Collaborative Dickens. Melisa Klimaszewski
Stone’s assertions so importantly. I do not dispute that Dickens “probably” wrote some of these passages, but realizing how uncertain the attributions must remain, we learn the most by using the speculative information, perhaps paradoxically, to take emphasis off of attribution and place it onto collaboration.17
More recently, Dickens Journals Online, The Dent Uniform Edition of Dickens’ Journalism, a 2011 issue of Victorian Periodicals Review titled “Victorian Networks and the Periodical Press,” and various monographs centered on major figures testify to consistent and growing interest in journalistic work that was often collaborative.18 Even as the Christmas numbers gain notice, however, critical stress has remained on Dickens and high-profile contributors like Wilkie Collins, not on the complete versions of the collaborative texts. To explain such choices, scholars tend to note that contributors republished their pieces outside the Christmas number frames and cite the fact that Dickens himself extracted pieces from seven numbers to form the “Christmas stories” volume of the 1867 Diamond Edition of his works, which includes a prefatory statement declaring that his stories “were originally so constructed as they might express and explain themselves when republished alone.”19 Evaluating Dickens’s claim, we do well to keep in mind Robert L. Patten’s lucid readings of several prefaces in which Dickens’s statements are misleading or blatantly false: “For well over a hundred years, Dickens has with considerable success controlled how we read him. In the manuscripts and biographical materials John Forster preserved, in the thousands of letters that the Pilgrim editors have annotated, even in the memoirs of Dickens’s agents, publishers, family, and friends, he has to a rare degree fashioned his public image.”20 When it comes to the topic of collaboration, this type of retrospective shaping of Dickens’s authorial persona has also existed because scholars have been willing to let Dickens have such control, interrogating his own statements about his co-writers less rigorously than, for instance, his statements about his wife. In the Christmas numbers, one discovers a much more varied Dickens than he himself describes.
Furthermore, when Dickens published his extractions as “Christmas stories” for the Diamond Edition, his selections make for “a sometimes bewildering collection of dislocated pieces.”21 As Jack Stillinger points out, “The fact is that authors themselves are among the most ardent believers in the myth of single authorship.”22 Dickens’s perpetuation of the myth does damage to the legacy of the Christmas collections, and the existence of selective reprints does not justify anticollaborative critical stances. Such an either/or formulation unnecessarily simplifies the realities of the Victorian publishing marketplace in which texts could circulate in various forms simultaneously. Novels might be printed in volume form before the final serial installments had been issued, and stage adaptations overlapped with ongoing periodical publications. Fran Baker usefully refers to Elizabeth Gaskell’s “The Ghost in the Garden Room” for the 1859 Christmas number having a “double life,” as it appeared in the collaborative collection and then independently.23 Exploration of such textual double lives has been eclipsed by interest in particularized textuality. One of the central lines of inquiry this book pursues, then, is: what happens when we reinsert all of the collaborative voices into our discussion of these numbers?
What happens when we read not only Dickens’s contributions but also stories by the likes of George Sala, who also wrote pornography? To study the Christmas numbers completely, one must consider Dickens alongside writers like Wilkie Collins and Elizabeth Gaskell, whose other works were commercially successful. One must also consider Dickens alongside writers such as Eliza Griffiths and the Reverend James White, whose names have not endured or whose works never earned fame. Julia Cecilia Stretton, for instance, wrote domestic novels featuring idealized heroines with titles like Margaret and Her Bridesmaids (1856), which was a best seller in England and America, but few think about her as a collaborator of Dickens.24 Then there is Reverend Edmund Saul Dixon, a man of the cloth who wrote a famous “Chicken Book,” which really is all about poultry.25 Quality questions arise quickly when one stops excising such collaborators. In restoring conversation between their pieces and Dickens’s contributions, what if their voices make for an irritating conversation? No answer will please all. Just as readers might disagree over whether Oliver Twist’s virtues and proclivity for fainting are cloying or whether A Tale of Two Cities is overly sentimental, so too there are stories in the Christmas numbers that some find abysmal and others call brilliant (or at least no worse than Dickens’s other misfires). As the following chapters demonstrate, Dickens’s stories might be the weakest in a collection while writers like Charles Collins, who contributed for seven years straight, consistently share storytelling gems. Regardless of whether we like all of the stories or whether Dickens ultimately liked them, they were part of what “Dickens” signified in the 1850s and ’60s, and we are remiss if we excise them from our notion of what counts as “Dickensian” now. For most of the collections, Dickens is far outnumbered by his collaborators (see appendices), and some of their stories were misattributed to him for several decades, further justifying their inclusion in critical assessments of the Christmas canon.
I aim to persuade readers to do three overlapping things: to read collaborative texts in their complete forms, to complicate hierarchical models of collaboration, and to acknowledge the powerful polyvocal potential of periodical forms such as the Christmas number. To achieve those aims, I provide an examination of all eighteen Christmas numbers in their entirety, analyzing the textual dynamics and relationships between Dickens’s narrators and those of his collaborators in the most comprehensive treatment to date. I also illustrate how my analysis of the numbers reenvisions Dickens as a collaborator and suggests new ways of thinking about nuanced literary collaboration, particularly in Victorian periodicals. In one volume, I hope to provide a sense of grounding for all the Christmas numbers, to give readers a sense of this body of work with a critical eye that spotlights collaborative textual dynamics. Those dynamics shift, morph, repeat, and change across years as the Christmas numbers exhibit multiple modes of collaboration and reveal a complex subgenre of the Victorian periodical press.
Several methodological questions challenge studies of extended collaborative relationships, particularly when it comes to the thorny issue of how to balance biographical information (or a lack of it) with the author function. Rosemarie Bodenheimer’s pathbreaking study Knowing Dickens reshapes the options for how biographical inquiry and literary analysis might work in tandem. Bodenheimer investigates not only what Dickens may have known and the various ways he knew things but also the ways in which studying his works leads to fruitful questioning of our own ways of knowing. Juxtaposing several genres, including letters, journalism, and novels, Bodenheimer’s approach reminds critics that any sense of biography as “the life” is mythical if it does not acknowledge that all understandings of Dickens’s life and Dickens’s relationships with others stem from readings of texts: “We cannot go back and forth between life and work because we do not have a life; everything we know is on a written page. To juxtapose letters and fiction, as I am doing, is to read one kind of text alongside another. Neither has explanatory power over the other; all we can do is observe, make connections and interpretive suggestions.”26 In agreement with Bodenheimer, in the chapters that follow I treat letters as representations, regarding them as the performances they are. Remaining cognizant of the self-fashioning maneuvers the genre of letter writing invites, I also realize that these texts nevertheless provide us with information. Letters simultaneously serve as evidence and as textual performance requiring careful interpretation.
Dickens’s friendship with his closest collaborator, Wilkie Collins, provides an ideal example of how intertwined questions of biography and collaboration become. The two men engaged in moustache-growing contests, used aliases, acted together on stage, had secret love affairs, used opium, may have suffered from sexually transmitted diseases, co-wrote in the same room and from afar, cruised London’s entertainment districts, and parodied themselves in fiction. When it comes to the Collins-Dickens friendship, the foregoing list only begins to gesture toward how much biographical information might be brought to bear on the many texts that they coauthored, performed, coedited, or read and reviewed for each other. There is no other writer with whom Dickens collaborated so frequently. The two men offered to finish each other’s works when one or the other fell ill, and they seem to have shared an understanding that, even as each