Collaborative Dickens. Melisa Klimaszewski

Words Office Book (see figures I.1–I.3) and other records, we can identify the nearly forty collaborators who contributed to Christmas issues, but constructing a careful methodology for the study of those collaborative relationships is a much more difficult task.

      Despite the complexity of the conducting metaphor, the dominant critical tendency has been to characterize Dickens as an inflexible editorial bully. Edgar Johnson’s dated yet still frequently cited biography claims, “Dickens maintained a vigorous, a dictatorial control over every detail. . . . His hand was everywhere,” and Ruth Glancy concludes, “Household Words achieved its vision through Dickens’s powerful editorial control. . . . Dickens edited every item.”⁶ Lillian Nayder’s Unequal Partners, as its title indicates, emphasizes power struggles in the only full-length book study of Dickens’s work with Wilkie Collins. Nayder posits that contributors “were forced to submit to the editorial authority of Dickens” and goes so far as to state that Collins sometimes saw himself “as a wage slave” to Dickens.⁷ Such critical presentations of Dickens as a domineering editorial force who never actually collaborated with his contributors are not borne out by examination of the complete Christmas numbers. Nayder’s work brought important attention to collaboration but has skewed critical discourse further toward hierarchy and contention as the central aspects of Dickens’s joint works. Misdirection toward competition ignores the fact that the Christmas numbers repeatedly include dissonant or contradictory voices comfortably. As Melissa Valiska Gregory states, “The scholarly emphasis on Dickens’s efforts to establish his supremacy over the very authors that he invited to work with him obscures some of the intriguing tonal nuances, weird internal friction, and peculiar crossbreeding effects that animate his collaborative work and make it a dynamic reading experience.”⁸

      Figure I.1. Household Words Office Book, cover. Morris L. Parrish Collection of Victorian Novelists (C0171), Manuscripts Division, Department of Rare Books and Special Collections, Princeton University Library.

      Figure I.2. Household Words Office Book, side view. Morris L. Parrish Collection of Victorian Novelists (C0171), Manuscripts Division, Department of Rare Books and Special Collections, Princeton University Library.

      Figure I.3. Page from Household Words Office Book. Morris L. Parrish Collection of Victorian Novelists (C0171), Manuscripts Division, Department of Rare Books and Special Collections, Princeton University Library.

      Still, deep irony accompanies Dickens’s desire to present a collective, unified voice in his journal given his self-donned nickname. John Drew remarks, “This from a writer who styled himself ‘The Inimitable’ clearly raises some complex issues for the study of literary distinction, editorial approach and collaborative authorship.”⁹ As I probe such complexities, I am aware that my work pushes against a scholarly trend that has accepted the “inimitable” designation without considering other voices that were part of it. Those other voices at times provided a robust (if friendly) undermining of Dickens’s inimitability. Catherine Waters demonstrates that “while Dickens exercised tight editorial control and even rewrote contributions to Household Words, the journal’s form is nevertheless dialogic, with differing lights being cast on a given topic, and the individual voices of such writers as George Augustus Sala, Harriet Martineau, Wilkie Collins, and of course Dickens himself, readily distinguishable to the avid reader despite the policy of anonymity.”¹⁰ As we shall see, the thematic and stylistic tendencies of these contributors also emerge recognizably in their fiction for the Christmas numbers, and many Christmas stories that have come to be regarded as characteristically Dickensian did not come from Dickens at all.

      Perhaps the figure at Household Words and All the Year Round that has been overlooked most severely is William H. Wills. Dickens used the term sub-editor for Wills, but coeditor is a more accurate term for his duties.¹¹ Wills and Dickens were in nearly constant communication about almost every issue of the journals, and when Dickens was unable to read contributions or galley proofs, Wills made final decisions himself. Working with Wills, Dickens was constantly functioning in a collaborative mode, and extant letters document a fluctuating relationship between the men. At least once, Dickens calls Wills “my other self in Household Words.”¹² Focusing strictly on Dickens’s egotism, one might at first glance categorize this statement as an example of Dickens appropriating another’s work or subsuming it into his own identity. A slower approach enables one also to see that, as a collaborator, Dickens was willing to open his “self” up to include other people and their ideas. Sometimes, Wills exercised more control over a Christmas number than did Dickens, and other times, Dickens’s ideas controlled a text to its detriment. As the chapters ahead demonstrate, reading the complete numbers exposes a plethora of such surprising details. Dickens printed endings he did not like under his own name, asked another person to co-write more than one frame story, allowed yet another person to decide the ordering of stories, and included a poem that approves of cannibalism in stark contrast to his other published work on the subject.

      In most cases, with the notable exception of Wilkie Collins, the Christmas contributors did not spend time together discussing a plan for the stories. Dickens sporadically provided direction or a frame concept via letters of invitation that Wills usually distributed. Unless one belonged to Dickens’s circle of close friends or conversed with him consistently, a writer did not know who the other contributors might be or what they would write. Dickens famously (or infamously) burned his correspondence in an 1860 bonfire and subsequent smaller conflagrations, and the low number of his contributors’ surviving letters compounds the difficulty of forming definitive conclusions about the editorial process. It is also important to avoid overgeneralization. Dickens produced Christmas issues for nearly two decades, and his creative processes did not stagnate over such a long period of time. Some writers submitted work for multiple numbers and seem to have figured out what Dickens desired, while others contributed only once, and most contributors do not appear to have corresponded directly with others about Christmas content. We do not know how routinely these individuals may have crossed paths in London’s bustling literary scene or in contexts having little to do with Dickens, but the stories for the Christmas numbers were submitted in response to instructions that did not require or even encourage such contact.

      Regardless of the format of the original Household Words and All the Year Round issues, dominant scholarly practice has broken the Christmas numbers apart, separating each writer’s contribution from its host compilation. Since at least 1964, when Ada Nisbet complained about critical neglect of Dickens’s short stories, other scholars have echoed the call.¹³ Harry Stone first investigated the Christmas numbers in detail, and his Charles Dickens’s Uncollected Writings tries to identify and reprint exactly which words Dickens wrote in his periodicals, proposing that the genius of his prose will be evident in isolation from the rest of the texts. Regularly cited as an attributive authority, Stone’s work is in fact highly speculative. Taking the 1854 number as an illustrative case, Stone writes, “Dickens probably wrote the introductory passages to the stories of the Second, Fourth, Sixth, and Seventh Poor Travellers.”¹⁴ Already qualifying claims with “probably,” Stone further hesitates: “Dickens may also have written or modified the introduction to the story of the Fifth Poor Traveller.”¹⁵ Stone’s tentativeness when attributing sections to Dickens is essential; more frustrating is that Stone does not provide reasoning for attributing only some linking passages to Dickens, and the criteria are usually missing. After making a brief case for the subjective use of “internal” evidence, such as “allusions, imagery, structure, division, ideas, diction, syntax, and the like,” when Stone uses “general internal evidence” to make an attribution, only conclusions appear, “not the analysis itself.”¹⁶ The lack of grounding