Collaborative Dickens. Melisa Klimaszewski
to develop family relationships in the group before describing a most extreme sacrifice as it begins, “I have never told you my secret, my dear nieces” (5). Noticeably, she does not speak directly to the schoolboy, who has just warned her off. Lizzie, the old lady, tells of her youthful infatuation with Mr. Felix, a “foreign man” who moves into the neighborhood with a retinue of servants whose darkness adds to his mystery: “Hindoos, or Lascars, or Negros; dark-coloured, strange-looking people” (6–7). Mr. Felix’s presence poses a racial threat, and the Orientalized description of the estate that he transforms into a “fairy palace” full of velvets and “foreign smells” accounts for how he is able to cast a seductive spell over Lizzie (7). She defies her father and neglects her sister, Lucy, whose concern for Lizzie has made her gravely ill. Lucy dies at the moment she stops Lizzie from eloping, and guilt prevents Lizzie from ever marrying (8–9). The story’s warning against allowing foreign charms to enchant vulnerable English girls is one that Lizzie shares because she anticipates dying soon, and it reinforces the undercurrent of imperial anxiety that runs through the Christmas numbers. Exactly to whom Lizzie issues the caution is unclear because she mentions no siblings beyond the dead Lucy in her tale, and the other speakers offer no clarification of how an unmarried, siblingless woman would come to have nieces. The most likely explanation seems to be that the aunt/niece relationship is one of endearment, with Lizzie as an “adopted” aunt of a family, allowing the collection to advocate for non–biological family bonds.33 The reader’s inclusion in such a circle increases the text’s intimacy and justifies the next speaker, a neighbor who is included in the family grouping.
George A. Sala’s “Over the Way’s Story” brings fairy-tale tropes into the number and speaks back not just to the other narrators but also to Dickens. Barnard Braddlescroggs, called “the Beast,” is a grumpy merchant with a rigid attitude who runs a profitable warehouse (10). A clerk, Simcox, becomes the focus of the story, and his resemblance to Mr. Micawber, a character famous for always being in debt in David Copperfield (1849–50), is one reason that some identify the story as Dickensian. Simcox is a good-hearted man whose debt stems from his inability to control his drinking and the spending of his wife, who is characterized in a sudden and sharp emergence of the number’s underlying racism as a woman who is “of all domestic or household duties considerably more ignorant than a Zooloo Kaffir” (12). Ridiculing the idea of a black South African woman running an English household reinforces the notion that whiteness is synonymous with the idealized domestic hearth in the imaginary space of the number. Simcox compounds his family’s trouble by borrowing ten pounds from petty cash without permission, and when Braddlescroggs discovers the embezzlement, he plans to jail or transport the entire family. Bessy, Simcox’s ailing daughter, saves the day by accepting Braddlescroggs’s offer of employment as a housekeeper at the warehouse, where he forbids her from speaking to her father, and Bessy’s meekness in that role slowly softens Braddlescroggs’s character. The story invokes fairy tales in its characterization of Bessy, who occupies “an analogous position to that of the celebrated Cinderella” (13) in her own family but then becomes the heroine of a Beauty and the Beast transformation plot in the Braddlescroggs family: “So Beauty was married. Not to the Beast, but to the Beast’s son” (17).
Substituting “scrogg” for “scrooge,” Braddlescroggs’s name riffs on Ebenezer Scrooge, and the story’s plot converses with A Christmas Carol. Philip Collins and others have noted that Sala’s essays regularly feature him “out-Dickensing Dickens” with ease.34 The unreformed Braddlescroggs dampens his son’s generous spirit in the same way that Scrooge curtails the cheer of his nephew Fred, and, like Scrooge, Braddlescroggs’s “compeers, fell away from him on ’Change” (11). For Braddlescroggs, a young girl whose patient duty to her alcoholic father threatens her health takes the place of the uncomplaining disabled boy who inspires Scrooge. The result for both protagonists is an excessive and buoyant generosity. Without published bylines to identify authors but with the common knowledge that Dickens “conducted” his contributors, readers could legitimately read this piece in numerous ways. With Dickens as the author, the story comes across as self-parody or an example of Dickens unoriginally repeating his own story lines. Speculating that someone else is the author, a contributor like Sala may be offering a tribute to the conductor via imitation or, alternatively, making fun of him. The unique collaborative context makes any or all of these readings feasible, and the plethora of possibilities attests to the rich interpretive arena that attention to collaboration opens.
Following Sala’s piece, Adelaide A. Procter’s “The Angel’s Story” brings the collection back to a more traditional Christmas setting, but decoding its message about death continues to illustrate the indeterminacy that the collection’s form enables. The poem takes one to a wealthy household as it endures the loss of a child. At the moment of death, an angel flies away with the boy then tells him the story of a poverty-stricken orphan who also used to dwell in London. That boy, in low health, wanders up to the garden gate of a rich family, and when the servants send him away with a little money because they are “tired of seeing / His pale face of want and woe,” the young boy living in the house takes pity on his poor counterpart and shares a handful of blooming roses (18). The roses comfort the orphan as he dies the next day, and he turns into the angel that now bears the wealthier boy to his own death while adorning him with the same red roses. Although the story initially appears to sanctify children’s solidarity across class lines as their pure souls console each other in heaven, a more disturbing interpretation emerges when one recognizes that the children also act as catalysts for death. The poor child is ill when he first meets the rose-bearing boy, and their encounter seems to speed up his decline. As an angel, he tells the wealthy boy,
Ere your tender, loving spirit
Sin and the hard world defiled,
Mercy gave me leave to seek you;—
I was that little child!
(19)
These closing words of the poem yoke the wealthy boy’s death to a vision of his corrupt future, making the angel an agent of death who takes the life of the generous boy as a means of proactive “mercy.” The wealthy boy, however, has already proven himself to be more compassionate than his servants even when living in luxury. The angel’s appearance pessimistically implies that humanity’s sin is too strong for even the most righteous children to withstand.35 Crucially, we do not know who narrates “The Angel’s Story” at the fireside, information that could assist in determining its tone and message. The poem shifts from an unidentified third-person speaker to the voice of the angel, and its title does not match the others in the collection unless readers believe that an actual angel joins the assembled family. Gill Gregory, one of the only scholars to situate an analysis of a Christmas number story in relation to those of other collaborators, notes that the placement of Procter’s piece after Sala’s potentially creates a tension between those two contributors, as Sala’s emphasis on “essentially generous” qualities of children contrasts with the image of children as fatal deliverers of retributive justice.36
The number moves quickly from the celestial realm back to worldly interests in Elizabeth Gaskell’s “The Squire’s Story,” and Dickens’s correspondence with her again reveals an excessively complimentary editor, perhaps anxious to be sure that she will contribute to the collection despite Dickens’s vociferous attempts to get her to change her story the previous year. In September, after Gaskell asks for more specificity about the frame concept, Dickens replies, “No. I won’t give any outline. Because anything that you like to write in the way of story-telling, when you come out of that tea-leaf condition will please me. All I say, is, it is supposed to be told by somebody at the Xmas Fireside, as before. And it need not be about Xmas and winter, and it need not have a moral, and it only needs to be done by you to be well done, and if you don’t believe that—I can’t help it.”37 Countering Gaskell’s wish for more information with a playful but firm insistence on his vision, Dickens stresses her talent and creative vision rather than his own, declining to insist upon a theme or “moral” for her story. The setting—being “told by somebody at the Xmas Fireside”—Dickens finds important enough to mention, which associates the domestic hearth with appropriate subject matter. Given that the deadline for contributors to submit