Collaborative Dickens. Melisa Klimaszewski
voice is both the “Mother’s” and Dickens’s, and her piece strategically essentializes maternity in a manner that advocates for cross-racial female solidarity and condemns oppressive men. When Leena seeks shelter with Claude’s brother, he insists that she leave the children with him so that they can “outgrow” and forget the shame he associates with their indigenous heritage (34). The uncle steals the children from a resistant Leena and bribes a tribe to enslave her. Most striking is the fact that the poem’s portrayal of the maternal takes place in the complete absence of white-identified women in the story, focusing on the experiences of multiracial women and other women of color. Leena is able to escape enslavement when maternal solidarity leads an indigenous woman to liberate her, but Claude’s brother sends her back into slavery on a “wild plantation” (35) in Africa from which it takes her twenty years to flee.27 Upon returning home, Leena cannot track down her son, but she finds her daughter wedded to a wealthy white man. The melodramatic conclusion of the number revolves around this extremely troubled reunion. Whether Leena’s daughter understands herself to be multiracial is unclear. Once she recognizes her mother, their interaction is strained and truncated because they hear the footfall of her husband, a man she truly loves but whom she, “Fair” and with “auburn hair,” has married as a white woman (35). The young woman knows that her husband’s “title high / Would ne’er to Indian blood ally” (35), so she tells her mother that they may never meet again. Leena departs in fear and, true to the strained coincidences of nineteenth-century sensation fiction, discovers (after two nights of sleeping in the snow) a house of worship where her son is preaching about undying maternal love. Before the concluding tableaux of Leena and her grandchildren appears, Leena’s regretful daughter sends for her, and their deathbed reunion shows that the path to heaven lies with other women of color. The cost of not having seen that truth kills Leena’s daughter, and the poem’s final lines nearly deify Leena: “A very presence from above, / That simple woman’s faith and love” (36).
What do we make of the fact that the number closes with Griffiths’s words? Initially, Dickens had considered Martineau’s piece about the deaf boy to be the ideal final story, telling Wills, “For the last story in the Xmas No. it will be great. I couldn’t wish for a better.”28 At that date, Dickens had not yet read Gaskell’s story, and we do not know whether he had read Griffiths’s contribution. He may have decided at a later date that Griffiths’s story was an even better concluding piece than Martineau’s, or, especially if Wills disagreed about the placement of Martineau’s story, Dickens may have changed his mind. Whatever the decision-making process, Griffiths’s poet’s voice assumes the authority to conclude the number as a whole, and readers must ponder the negotiation of power between this nearly anonymous woman writer, her fictionalized woman of color, and the white men publishing a journal that builds its audience with the story. I do not see an articulated set of points in Griffiths’s piece that Dickens would have found repulsive, but this story’s take on matters of race differs from Dickens’s often-hostile depictions of racially othered groups.29 Although we know almost nothing about the relationship between Griffiths and Dickens, the collaborative practices of Household Words as a literary enterprise establish that, in Griffiths’s case, the voices of women collaborators become Dickens’s own voice even if he does not like what they say. And as the histories of Gaskell’s and White’s stories for this same number demonstrate, Dickens does not always use the Christmas number as a place to insist on his will over all others. In these ways, Dickens’s editing, collating, and framing are also a form of collaborative authorship—a form that he simultaneously controls and to which he submits. This model of collaboration differs distinctly from the type that has been delineated in most scholarship on Dickens’s collaborative ventures, and it continues in the following year.
Another Round of Stories by the Christmas Fire
Dickens is so pleased with the effect of the 1852 Round that he writes to Elizabeth Gaskell on April 13, 1853, to let her know that he has already decided to structure the next number “on the plan of the last” and to solicit her work for it.30 Another Round of Stories by the Christmas Fire both acknowledges an existing audience from the 1852 number and informs new readers of its predecessor’s existence. The second Round contains pieces named for the following speakers: the schoolboy, the old lady, the angel, the squire, Uncle George, the Colonel, the scholar, nobody, and “over the way,” a nickname for the person living at that location. Sharing the first Round’s potentialities for cross-speaking within a single number, Another Round consistently includes family bonds that extend beyond the biological. The interpretive possibilities expand even further when one views the two collections in relation to each other. A complicated chorus exists within each Round, and those choruses subsequently combine in endlessly rich pairings. “Somebody’s Story” in the first Round is answered by “Nobody’s Story” in the second, but they do not occupy the same position in each. The title of “The Old Lady’s Story” echoes “The Old Nurse’s Story,” and their themes are somewhat similar in treating women whose deaths are caused by seductive “foreign” men. “The Angel’s Story,” rather than hovering above them all, exists on the same terrestrial plane as “The Charwoman’s Story,” and the threshold crossings are not only narrative or temporal when one attempts to imagine the ordering of the two Rounds. The interconnections between speakers cut across the landed aristocracy and the serving classes; spiritual and earthly realms; and military and civilian life. Such a levelling of speakers implicitly claims that a servant’s voice merits as much attention as a squire’s. This range of perspective, speech, and experience comes together in the authorial identity of “Dickens,” which, in the context of the two Rounds, becomes as much a concept as an individual identity.
The first story illustrates how narrative threads crisscross between the two years’ collections as Another Round begins not with an explanation of who is sitting around the fire or why and how they come to tell stories but rather with the first speaker launching right into “The Schoolboy’s Story.” The framing fundamentals of the first Round therefore carry over as the journal, Household Words, binds the two numbers and provides a rationale for readers to presume that the same household from 1852 hosts the second storytelling round in 1853.31 The schoolboy recalls not Dickens’s opening narrator of the first Round but rather Martineau’s deaf playmate, who likewise recounts his school days. This entertaining account, however, is much more cheerful in its childlike tone: “However, beef and Old Cheeseman are two different things. So is beer. It was Old Cheeseman I meant to tell about” (1). Living his entire life at the school as an orphan and enduring the ridicule of boys who label him a “traitor” for having turned from pupil to Latin master, Cheeseman shocks them by disappearing suddenly then returning with an inherited fortune (2). Having anticipated that Cheeseman would reappear with an avenging “prizefighter,” the boys prepare for battle by stockpiling stones in their desks only to find that, instead of warfare, the school fills with “sobbing and crying” when they take leave of their old friend (3).
The direct address of the schoolboy so early in the number also reminds readers that each speaker is sitting in the presence of others at a fictional fireside and positions readers as possible family members. Just before the story ends, the speaker suddenly commands, “Don’t look at the next storyteller, for there’s more yet,” then shares surprising twists: Cheeseman marries Jane, the school’s servant, and the schoolboy does not meet them until they take him home for Christmas well after the events he has been relating (5). The schoolboy reminds his audience, “[I]t was the year when you were all away; and rather low I was about it, I can tell you” (5). Not until the end of the story do we understand that the schoolboy is speaking to his family members—although, as in the first Round, we do not know precisely which other speakers are his kin. One’s curiosity continues to forge links across the numbers and to keep the narrators connected: for instance, the deaf playmate from the first Round could be this speaker’s friend, making the schoolboy Charley Felkin. The boy clearly shames his family for abandoning him at Christmas, and his report of having a grand time at Cheeseman’s hints that the Cheeseman family may provide better company than his own (5). The schoolboy’s insecurity about holding the attention of the adults at the fireside prepares readers for the pending narrative shift and suggests