Collaborative Dickens. Melisa Klimaszewski
target="_blank" rel="nofollow" href="#u09fc5246-38c6-516b-a2f7-f1481117234f">Chapter 4 argues that, as the 1856 and 1857 Christmas issues engage directly with questions of empire building and fortune seeking, collaboration is crucial to the ways in which the collections continue to explore the foundational ideologies laid out in the first two numbers. Restoring connections between the narrative parts of The Wreck of the Golden Mary, I recuperate the neglected dialogic aspects of the original text to assert that the interpolated stories of the middle section are essential to the success of the frame story and to one’s comprehension of the links between trauma and storytelling. The Perils of Certain English Prisoners is the first number for which Dickens collaborates with only one other author, Wilkie Collins, and I demonstrate that their voices blend much more thoroughly than critics have been willing to acknowledge, even at the text’s most racist moments. Collins’s and Dickens’s jointly created narrative device in The Perils routes their voices through an illiterate man who is unable to present his own voice in print and thus explores narrative impotence as a parallel to social inferiority in the face of colonial and racial violence. Chapter 5 reveals the range of outcomes exhibited in collaborative work as Collins and Dickens move from success to disappointment in A House to Let, the number that comes closest to collaborative failure. Dickens navigates personal crisis from 1858 to 1859, and collaboration enables him to experiment with representations that blur the boundaries between reality and fiction. As the frame concept unfolds in The Haunted House, Dickens weaves together commentary not only on the psychological dynamics of perceiving a thing, or place, to be haunted but also on storytelling, trauma, and the interpersonal dynamics of collaboration.
Three collections that revel in the chaos of collaborative storytelling form the focus of chapter 6. Spotlighting a poem in A Message from the Sea that depicts cannibalism and race in a manner that most scholars identify as antithetical to Dickens’s usual aims, I continue to build a case for the necessity of constantly reading the numbers with attention to multivocal authorship. I also note the number’s questioning of generic distinctions between pieces to excavate its ironic stance toward the storytelling its characters are trying to accomplish. Tom Tiddler’s Ground comingles Dickens’s real and fictional personas and further indulges irony by showing how storytelling can fail to have any positive effect on an audience. An especially strong example of how collaborative texts can volunteer responses to the very questions they raise, Somebody’s Luggage is the most playful and entertaining in its metatextuality as its narrative framing simultaneously insists on and deconstructs textual divisions.
Chapter 7 proposes that the use of kindly adoptive parental figures in frame narratives enables Mrs. Lirriper’s Lodgings, Mrs. Lirriper’s Legacy, and Doctor Marigold’s Prescriptions to present collaborative storytelling as an act of cross-generational love. I argue that collaboration and story gathering are crucial aspects of how these collections validate non-biological family structures and advocate for working-class characters. The figures of Mrs. Lirriper, Major Jemmy Jackman, and Doctor Marigold were extremely popular, and their collecting of texts as a legacy-making act assumes a moral weight equivalent to their rescuing of children. Chapter 8 examines the final two Christmas numbers to show that as Dickens concludes the Christmas collaborations, he introduces major changes to the format but maintains other collaborative traditions as he identifies other authors in print for the first time, then returns to crafting a narrative solely with Wilkie Collins. Mugby Junction, a seemingly misordered set of contributions, is disjointed but nevertheless develops hitherto overlooked themes across stories that profoundly impact attempts at biographical readings of Dickens’s fictionalized responses to trauma. No Thoroughfare mixes authorial voices seamlessly and reverts to a reinforcement of English identity in opposition to less pure others. The final Christmas number also illustrates a further new direction in scholarship that Collaborative Dickens makes possible: an investigation of how the collaborative conversations of Collins and Dickens persist in their joint works from the years of the Christmas numbers through to Dickens’s unfinished novel, The Mystery of Edwin Drood, and Collins’s best seller The Moonstone.
The range, skill, and complexity of the Christmas numbers, which have been overlooked in academic studies and popular accounts of Dickens and Christmas, illuminate an annual event in the nineteenth-century periodical press that involved readers in engaging, multivocal experiments. Evaluating the Christmas collections in their polyvocal completeness forces one to regard Dickens as a collaborator whose working methods and interactions with his colleagues shifted productively over nearly two decades and leads to a fresh awareness of Dickens as a multigendered and multimodal authorial voice. The Christmas collaborations also reveal that the idealized Englishness of what has come to be regarded as a typical Christmas is linked to a chorus of voices articulating sometimes conflicting racial and imperial ideologies. Accounting for the polyphonic nature of the complete Christmas numbers inspires a more comprehensive understanding of plural authorship in the nineteenth-century periodical press that prompts us to reconceptualize “Dickens.”
1
Writing Christmas with “a Bunch of People”
(1850–51)
The standard practice of Household Words and many other Victorian journals was to print the work of contributors without naming them. In the absence of bylines, editors in chief hoped their journals would construct distinct, unified voices of their own, and the practice of publishing contributions anonymously “prevailed almost universally until the late 1860s and 1870s.”1 Dickens published his first pieces anonymously in the 1830s.2 By midcentury, readers were familiar with the fact that Dickens and other editors did not write every column that appeared in their journals’ pages but that each piece nonetheless publicly held the editor’s stamp of approval. As Catherine Waters notes, there is a kind of inherent dialogism in this periodical form that resists easy categorization, in part because the texts that constitute Household Words simultaneously exist as the words of Dickens and the words of others.3 Many writers were honored to have their work appear under Dickens’s name, as after only a couple of years of publication, “Dickens’s journal had a readership and a kind of glamour no other journal had.”4 Household Words also paid well at one guinea or more per page for a Christmas number contribution, making it an attractive venue. For the first two Christmas issues, a fair amount of scholarship exists on the pieces Dickens authored as they relate to his personal conceptions of Christmas and youth, but few scholars have viewed them alongside the contributors’ pieces. The first Christmas number establishes important precedents, particularly in regard to contested imperial ideologies, that are visible only when the number is read in its entirety. In building a definition of acceptable English Christmas celebrations, the 1850 issue functions as a foundation for future years. The 1851 number continues to draw upon that base while also demonstrating that Dickens and Wills stumble in their second attempt as they learn how to sustain the Christmas numbers. Rather than showcasing a smooth progression of the form, the second number’s repetitive missteps illustrate the need for the stronger framing apparatuses that appear in subsequent years.
Until 1866, the Christmas issues of Household Words eschewed bylines, following the same practice as the regular issues, and the unprinted name most crucial to the success of both the regular issues and the Christmas numbers is that of William H. Wills, Dickens’s coeditor. Wills tended to the details of every Household Words issue as he communicated with printers and contributors, corrected galley proofs, reviewed more contributions than Dickens did, coauthored essays and stories, and arranged business matters such as payments and contracts. As John Drew points out, “Often portrayed as the anchor and engine of the editorial team, punctual, steady, unimaginative—Charlie Watts to Dickens’s Jagger—Wills was a hugely versatile and skilled literary craftsman.”5 Shu Fang Lai also persuasively argues that Wills’s role has been inaccurately diminished in most critical treatments of Dickens’s editorship. Lai charts a perplexing resistance to acknowledging Wills as