Collaborative Dickens. Melisa Klimaszewski

in a 2004 National Endowment for the Humanities Seminar at the Dickens Project in Santa Cruz, California. Thanks to the seminar participants and to leader John Bowen for being part of the beginning, and thanks to the Dickens Project for decades of generously supporting my intellectual development. Collaborating with Melissa Valiska Gregory led to my first editorial work on the Christmas numbers, and I am grateful to her for inspiring ideas that spawned this monograph and for being a steadfast friend. Holly Furneaux provided essential help at various stages of writing and crucial sustenance in the form of olives.

      Special spaces and special people have enabled me to press forward through all sorts of obstacles. Shout out to Ritual Cafe, the Rare Books Reading Room at the British Library, The Lamb in Bloomsbury, and my front porch. Love and thanks to all the people who inspire and sustain me, including Christine Klimaszewski, Alice Reinke, Benjamin Gardner, Amy O’Shaughnessy, Ted Lyddon-Hatten, Mariella Theuma, Karl Kaufman, Barbara Klimaszewski, and the mighty Sofia Turnbull. Warm gratitude to Craig Owens, Erik Siwak, Mazz Swift, Angelica Saintignon, John Jordan, Bill Ingram, Emily Miranda, and my dear nephew, Wolf Miranda Klimaszewski, who indulges my desire to tell stories and who gives me hope. Forever thanks to Carlton Floyd, who helped my brain to grow at a key stage and who affected my core in ways that continue to benefit all aspects of my life. To the Coalition of Black Students and inaugural Crew Scholars at Drake University, thanks for all the years of walking together.

      In a book focused on Dickens and the Victorian periodical press, the notes and bibliography will express my engagement with and implicit gratitude toward scholars in those fields. I must also acknowledge this book’s and my own debt to writers and thinkers whose focus does not fall directly on the primary sources I discuss but whose work has shaped my thinking. Once one has read James Baldwin, Toni Morrison, or Eve Sedgwick or listened to Songs in the Key of Life, one simply does not think the same way again. I am as intellectually indebted to Steve Biko, Mamphela Ramphele, and Zakes Mda as I am to Sandra Gilbert and Susan Gubar.

      Several grants from Drake University provided critical funding for research travel, research time, and conference attendance, which enabled me to develop ideas central to this book. Without the material support of Drake’s Center for the Humanities, the College of Arts and Sciences (presided over by Dean Joseph Lenz), Drake International, and the Office of the Provost, this book would not have made its way into print. For valuable research and proofreading help, my thanks to the following student workers: Erin Mercurio, Jon Heggestad, Yvonne Gildemaster, Nicole Margheim, and Dominic Adduci. Thanks also to the Interlibrary Loan staff at Drake University, the librarians at the Forster Collection of the National Art Library in the Victoria and Albert Museum, and the patient workers in the British Library Manuscripts and Rare Books Rooms. The Dickens Museum in London, especially Louisa Price, has graciously provided archival access and photographs while on a tight schedule. An earlier version of the portion of chapter 4 that discusses The Wreck of the Golden Mary is reprinted here with kind permission from SEL Studies in English Literature 1500–1900 54, 4 (Autumn 2014).

      Finally, deep thanks to the doctors and nurses at the Mayo Clinic in Rochester, Minnesota, and John Stoddard Cancer Center in Des Moines, Iowa, for spending a great deal of time saving my life while I completed this manuscript. Their expertise has enabled me to hold this book in my hands. To Dr. Boughey and Dr. Nguyen, who gracefully agreed to play Stevie Wonder in the operating room, my insides are forever grateful. Onward we dance.

      Introduction

      For those who think of Charles Dickens as a professional and personal bully, the phrase “collaborative Dickens” may sound like an oxymoron or an overly generous fantasy. For those who associate only A Christmas Carol with the phrase “Dickens and Christmas,” the phrase “Dickens’s Christmas numbers” may act as a reminder of the seemingly infinite number of Carol adaptations. There is, however, a whole cache of Dickens Christmas literature that has little to do with Ebenezer Scrooge and is indeed collaborative. Readers and scholars do not usually regard Dickens as a famous writer who placed his voice in conversation with and sometimes on a level with fairly unknown writers. And yet this Dickens, a significant collaborative presence in the Victorian period, is one that I have found repeatedly while editing and studying the literature he produced for Christmas.

      Between 1850 and 1867, Dickens released a special annual issue, or number, of his journal shortly before Christmas. Enormously successful, these numbers eventually sold upwards of 200,000 copies: “[I]n Britain and America, the most popular single issues of All the Year Round remained, as with Household Words, the annual Extra Christmas Numbers. These . . . had the highest circulation of any of Dickens’s serial or periodical writings.”¹ The special Christmas issues contained stories written by Dickens in addition to work from friends and colleagues he invited to contribute. For each one, Dickens would work fictional prose and verse (only the first two contain some nonfiction) from other writers into a frame concept he devised. The title of one of the early numbers, A Round of Stories by the Christmas Fire (1852), describes a basic frame: people sharing tales as they sit around a fire. Dickens soon made the structures more elaborate, as for Somebody’s Luggage (1862), which features a waiter discovering manuscripts tucked away inside various pieces of travel gear.

      Collaborative Dickens is the first comprehensive study of these Christmas numbers, which are some of the most fascinating works Dickens produced. Restoring links between stories from as many as nine different writers in a given year, this book shows that a respect for the Christmas numbers’ plural authorship and intertextuality results in a new view of the complexities of collaboration in the Victorian periodical press and a new appreciation for some of Dickens’s most popular texts. Examining the complete numbers reveals Dickens to have been an editor who, rather than ceaselessly bullying his contributors, sometimes accommodated contrary opinions and depended on multivocal narratives for his own success. As often as Dickens was defensive or controlling, he was playful and self-conscious in collaboration. Reevaluating all eighteen Christmas collections leads to an understanding of Dickens as a variable collaborator and illustrates more broadly that collaborative texts require a flexible definition of authorship. Tracing the connections among and between the stories uncovers ongoing conversations between the works of Dickens and those of his collaborators, and some Christmas collections emerge as texts that enact their own fraught origins.

      Eagerly anticipated and broadly appealing, the annual numbers quickly spawned imitations from other publishers, but those texts were not emulating Dickens alone. For all issues of Household Words, Dickens called himself the periodical’s “conductor” and, with rare exceptions for serialized novels, included no individual bylines for authors. The practice of anonymous publication was not unusual for periodicals whose editors generally saw bylines as impediments to a journal’s creation of a unified voice. Some authors disliked anonymity, and Douglass Jerrold reportedly remarked that Dickens’s journal was “mononymous” rather than anonymous because every page header of the regular issues announced, “Conducted by Charles Dickens.”² Kelly Mays points out that anonymity or the use of pseudonyms also contributed to “the corporate character of the periodical text.”³ Whether reacting to his journals as entities or to Dickens as an individual, not all authors resented anonymity. Dickens’s unique conducting metaphor at once acknowledged and subordinated other creative talents. In an orchestral conducting context, without skilled musicians, a conductor’s wand would fail to impress; successful conducting requires deep familiarity with each individual’s aptitude and savvy coordination of styles. Other readings of the metaphor, which consider railway conducting or material objects that conduct electricity and energy, likewise reference scenarios in which interactions are crucial to achieving a desired effect. Alexis Easley further contends that a byline for women writers could act as “a barrier to those who relied upon anonymity as a means of separating their private and public identities” and wished to address “conventionally masculine subject matter in their work.”⁴ And Joanne Shattock notes that Dickens’s celebrity was profitable even for unnamed contributors: “None of the other eponymous journals had a ‘Conductor’ with such pulling power. . . . Writers wanted to be published in Dickens’s journal, and then to republish their essays, stories and articles,