Collaborative Dickens. Melisa Klimaszewski

as Dickens closes the Round with his own prose in a tribute to workingmen. His story allegorically indicts the ruling classes for blaming societal ills on workers without funding infrastructures that would empower laborers to live more comfortably. The Bigwig family represents the wealthy classes while Nobody speaks for “the rank and file of the earth” who are ignored in monuments while the feats of less industrious noblemen are commemorated (36). As Nobody’s life advances, his children fall into immoral habits because they lack schooling while the Bigwigs debate educational policy, and his family dies from preventable disease that the Bigwigs care about only when their own families risk contagion (35–36). The final words of Another Round of Stories by the Christmas Fire implicate the reader directly in these dilemmas as Nobody implores, “O! Let us think of them this year at the Christmas fire, and not forget them when it is burnt out” (36). This plea for compassion addresses not only readers but also the fictional narrators of both Rounds with an inclusive “us” around the Christmas fire. The call brings all of the voices together and places the conductor’s baton firmly back in Dickens’s hand as he transforms it into a sort of poker to extinguish the fire that, for two years, has helped to create a polyvocal space where Dickens loosens his conductor’s grip and enjoys the music for a bit.

      Dickens’s lack of autocratic control is even more apparent when we pay close attention to his correspondence with Wills. Dickens was traveling in Europe from October to early December when the 1853 Christmas issue was finished and sent to press—and when the details of a moustache-growing contest with his travel companions, Wilkie Collins and Augustus Egg, were more exciting to Dickens than the Christmas number.⁴⁴ Dickens does not imagine his own stories, composed in Italy, specifically as framing pieces: “In making up the Christmas number, don’t consider my paper or papers, with any reference saving to where they will fall best. I have no liking, in the case, for any particular place.”⁴⁵ Consistent with the round metaphor, Dickens thinks that his stories will work equally well in any position, but Wills’s placement of them in the first and last positions affords them extra prominence in published form and enhances their subsequent significance in the collection.

      For the first time, Dickens’s own stories stand as bookends for a Christmas number, but he is not the person who decided to place them there. This fact reinforces Wills’s significance as a coeditor and leads one to envision the act of editing as a collaborative authorial endeavor.⁴⁶ The fact that Wills, not Dickens, was reviewing and ordering submissions doubles the layers of collaboration. Discussing the number-in-progress in a letter to Emile de la Rue, Dickens reports that he has not read several of the pieces Wills plans to include.⁴⁷ The same letter offers evidence that such confidence in Wills was not restricted to the Christmas numbers. Answering la Rue’s question about a piece in the weekly issue from November 19, Dickens writes, “I diffuse myself with infinite pains through Household Words, and leave very few papers indeed, untouched. But Kensington Church is not mine, neither have I ever seen it.”⁴⁸ Prevailing critical tendencies make it more likely for one to have seen Dickens’s comment about self-diffusion cited as confirmation that he arrogantly controlled the journal rather than as an example showing that he was simultaneously ignorant of exactly what appeared in that journal. In this instance, travel presents itself as a logistical reason for such sharing of editorial authority, but as I demonstrate throughout the present volume, openness to other people’s input and willingness to share power persist in varying degrees as Dickens produces fourteen more Christmas numbers. Beyond Wills, Dickens draws into the collaborative group another major figure, John Forster, as he anticipates the need to proofread “The Schoolboy’s Story”: “Let Forster have the MS. with the proof, and I know he will correct it to the minutest point.”⁴⁹ The number of pens, and minds, at work on the collection does not seem to have worried Dickens in the slightest, as he accepts that he is not in complete control of his work.⁵⁰ Theories of collaboration in the periodical press must accommodate such an approach to authorship, as ceding control and allowing others to make decisions are crucial elements of Dickens’s collaborative practices.

      The success of the Rounds’ structure is evident in its lasting appeal both to competitors and to Dickens. As Household Words attracted a growing audience, the Christmas numbers also increased in popularity throughout the 1850s and 1860s and spawned imitators. In 1856, Edwin Roberts published a collection titled The Christmas Guests round the Sea-Coal Fire, which an obituary for Dickens in The Bookseller lists as one of the most successful imitations.⁵¹ Roberts is credited as sole author, and each story has two titles: “Phoebe Gray’s Troth-Plight,” for instance, is “The Niece’s Story,” and “The Lost Fiddler” is “The City Friend’s Story.” The double titling creates ambiguity, but the confusion feels unintentional, as if Roberts has patched together as many elements as possible from Dickens’s previous Christmas numbers (snowed up people, telling tales around a fire, stories named for their tellers) without careful craft. Many of the stories begin by disclosing their plots, doing away with suspense and illustrating why Dickens’s Christmas numbers, with their constantly evolving frame narratives, continue to grow in popularity over others.⁵² Five years after the second Round, Dickens stated that if he and Wilkie Collins were unable to devise a satisfactory new frame idea, they could always fall back on yet another Round, but doing so was not Dickens’s preference, as he wisely sensed that he had exhausted the Round structure by the end of 1853.⁵³ In the next Christmas numbers, Dickens moves to a much more fully developed and linear narrative frame and, perhaps inspired by Wills’s placement of stories in the second Round, continues the practice of positioning his own work to start and finish the next two special issues.

      3

      Orderly Travels and Generic Developments

      (1854–55)

      Early in The Holly-Tree Inn, its narrator declares, “[W]hen I travel, I never arrive at a place but I immediately want to go away from it” (3). The speaker’s back-and-forth desires could create an elliptical visual image, but in this case, a snowstorm prevents the traveller from being able to backtrack or skip to his next destination quickly. Instead, he must slow down and proceed through the space he currently inhabits in a direct, uncomplicated motion, which is a fitting way to visualize both the 1854 and 1855 Christmas numbers. For these years, in contrast to the preceding Rounds, the numbers move from circularity to structures that are more linear, and the storytelling moves from one speaker to another with a clear sense of forward motion.¹ Dickens reins in the storytelling, limiting the mixing that characterizes the Rounds and keeping his travellers under at least temporary control with his own narrator framing them.

      The Seven Poor Travellers (1854) and The Holly-Tree Inn (1855) are Dickens’s first forays into fully developed frame narratives for the Christmas numbers. The narrative lacing structures that emerge in each collection come to characterize the Christmas numbers for more than a decade. These heretofore-overlooked techniques enable the stories to cohere in contexts that feature group as well as individual storytelling, and Dickens’s correspondence on the subject reveals intriguingly inconsistent stances toward the dynamics of collaboration: sometimes he embraces joint creative processes, and sometimes he complains about them. Even when contributors shared no apparent communication about their stories’ emphases, the numbers for 1854 and 1855 evidence lively intertextual dynamics. Approaches that emphasize attribution blind critics to those dynamics and prevent appreciation of the symbiotic relationships that enhance both the interpolated stories and their respective frames. The frames enabling these collections to cohere are, for instance, important elements of the collaborative contexts from which detective fiction emerges. These collections also fold close male bonds into Christmas visions and exhibit the ways in which shifting representations of imperial projects continue to underpin celebrations of idyllic English holidays.

       The Seven Poor Travellers

      The first Christmas number in which a narrative frame completely encloses the other stories and is woven through them to enhance coherence, The Seven Poor Travellers succeeds in creating orderly storytelling. Each traveller speaks in numbered sequence, and the frame story gives good reason for possible variations in narrative style, theme, or idiom