Collaborative Dickens. Melisa Klimaszewski
supposed to be told by a family sitting round the fire. I don’t care about their referring to Christmas at all; nor do I design to connect them together, otherwise than by their names.”2 Dickens’s declaration that he does not aim to “connect” the stories beyond the names might nudge future readers (and scholars) who value the intentionality of an author away from a cohesive approach to the text. That the writers did not discuss a shared strategy for their stories can lead to a view of the numbers as miscellanies—bits of discrete fiction that one can easily pluck apart. Dickens had edited Bentley’s Miscellany from its launch in January 1837 to February 1839 and fostered a much more unified vision for Household Words, but even he might seem to have encouraged a fragmented approach to the Christmas collections when he republished some of his own pieces without all of their original counterparts.3 The form itself, however, and the mandate of the collection titles lead in a different direction; threads of connection between and across all nineteen stories in the two Rounds are abundant. Closely examining the linkages between the stories not only results in stronger textual interpretations but also subverts the notion that Dickens is a figure with a single, stable voice.
Nine authors contribute to A Round of Stories by the Christmas Fire, and each title locates a speaker around the fire while isolating an identifying characteristic. The titles are more complicated than what Dickens describes to White and include nonrelatives, such as the deaf playmate, which evidences a flexible editor adjusting the frame in response to the contributions he receives. The finalized titles also signal that the assembled speakers are not complete strangers without explaining each relationship precisely. Even after some of the narrators address one another, the narrative revels in the ambiguity of this set of relationships. The number’s aesthetic lies partly in its awareness of the rich potentialities embedded in the titles, and the Round even teases its own frame with the broadly titled “Somebody’s Story.” The musical aspect of the collection’s title resonates with the structuring of Dickens’s phenomenally popular A Christmas Carol (1843), whose chapters are called staves, but nine years after the Carol, Dickens imagines singing that is both individual and communal in place of a single song. The initial speaker in a round may contribute an individual voice, but each part in a round can also be sung by the group, and the structure is decidedly circular.4 The fact that voices in a choral round literally overlap encourages readers to break out of a linear mode of reading and invites them to hear the story’s converse.5
The Round’s opening paragraphs immediately draw attention to complicated narrative positioning. “The Poor Relation’s Story” begins:
He was very reluctant to take precedence of so many respected members of the family, by beginning the round of stories they were to relate as they sat in a goodly circle by the Christmas fire; and he modestly suggested that it would be more correct if “John our esteemed host” (whose health he begged to drink) would have the kindness to begin. For, as to himself, he said, he was so little used to lead the way, that really—But as they all cried out here, that he must begin, and agreed with one voice that he might, could, would, and should begin, he left off rubbing his hands, and took his legs out from under his armchair, and did begin. (1)
This narrator’s speech temporarily but conspicuously bridges class divisions within the family as the “poor relation” humbly addresses his wealthier relatives and sets up a model for cross-class storytelling from other speakers. More significantly, the listeners encourage him “with one voice,” increasing the feeling of intimacy and closeness among the future narrators and establishing immediately that their voices will overlap. “The Poor Relation’s Story,” written by Dickens, also shows Dickens enlisting his contributors as cheerleaders; he makes them responsible for his narrator being the one to start the round, casting himself in a modest role that hardly matches his confidence as an artist and as an editor.
Shifting into a first-person voice, Michael (the poor relation) continues to reference “the assembled members of our family,” and understanding the possible relationships between those members becomes increasingly complicated as the round continues (1). The aged poor relation shares a tale in which he fantasizes about the life he might have lived if various people had not treated him poorly. A gullible and benevolent man, Michael loses his professional and personal well-being when his wealthy uncle disowns him for proposing marriage to a woman with no fortune. She marries a rich man instead, and Michael’s business partner takes advantage of his trust to force him out. An opposite trajectory of events constitutes his fantasy, and the tale concludes with the disheartening reality that John, the host, provides Michael’s actual financial support. Moving immediately to another contribution from Dickens that continues to develop family bonds among the storytellers, “The Child’s Story” presents a version of the parable of the seven ages via a traveller who experiences all phases of life in a single compressed day.6 The short piece features no real climax, but its conclusion reminds one of the relationships between listeners. The fictional traveller is surrounded at the end of his journey by the people he has lost to death, and their respectful love for one another leads the child to speculate, “I think the traveller must be yourself, dear Grandfather, because this is what you do to us, and what we do to you” (7). Forecasting his grandfather’s death, the naïve child also makes clear that even the cliché-driven stories in the collection pertain specifically to the family around this particular fire.
The number does not, however, settle into a consistent depiction of those family relationships, as William Moy Thomas’s “Somebody’s Story” remains deliberately vague. Adding to the confusion about which “somebody” tells the story, it is set in Germany with no recognizable characters from the frame. Successful, loyal, and strong, Carl is an apprentice cask maker who must travel to earn enough money to marry Margaret. After building his fortune in a distant town, Carl temporarily loses it when he hides gold pieces in his lucky hammer, which a comedic, monkey-like hired boy drops in the river (10). Carl’s homecoming is therefore subdued, but his luck returns when the gold-filled hammer appears in the river behind Margaret’s house and he is feted for having inadvertently discovered the source of the River Klar. The story’s message—that people should not doubt the honest intentions of hardworking young men with bad luck and that those young men should not rush the pursuit of their dreams—suits the mood of a family gathering at which people of various ages visit. Still, with no articulated link to the family around the fire, one might begin to suspect that the collection’s cohesion is weak, but Elizabeth Gaskell’s “The Old Nurse’s Story” potently brings the frame back to the fore.7
Given the scandalous nature of the family events the nurse relates, questions of relationality add to the story’s mysterious Gothic atmosphere. The nursemaid begins, “You know, my dears, that your mother was an orphan, and an only child; and I dare say you have heard that your grandfather was a clergyman up in Westmoreland, where I come from” (11). The mother to whom the nurse refers is Miss Rosamond, just a girl in the story, but we do not know for which people present she is a mother. The nurse, Hester, tends to the orphaned Rosamond in a household with the elderly Grace Furnivall and a few servants. Hester immediately senses the danger of the place when she hears booming music emanating from a broken organ, and Rosamond subsequently disappears during a heavy snowfall. Hester finds a shepherd carrying the child’s almost frozen body and learns from the revived Rosamond that another little girl tempts her outside then takes her to a weeping woman beneath a holly tree, where that woman lulls her to sleep (15–16). These figures are the ghosts of Grace’s sister (Maude) and her daughter, who froze to death when the former Lord Furnivall cast Maude from the house after discovering from her envious sister that she secretly married a “foreign musician” and had been hiding their child (17–18). Hester learns this history “not long before Christmas Day” (17) when she herself sees the spectre of the child, and at the end of the story, the ghosts of Lord Furnivall, Maude, and the girl appear to the entire household, reenacting the scene of Maude’s banishment. When Grace sees her own “phantom” take shape, “stony and deadly serene” in youth, shock and shame send her to her deathbed, muttering the story’s final words: “What is done in youth can never be undone in age!” (20).
The story’s account of bad behavior on the parts of both sisters and Lord Furnivall raises questions about the nurse’s motive and tone as she