Collaborative Dickens. Melisa Klimaszewski

of death is extended as Doubledick carries Taunton’s lock of hair “near his heart” for over a year until he can deliver it to Taunton’s mother (7). When Doubledick goes to France to visit Mrs. Taunton, he discovers that her host is the officer who killed her son, but rather than vengefully murdering the man, Doubledick forgives. Reflecting the shift from English-French animosity to alliance that took place relatively quickly between the Napoleonic and Crimean conflicts, the children of the men grow up as friends who later unite to fight “in one cause . . . fast united” (10). Holly Furneaux’s analysis of this story focuses on the Doubledick character and Dickens’s treatment of “military men of feeling” while, refreshingly, including consideration of the resonances between Doubledick’s plight and other pieces in the number: “Like Dickens’s story Procter’s poem considers the thorny question of allegiance in wartime. . . . Both contributions, too, are concerned with the appropriate gendering of military heroism and the personal characteristics of a hero.”⁹ Indeed, the heterosexual pairing of Doubledick with Mary, which the story barely mentions, takes place only because of the transformation he experiences in his relationship with another man. In a frame story that involves a man fantasizing about the succor he will provide to poor travellers, all but one of which are men, the relationship depicted in the first traveller’s story suggests a path forward not just for individual travellers who might be in need of character reform but for the entire nation to overcome animosities that run through deeply violent episodes of its history.¹⁰

      The direct, first-person voice of the next speaker keeps the second story anchored to the frame as the shipwright begins his portion by explaining that his arm sling results from an adze-wielding coworker having inflicted an “unlucky chop” at the shipyards. He then moves into the tale by saying, “I have nothing else in particular to tell of myself, so I’ll tell a bit of a story of a seaport town” (10). Following the first traveller’s references to an unspecified time in the future, the voice of the second traveller pulls readers right back into Christmas Eve at Watts’s, which acts as a reminder that the storytellers are randomly assembled. Such a reminder is especially fitting to introduce George A. Sala’s psychedelic story about Acon-Virlaz, a Jewish shopkeeper and jeweller whose characterization complicates critical understanding of ethnic “others” in Dickens’s collaborative canon. In Acon-Virlaz’s dream vision, he joins his friend Mr. Ben-Daoud on a shopping trip to Sky Fair, a bizarre place full of “live armadillos with their jewelled scales,” diamonds the size of ostrich eggs, and jewels that are sold “by the gallon, like table beer” (14). Weighed down by treasures, Acon-Virlaz fails to leave the fair before the closing bell and offers the gatekeeper his daughter’s hand in marriage to avoid being locked in for a hundred years. Although “women and children from every nation under the sun” (15) help block his way to the exit, the quick reference to other ethnicities does not lessen the story’s excessive attention to Jewishness. Early in the tale, some attempt at moderation appears when, on the subject of Acon-Virlaz’s name, the narrator says, “He went by a simpler, homelier, shorter appellation: Moses, Levy, Sheeny—what you will; for most of the Hebrew nation have an inner name as well as an inner and richer life” (11). Despite this defensive statement on behalf of “the Hebrew nation,” the story’s depiction of Ben-Daoud, who owes Acon-Virlaz money, is directly anti-Semitic. Ben-Daoud is “oily” with “a perceptible lisp” and pink eyes, and Acon-Virlaz casts him as the dream’s villain because he lures Acon-Virlaz to Sky Fair only to abandon him (12). In actuality, Acon-Virlaz has returned home drunk, and falling out of his chair “into the fire-place” wakes him from the dream (16).¹¹