Collaborative Dickens. Melisa Klimaszewski
because he did not yet know how the number would shape up. Set in 1769, Gaskell’s story follows Dickens’s vague instructions by shying away from Christmas themes in its depiction of a sadistic thief who deceives an entire small village by masquerading as a respectable gentleman. The periodic absences of Mr. Higgins, necessary for “collecting his rents” in another region, are the times when he commits highway robbery (22). Eventually, he is caught and hanged after murdering an old woman in Bath who had reputedly been hiding a fortune. The story is fairly anticlimactic because it is so obvious from the start that Higgins is a sadistic, suspicious man. More surprising than his criminality are the story’s odd details; Higgins, for instance, is a kind husband with mysterious health-preservation habits that might contribute to the couple’s childlessness. The squire concludes by asking the listeners at the fireside if they would like to join the hunt for the fortune Higgins is rumored to have stashed in the house he rented: “Will any of you become tenants, and try to find out this mysterious closet? I can furnish the exact address to any applicant who wishes for it” (25). Listeners, then, are invited to participate actively in what could become a sequel to the squire’s tale as the stories in Another Round continue to unfold in circular patterns.
Treating a different aspect of criminality, “Uncle George’s Story,” by W. H. Wills and Edmund Saul Dixon, emerges from multiple layers of collaboration and shows the number again endorsing non–biological family bonds. George shares the story of his adventurous wedding day when his bride, Charlotte, stands alone at the altar because George has fallen into a shaft on unstable cliffs. George’s rescuer, the outcast Richard Leroy, explains that the town’s reason for ostracizing him stems from his work as a smuggler, which accounts for his familiarity with the hidden tunnel and exposes the previous occupation of George’s father. After Leroy becomes a close friend and stops smuggling, the families hope that their children might marry. The story evidences collaboration so thorough that no awkward transitions or recognizable marks of distinct voices diminish its delivery. Wills was clearly able to move between creating and editing with success, yet the story raises more unanswered questions about the frame. George is uncle to someone around the fire, which means that a grandfather figure for some people around the fire was a smuggler. This grandfather, however, must be different from the one who narrates “The Grandfather’s Story” because that speaker is a bank clerk. The criminality of a patriarch would certainly affect one’s reading of the other stories in the collection that touch upon illegal activities, such as Gaskell’s tale of the highwayman. At the same time, as with Linton’s aunt character, one cannot be sure whether the family relationships of the story titles are biological or metaphorical. George has no siblings, nor are any siblings of Charlotte’s mentioned in the story, but they have joined a kin group so completely that they fill familial roles and are comfortable enough to discuss their family’s criminal past. Overcoming such social hurdles in a celebration of Christmas camaraderie lends an enhanced sense of togetherness—because it is so purposeful—to the storytelling gathering.
The adoptive family story in Samuel Sidney’s “The Colonel’s Story” is not so uplifting. Orphaned, the Colonel is a teenager when his uncle adopts him and funds an indulgent lifestyle but forbids him to marry anyone who is not wealthy. After falling in love with a young widow, the young man marries her secretly then discovers that she is a spendthrift who is slightly mad and prone to violent quarrels. On the way home from visiting her at a remote cottage, the young lover falls from his horse, and when he wakes up, the blood covering him is taken as proof that he murdered his wife, whose dead body is discovered not long after he leaves her. Acquitted once the real murderer is found, the Colonel now enjoys the sharing of stories with the extended family at the fireside, but readers never learn whether the Colonel is a member of the host’s family or an honored guest.
The scholar’s position in the family is likewise unclear, but Elizabeth and William Gaskell’s “The Scholar’s Story” presents a more complicated scenario of collaboration. William Gaskell translated the ballad from Théodore Hersart de La Villemarqué’s Barzaz-Breiz (1845), a text based on ancient Breton oral folk tradition.39 The letter in which Dickens first asks Elizabeth Gaskell to keep the Christmas number in mind also brings William Gaskell into the collaborative relationship: “I receive you, ever, (if Mr Gaskell will allow me to say so) with open arms.”40 Asking Mr. Gaskell’s permission to violate a social code (wrapping metaphorical arms around another man’s wife) after he has already expressed that desire lessens the respect the letter might communicate, and one can further criticize Dickens for treating an immensely successful contributor as if she is an underling of her husband’s.41 In light of the ongoing professional relationship between Dickens and Mrs. Gaskell, who published under exactly that name, it is also possible to view the inclusion of her husband as a way Dickens expands the collaborative circle. William published another ballad from Barzaz-Breiz in the October 22, 1853, issue of Household Words and was involved in later negotiations surrounding the publication of Elizabeth’s novel North and South. All three individuals seem to have expected to interact through various pairings and triangulated communications. The Gaskell text appearing in Another Round is a translation of a translation, but the filtering does not stop there. Elizabeth writes the introductory paragraphs to the verse that William translates, and her preliminary note states that the scholar character hears the story from the mother of the woman who originally told it. Two layers of oral telling, one involving a fictional character, precede the written translations, and Elizabeth Gaskell, not Dickens in his role as conductor, is the one who massages all of these tellings and translations into the frame concept with impressive wit.42
The scholar opens the story with a defensive maneuver that unsettles the harmony of the round and further questions authorial dynamics: “I perceive a general fear on the part of this pleasant company, that I am going to burst into black-letter, and beguile the time by being as dry as ashes. No, there is no such fear, you can assure me? I am glad to hear it; but I thought there was” (32). Since Dickens would provide Gaskell with no outline or list of speakers, it is likely that Gaskell herself decided to insert a scholar into the fireside circle as a means of introducing her husband’s translated poem. Her nursemaid narrator for the first round addresses the group, and she would have observed the other speakers delivering comments that bounce off of other characters. Given that Wills decided on the final ordering of the stories for 1853, his involvement as a collaborator is also crucial to this dynamic. The scholar’s resistance to an idealized fireside image skillfully balances congenial teasing with hostility, and his desire to avoid boring his companions with too learned of a story recalls the schoolboy’s worries that the assembled group will move too quickly away from him. Wills very well could have placed this joint piece late in the number so that its setup would tie back to the first story. Both he and Gaskell would have been aware of the way in which her opening for the story deftly points out that Dickens is not the only writer who can exploit the fire puns, and her narrative framing demonstrates that contributors sometimes pull Dickens’s voice into theirs rather than vice versa.
Far from pedantic, the verse the scholar shares is gripping in its portrayal of a young wife who is tormented then killed as a result of male jealousy, and this second violent story from Gaskell reminds one that Dickens’s emphasis on the setting of the domestic fireside never excludes gruesome topics from the Christmas season. Count Mathieu departs to fight in the crusades, leaving his wife and infant son under the protection of a cousin who serves him as a clerk. The wife, never named, maintains devotion to her husband but must lock herself in her room to hide from the psychotic cousin, who badgers her with declarations of love. To provoke the couple, the madman kills his master’s dog and horse, sending letters each time that blame their deaths on the negligent wife, whom he also reproaches for entertaining suitors at glamorous balls. Count Mathieu finally takes the bait after the cousin murders the family’s infant son and accuses the lady of having cavalierly left the baby near a giant, hungry sow. Oblivious to the improbability of such a scenario, the lord arrives in a rage, slays his cousin for not taking better care of his family, kills his wife before she can speak a word, and is left to regret the horror of his own ignorant brutality.43 The ballad’s final lines describe a priest who sees the spirits of the hound, the steed, the wife, and the infant comforting each other in a churchyard, but they offer little relief from the deranged behavior that makes the verse so haunting.
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