Collaborative Dickens. Melisa Klimaszewski
“You know what the spirit of the Christmas number is. When I suggested the stories being about a highwayman, I got hold of that idea as being an adventurous one, including various kinds of wrong, expressing a state of society no longer existing among us, and pleasant to hear (therefore) from an old man. Now, your highwayman not being a real highwayman after all, the kind of suitable Christmas interest I meant to awaken in the story is not in it.”22 What is the “spirit” that Dickens feels should characterize this number so strongly? Dickens’s piece for the 1851 Christmas issue defines it as “the spirit of active usefulness, perseverance, cheerful discharge of duty, kindness, and forbearance” (1). Alternatively, he could be referencing the “Carol philosophy”: his idea that compassion for others should guide people’s interactions all year long and the belief that drawing upon memories, even sorrowful ones, will restore proper moral principles.23 Apparently, White either did not understand why his story—which indeed exhibits kindness, forbearance, and traits of the “Carol philosophy”—failed to meet expectations, or he did not care to exemplify his understanding with a new tale. The story Dickens claims is a poor fit is the one that he prints, allowing the visions of others to continue shaping the “spirit” of the numbers.
The relationships among storytellers continue to join the Round’s pieces in circular fashion as Edmund Saul Dixon’s “The Charwoman’s Story” begins with a servant figure complaining about her inclusion: “A person is flustered by being had up into the dining-room for to drink merry Christmases and them (though wishing, I am sure, to every party present as many as would be agreeable to their own selves), and it an’t easy rightly to remember at a moment’s notice what a person did see in the ghostly way” (25). Displaced from her usual position downstairs, the charwoman does not regard inclusion in the family circle as an honor but rather as an anxiety-producing burden because she is expected to wish people she serves a merry Christmas and to perform for them “at a moment’s notice.” Put on the spot with the imperative of telling a ghost story, the charwoman blames the “Nurse” for telling the “ladies” that she is in possession of such an account, creating tension between the two servant figures (who act as the fourth and seventh narrators) and reminding readers that both stories associated with servants deal with supernatural topics (25). The charwoman’s brief ghost story tells of how her colleague Thomas accurately foretells their employer’s death when he hears an alderman’s distinct step at what they later learn was the moment the alderman died several miles away. More poignant than the idea of the haunting, however, is the way in which Dixon’s story about the jarring quality of a noise dovetails into Harriet Martineau’s story, which explores hearing from a much different perspective.
In a collection whose title alludes to overlapping voices, whose genre almost demands cacophony, Martineau’s “The Deaf Playmate’s Story” forces one to ponder the absence of voices. As a child struggles to understand that he is losing his hearing, thinking that others are suddenly treating him meanly for no reason that he can perceive, he acts out violently and loses his friends. Even the adults in his life fail to realize that he is becoming deaf. The speaker of Martineau’s story is that child, never named and therefore identified primarily by his lack of hearing.24 The deaf boy is the playmate of Charley Felkin, but because he never addresses Charley directly and identifies Charley as well as his own family with third-person references, the playmate does not seem to be in the presence of those people. The family around the fire, then, is not the Felkin family, nor is it the family of the deaf playmate, so we do not know why the deaf child spends time with the other narrators; the reader is left to wonder whether the deaf boy is in the company of strangers, extended family, the doctor who treats him kindly in the story, or friends. That ambiguity about the child’s location not only heightens his potential vulnerability as a narrator but also forces readers to continue puzzling over the relationships among the storytellers.
The most difficult questions the story raises pertain to the way one should comprehend a deaf child’s role in a verbal round. Up to this point, the round structure has suggested that each speaker may overlap with the previous one(s) and that something or someone gives a cue to commence. When a story begins without comment on the transition between narrators, the round structure invites the reader to imagine a head nod, eye contact, or some other nonverbal gesture to indicate which person will speak next. Those gestures would reach the deaf playmate, but the content of the previous narrators’ stories would not. Storytellers in a round might adjust the beginning of a tale depending on how the previous speaker has concluded, or a particular detail might suddenly seem humorous when juxtaposed with an earlier tale and merit an altered style of delivery. For the deaf playmate, however, even if he understands nonverbal cues passing among the fireside company, none of the interactions pertaining to events narrated in previous stories would reach him. His first words to the assembled group boldly declare, “I don’t know how you have all managed, or what you have been telling” (27). One speaker explicitly acknowledging his exclusion from the conversational nature of the round might raise doubts about whether the previous stories really do have any significance. The import of “The Deaf Playmate’s Story” lies in its raising of this question rather than in proposed answers, and Dickens may have been especially comfortable with such questions given his own inclusion of “the deaf gentleman” as a key member of the storytelling group in Master Humphrey’s Clock more than a decade earlier.25 The deaf playmate suffers as much from the ignorance of adults as from his inability to hear. Early in his experiences of deafness, before he understands what is happening, the playmate reacts aggressively to changes in his hearing and kills an innocent dove, spotlighting the high stakes involved in suiting one’s method of communication to one’s audience. That point resonates strongly with a group of storytellers as the child becomes a source of wisdom. “The Deaf Playmate’s Story” holds as much weight as the stories narrated by adults, forcing the adults to reflect upon how exactly they decode the signs of others and lending a self-reflexive layer to the Round.
Reinforcing communal feeling around the fire and his sense of acceptance, the deaf boy concludes, “How you all nod, and agree with me!,” and the lack of transition to the next story makes “the guest” seem less integrated into the group (30). Samuel Sidney’s “The Guest’s Story” abruptly begins, “About twenty years ago, I was articled clerk in the small seaport town of Muddleborough” (30). The guest then explains how a one-handed Irishman, Peter, cons the entire town out of its money by promising to use their investments to go to Portugal and retrieve a buried treasure (31–32). After Peter disappears, misery and regret ensue, but justice catches up to Peter when he tries to take advantage of an American, who shoots him (33). Only by looking at the collection as a whole does one notice the connection between “The Guest’s Story” and “The Host’s Story.” The host warns against taking advantage of hospitality, while the guest’s tale stresses misplaced confidence and the penalty of death for those who scheme in the face of generosity. Seeing the link not only adds interest to each story but also uncovers a conversation that is audible only in the original context of collaboration.
Concluding the collection, Eliza Griffiths’s “The Mother’s Story” continues to complicate questions of narrative voice and challenges the primacy of the text’s “conductor.”26 Griffiths’s poem depicts an interracial romance sympathetically, criticizing racial persecution and the destruction of family bonds in South America. Leena, the protagonist, is the orphan of an indigenous woman and a white hunter. Her solicitous care of Claude d’Estrelle, a Frenchman she discovers dying in the forest, leads to their marriage, but once Claude dies, his relatives mistreat her. The poem simultaneously emphasizes a highly idealized maternal love and Leena’s color, comparing her “brown cheek” to a “crimson streak” and taking Dickens’s voices across geographic, racial, and gender boundaries (34). That this is “The Mother’s Story” aligns Griffiths with the immediate speaker in the round. The “Mother” repeats a tale that an old male traveller, who also appears in the story, told her by this very same fireside. She thus appropriates a man’s voice that has already appropriated a woman’s. The entire poem is spoken in the “I” voice, and with the exception of the introductory stanza, that “I” is the male traveller even though Leena’s trials, not those of the traveller, guide the plot. Leena never controls her own story; it is the presumably white-identified mother around the fireside in England who