Collaborative Dickens. Melisa Klimaszewski

In 1862, Dickens offered to finish the novel No Name for an ailing Wilkie Collins. He proposed reading and talking over Collins’s notes, promising to write in a style “so like you as that no one should find out the difference.”²⁷ As I discuss further in chapter 4, Dickens also sought to reassure Collins by reminding him of their previous collaborations: “Think it a Xmas No., an Idle apprentice, a Lighthouse, a Frozen Deep.”²⁸ To be sure, Dickens worried about halting the publication of a novel appearing in his own journal, but his letter is concerned primarily with calming Collins (who finished the book after all). Most interestingly, Dickens rearranges many elements of the author function. Citing several genres across several years, he implies that collaborations create a joint voice and also enable the writers to ventriloquize each other.

      Thinking of Dickens’s voice as indistinguishable from Collins’s voice challenges the idea that writers and their works can be separated discretely from each other, and most scholars and fans of Dickens are unaccustomed to fusing notions of “Dickens the great novelist” with “Dickens the collaborator.” Jack Stillinger’s Multiple Authorship and the Myth of Solitary Genius deals with texts quite different from the Christmas numbers but is interested in similar questions about how readers and critics dismiss or outright erase the presence of “other” authors alongside treasured, famous ones. Stillinger makes the astute point that the theoretical poles invested in killing the author or in insisting upon “the author’s life holding the key to all textual meaning” share the presumption that the author is singular. Instead, Stillinger urges us to consider “how many authors are being banished from a text.”²⁹ Reevaluating the complete Christmas numbers to reverse such banishment destabilizes some of the basic critical approaches that underpin scholarship on Dickens and on collaboration in the Victorian periodical press. Discussing the late nineteenth century and corporate authorship, Rachel Sagner Buurma faults critical debates following Michel Foucault’s and Roland Barthes’s interrogations of the concept of the author for positioning Victorians inaccurately: “[O]ver the past forty years, theorists writing specifically about authorship have developed ever more specific critical accounts of the incoherence or complexity of the author-function. Because of the way historical changes in authorship tend to be periodized, the Victorians are often unfairly blamed for their seemingly oversimplified notions of the author. . . . [L]iterary authority in Victorian England was much more contingent, variable, and contested than has previously been thought.”³⁰ The critical tendency has been to view Dickens as always threatened, unsettled, or driven to autocratically control the variability Buurma describes. The Christmas numbers not only bear out Buurma’s claim but also reveal that the contingencies and contesta-tions enabled by collaboration often result in unique aesthetics.

      Even within studies of collaboration, scholars tend to look at collaborative pairs rather than more pluralistic collaborative endeavors. Samuel Taylor Coleridge and William Wordsworth or Katherine Harris Bradley and Edith Emma Cooper (Michael Field) produced texts that raise fascinating questions about how joint imaginative productions take shape. Scholars such as Bette London, Holly Laird, and Jill Ehnenn have increased attention to women who collaborate but still favor pairs, or “author-dyads” for Ehnenn, over less tidy groupings.³¹ For many critics, trying to advance theories of collaboration while also working with texts that extend past two or three authors introduces an unmanageable amount of complication, or the inclusion of such groupings is outside the scope of a delimited study. Laird, for example, explains that Women Coauthors will “only occasionally guess at what differences it makes when the number of coauthors increases” past two.³² With great respect for the studies above, I aim to fill this gap, moving into the territory of previously guessed-at excitement and attempting to advance our collective curiosity about what happens when a cluster of people produce a text. Wayne Koestenbaum notes that texts “with two authors are specimens of a relation, and show writing to be a quality of motion and exchange, not a fixed thing.”³³ Narratives with six or nine authors, then, present an even less stable set of relations whose fluid relationships merit investigation.

      I do sympathize with the need to draw parameters around one’s study. In highlighting the full Christmas numbers and the neglected collaborative dynamics in that group of writers—five to nine in a given year and as many as fifteen when frame concepts carry over from one year to the next—I include a broad range of texts but must sacrifice in-depth analysis to every pairing. The vitality of all of those voices singing in chorus but also ringing out in solos shapes the unique brilliance of the collaborative text and challenges us to reconceptualize the energies of collaborative authorship. When dealing with forty writers in total across eighteen numbers, tracing the contact points between Dickens and each collaborator or between all possible combinations of the collaborators becomes unwieldy. To keep the scope of this study manageable, in most cases, textual dynamics trump biographical detective work, as I am more interested in overlapping narrators and speakers than whether Dickens ever had tea with the elusive Eliza Griffiths.³⁴ I also lack space to consider the plethora of ways in which these same writers participated in collaborative relationships in the regular issues of Dickens’s journals and in other publications. My hope is that this study will help to catalyze and motivate continued work in those directions.

      The actual or possible sexual aspects of joint literary work is another focal point of much previous scholarship, as evidenced in the titles of Koestenbaum’s Double Talk: The Erotics of Male Literary Collaboration, Ehnenn’s Women’s Literary Collaboration, Queerness, and Late-Victorian Culture, Jeffrey Masten’s Textual Intercourse, and others.³⁵ Some of the Christmas numbers I examine require one to ponder the degree to which sexuality or queer intimacy arises as an important textual element. When particular stories or relationships intuitively lead in this direction (as in chapter 3), I pursue it. I also acknowledge that there is much work left to be done on the overlapping trajectories of queer studies and studies of collaboration and that such work must recognize that experiences of collaboration are as varied as experiences of individual authorship.

      As is already apparent, I use the term collaboration to refer to multiple ways of writers producing texts together. In practice, collaboration includes all sorts of interactions that extend past two people sitting in a room together while one of them writes ideas down on a page. Seth Whidden’s work takes nineteenth-century French literature as its subject and provides useful grounding concepts. Whidden separates intertextuality from collaboration and takes care to point out that agency is associated with the latter but not the former: “Collaboration refers specifically to the relationship between two or more agents at some point during the creation of a literary text, whereas intertextuality refers to the relationship between two or more texts; the former emphasizes the process, the latter the results.”³⁶ One of the most fascinating aspects of these Christmas numbers is the way in which they inconsistently interweave both collaboration and intertextuality. In a given issue, Dickens (and others) might participate in conversations affecting the text or have no direct communication at all. One contributor, for instance, might talk to Dickens about the frame narrative or the content of a particular story, while another contributor sends in a submission and hears nothing further. Or Dickens may send in stories from afar while Wills has conversations with others about the number’s shape. In the analyses that follow, I show that one must allow for the operation of both models and, most importantly, read from the text outward rather than imposing a strict model a priori based on unstable biographical evidence or unquestioned critical norms. In most scenarios, a critic can expect to be able to differentiate instances of what Whidden calls “collaboration in praesentia,” when writers are together physically during the creative act, from “collaboration in absentia,” when the writers are physically apart.³⁷ The Christmas numbers, however, force readers to consider both modes simultaneously.

      Laird’s work on feminist modes of collaboration suggests new paradigms that are helpful in thinking about collaboration that happens in multi-gendered groups. Especially useful to this study is a “model of coauthorship as distinct from both solitary genius and an authorless textuality. In this model a large range of different kinds of coauthorship includes, surrounds, and renders anomalous