributors. Those names may have been absent from the title page, but the noise that they make, and their existence as part of the “Dickens” of the Christmas numbers, prompts one to reconsider the pitch of that iconic voice.
A Round of Stories by the Christmas Fire
The first Christmas number to have a unique title, the 1852 compilation suggests that a blaze for the holiday might differ uniquely from other fires, but for its content, Dickens seems to have realized that the previous numbers had exhausted the numbers’ ability to keep specifically Christmas-themed writing interesting. In a letter to Reverend