makes clear that even the cliché-driven stories in the collection pertain specifically to the family around this particular fire.
The number does not, however, settle into a consistent depiction of those family relationships, as William Moy Thomas’s “Somebody’s Story” remains deliberately vague. Adding to the confusion about which “somebody” tells the story, it is set in Germany with no recognizable characters from the frame. Successful, loyal, and strong, Carl is an apprentice cask maker who must travel to earn enough money to marry Margaret. After building his fortune in a distant town, Carl temporarily loses it when he hides gold pieces in his lucky hammer, which a comedic, monkey-like hired boy drops in the river (10). Carl’s homecoming is therefore subdued, but his luck returns when the gold-filled hammer appears in the river behind Margaret’s house and he is feted for having inadvertently discovered the source of the River Klar. The story’s message—that people should not doubt the honest intentions of hardworking young men with bad luck and that those young men should not rush the pursuit of their dreams—suits the mood of a family gathering at which people of various ages visit. Still, with no articulated link to the family around the fire, one might begin to suspect that the collection’s cohesion is weak, but Elizabeth Gaskell’s “The Old Nurse’s Story” potently brings the frame back to the fore.7
Given the scandalous nature of the family events the nurse relates, questions of relationality add to the story’s mysterious Gothic atmosphere. The nursemaid begins, “You know, my dears, that your mother was an orphan, and an only child; and I dare say you have heard that your grandfather was a clergyman up in Westmoreland, where I come from” (11). The mother to whom the nurse refers is Miss Rosamond, just a girl in the story, but we do not know for which people present she is a mother. The nurse, Hester, tends to the orphaned Rosamond in a household with the elderly Grace Furnivall and a few servants. Hester immediately senses the danger of the place when she hears booming music emanating from a broken organ, and Rosamond subsequently disappears during a heavy snowfall. Hester finds a shepherd carrying the child’s almost frozen body and learns from the revived Rosamond that another little girl tempts her outside then takes her to a weeping woman beneath a holly tree, where that woman lulls her to sleep (15–16). These figures are the ghosts of Grace’s sister (Maude) and her daughter, who froze to death when the former Lord Furnivall cast Maude from the house after discovering from her envious sister that she secretly married a “foreign musician” and had been hiding their child (17–18). Hester learns this history “not long before Christmas Day” (17) when she herself sees the spectre of the child, and at the end of the story, the ghosts of Lord Furnivall, Maude, and the girl appear to the entire household, reenacting the scene of Maude’s banishment. When Grace sees her own “phantom” take shape, “stony and deadly serene” in youth, shock and shame send her to her deathbed, muttering the story’s final words: “What is done in youth can never be undone in age!” (20).
The story’s account of bad behavior on the parts of both sisters and Lord Furnivall raises questions about the nurse’s motive and tone as she exposes this family history around the fireside in the company of outsiders (“The Guest,” for instance). Is she exposing a piece of shameful knowledge or resisting stigma by speaking truth and refusing to obscure family history? Does she speak in order to humiliate the main actors in the story, warn future generations to avoid certain behaviors, or advocate for the semifallen woman? Told from the perspective of a servant, her story’s indictment of the unyielding Lord Furnivall for his stern parenting stances also rebukes the more privileged classes of her social “superiors.” The narrator’s position significantly influences one’s interpretation of the story’s message, making its context crucial to complete readings. The original timing of the number in anticipation of the Christmas holiday, with its attendant emphasis on forgiveness and generosity, may also impact one’s assessment of the story’s moral lessons. The appearance of “The Old Nurse’s Story” in anthologies, sometimes without any reference to its original publication in the Christmas number, limits these fruitful interpretive possibilities.8
If the “Old Nurse” has told a story about the mother of some of the people sitting around the fire, then we must also wonder how this contribution relates to the collection’s final piece: “The Mother’s Story” by Eliza Griffiths. Readers certainly could envision Miss Rosamond, the little girl from Gaskell’s tale, growing up to be the one telling Griffiths’s story, as the nursemaid has already identified Rosamond as the mother of some of those present. Within the structure of the round, if the timing were such that Gaskell’s story and Griffiths’s poem overlapped, the story of the Furnivall woman dying in the snow with her child would be interwoven with Griffiths’s poem about a mixed-race woman who collapses in the snow just before reuniting with her son after having endured twenty years of slavery away from her children. Repeated imagery of this sort helps to explain how a collection of tales that might seem randomly collected sometimes exhibits an organic cohesiveness. In the conglomeration of narrative voices, individual writers’ voices often become indistinguishable, and even though Dickens is the “conductor,” he does not always control the combined effect of the voices he conducts.
Edmund Ollier’s “The Host’s Story,” following Gaskell’s piece, is in verse form and adds unexpected irony to the collection as it relates the adventure of a greedy travelling merchant setting his host’s palace aflame. Sneaking through the palace as the household sleeps, the merchant “fills a bag with jewels and with gold,” sets a fire that nearly traps him, then escapes by jumping out of a window, leaving his treasure behind. Again, a contributor’s piece adds rich possibilities to the relationships between the storytellers in the frame. The poor relation presents John as a generous and modest host, noting that John does not want the group to dwell on the fact that he supports the poor relation financially. Considering Ollier’s piece, however, we might question whether a cautionary tale warning against taking advantage of hospitality shows the host to be less content in his role. The irony in Ollier’s poem, if it undercuts the credibility of Dickens’s narrator in the first story, may pose a challenge to Dickens’s authority that one would expect him to have put in check, but his correspondence with Gaskell and others displays more flexible editorial behavior than most critics allow.
Already the successful author of Mary Barton, Gaskell was a writer whom Dickens esteemed highly and whose authorial voice, from the very first issue of Household Words, sometimes melded with the public voice of Dickens. He was thrilled when she agreed to write a multipart story to help launch the periodical.9 As Linda Hughes and Michael Lund point out, “When [‘Lizzie Leigh’] appeared without attribution in Household Words, many inferred that the story was Dickens’s own, given its prominent place in the first number. And the story was first published in the United States under Dickens’s name.”10 By December 1851, Gaskell’s Cranford series had also begun appearing in the journal, which sparked some sparring between Dickens and Gaskell over the sketches’ references to Dickens’s Pickwick Papers.11 In regard to “The Old Nurse’s Story,” Dickens was confident enough to try to persuade Gaskell to change its conclusion. After complimenting the “wonderfully managed” writing and suggesting that Gaskell alter the ending so that the child sees more ghosts than the adults do, Dickens asks, “What do you say to this? If you don’t quite and entirely approve, it shall stand as it does.”12 Gaskell immediately makes it known that she did not “entirely approve.” A few days later, Dickens persists in trying to change her mind: “What I would propose to do, is, to leave the story just as it stands for a week or ten days—then to come to it afresh—alter it myself—and send you the proof of the whole, and the manuscript (your original manuscript) of the altered part; so that if you should prefer the original to the alteration, or any part of the original to any part of the alteration, you may slash accordingly.”13 The process Dickens describes is not one in which he bullies Gaskell into accepting his revisions. Rather, she is the one who may “slash,” and his proposal includes a creative cooling-off period that places his “alteration” on a level equal (not superior) to hers, as he is careful not to discard her “original” brusquely. These interactions force one to reevaluate Harry Stone’s assertion that Dickens’s usual practice
