approaching, Dickens repeatedly asks Gaskell for her permission before making permanent changes to her text, and their correspondence points to a stimulating collaborative relationship.15
Gaskell left the ending as originally written, and Dickens printed the story as she wished, knowing that readers might think the story was his own.16 His letters to her then mix defensiveness with reassurance: “I have no doubt, according to every principle of art that is known to me from Shakespeare downwards, that you weaken the terror of the story by making them all see the phantoms at the end. And I feel a perfect conviction that the best readers will be the most certain to make this discovery. Nous verrons. But it is greatly improved, and in making up the Xmas No. finally today, I shall of course be careful to preserve the New Ending, exactly as you have written it.”17 Even while placing himself in a direct line of descent from the Bard to defend his vision, Dickens concedes to Gaskell, demonstrating that their disagreement does not nullify the act of collaboration. As if to reinforce their status as creative allies, two days later he adds, “Pray don’t, in any corner cupboard of your mind, put away the least doubt or disparagement of the story. I read it carefully on Saturday (when I made up the Number finally) and did so with the greatest interest and admiration.”18 Dickens almost apologizes for having voiced his opinion so emphatically. He does not simply pay lip service to the idea of having an open mind when it comes to his collaborators’ choices but revisits their work and sometimes changes his valuation of it.
Once the number is published, Gaskell sends Dickens compliments on the stories she (correctly) guesses are his, while Dickens again contradicts his previous opinion: “I don’t claim for my ending of the Nurse’s Story that it would have made it a bit better. All I can urge in its behalf, is, that it is what I should have done myself.”19 The Dickens/Gaskell exchange bears out Rachel Sagner Buurma’s view that “literary authority in Victorian England was much more contingent, variable, and contested than has previously been thought.”20 In this case, the critical binary between anonymous authors as either exploited or subversive does not do justice to the original collaborative texts. Dickens strives to present work that accomplishes his storytelling goals and also allows the Christmas Rounds to tell the stories of his contributors with respect for their artistic integrity. The issue’s “conductor” listens, calibrating final decisions with consideration for the wishes of his talent.
James White’s “The Grandfather’s Story” again shows Dickens changing his mind about what he deems acceptable for the number, as he initially rejects a story that he ultimately prints. In his letter to White about the number’s frame, Dickens specifies the types of characters and plot that he desires: “The grandfather might very well be old enough to have lived in the days of the highwaymen. Do you feel disposed, from fact, fancy, or both, to do a good winter-hearth story of a highwayman?”21 White obliged, and his narrator speaks of his days as a bank clerk when he and a colleague, Tom Ruddle, are robbed while delivering gold to the bank’s clients on Christmas Eve. Pursuing a thief who has slit a full bag but taken only three guineas, Ruddle and the grandfather become sympathetic toward the criminal because he is motivated only by trying to keep his wife and baby from starvation after having been swindled (25). They let the man celebrate Christmas freely and offer to loan him more money, which seems to embody the generosity of the holiday that Dickens often prizes, but he sends remarks of dissatisfaction to White: “You know what the spirit of the Christmas number is. When I suggested the stories being about a highwayman, I got hold of that idea as being an adventurous one, including various kinds of wrong, expressing a state of society no longer existing among us, and pleasant to hear (therefore) from an old man. Now, your highwayman not being a real highwayman after all, the kind of suitable Christmas interest I meant to awaken in the story is not in it.”22 What is the “spirit” that Dickens feels should characterize this number so strongly? Dickens’s piece for the 1851 Christmas issue defines it as “the spirit of active usefulness, perseverance, cheerful discharge of duty, kindness, and forbearance” (1). Alternatively, he could be referencing the “Carol philosophy”: his idea that compassion for others should guide people’s interactions all year long and the belief that drawing upon memories, even sorrowful ones, will restore proper moral principles.23 Apparently, White either did not understand why his story—which indeed exhibits kindness, forbearance, and traits of the “Carol philosophy”—failed to meet expectations, or he did not care to exemplify his understanding with a new tale. The story Dickens claims is a poor fit is the one that he prints, allowing the visions of others to continue shaping the “spirit” of the numbers.
The relationships among storytellers continue to join the Round’s pieces in circular fashion as Edmund Saul Dixon’s “The Charwoman’s Story” begins with a servant figure complaining about her inclusion: “A person is flustered by being had up into the dining-room for to drink merry Christmases and them (though wishing, I am sure, to every party present as many as would be agreeable to their own selves), and it an’t easy rightly to remember at a moment’s notice what a person did see in the ghostly way” (25). Displaced from her usual position downstairs, the charwoman does not regard inclusion in the family circle as an honor but rather as an anxiety-producing burden because she is expected to wish people she serves a merry Christmas and to perform for them “at a moment’s notice.” Put on the spot with the imperative of telling a ghost story, the charwoman blames the “Nurse” for telling the “ladies” that she is in possession of such an account, creating tension between the two servant figures (who act as the fourth and seventh narrators) and reminding readers that both stories associated with servants deal with supernatural topics (25). The charwoman’s brief ghost story tells of how her colleague Thomas accurately foretells their employer’s death when he hears an alderman’s distinct step at what they later learn was the moment the alderman died several miles away. More poignant than the idea of the haunting, however, is the way in which Dixon’s story about the jarring quality of a noise dovetails into Harriet Martineau’s story, which explores hearing from a much different perspective.
In a collection whose title alludes to overlapping voices, whose genre almost demands cacophony, Martineau’s “The Deaf Playmate’s Story” forces one to ponder the absence of voices. As a child struggles to understand that he is losing his hearing, thinking that others are suddenly treating him meanly for no reason that he can perceive, he acts out violently and loses his friends. Even the adults in his life fail to realize that he is becoming deaf. The speaker of Martineau’s story is that child, never named and therefore identified primarily by his lack of hearing.24 The deaf boy is the playmate of Charley Felkin, but because he never addresses Charley directly and identifies Charley as well as his own family with third-person references, the playmate does not seem to be in the presence of those people. The family around the fire, then, is not the Felkin family, nor is it the family of the deaf playmate, so we do not know why the deaf child spends time with the other narrators; the reader is left to wonder whether the deaf boy is in the company of strangers, extended family, the doctor who treats him kindly in the story, or friends. That ambiguity about the child’s location not only heightens his potential vulnerability as a narrator but also forces readers to continue puzzling over the relationships among the storytellers.
The most difficult questions the story raises pertain to the way one should comprehend a deaf child’s role in a verbal round. Up to this point, the round structure has suggested that each speaker may overlap with the previous one(s) and that something or someone gives a cue to commence. When a story begins without comment on the transition between narrators, the round structure invites the reader to imagine a head nod, eye contact, or some other nonverbal gesture to indicate which person will speak next. Those gestures would reach the deaf playmate, but the content of the previous narrators’ stories would not. Storytellers in a round might adjust the beginning of a tale depending on how the previous speaker has concluded, or a particular detail might suddenly seem humorous when juxtaposed with an earlier tale and merit an altered style of delivery. For the deaf playmate, however, even if he understands nonverbal cues passing among the fireside company, none of the interactions pertaining to events narrated in previous stories would reach him. His first words to the assembled group boldly
