stories really do have any significance. The import of “The Deaf Playmate’s Story” lies in its raising of this question rather than in proposed answers, and Dickens may have been especially comfortable with such questions given his own inclusion of “the deaf gentleman” as a key member of the storytelling group in Master Humphrey’s Clock more than a decade earlier.25 The deaf playmate suffers as much from the ignorance of adults as from his inability to hear. Early in his experiences of deafness, before he understands what is happening, the playmate reacts aggressively to changes in his hearing and kills an innocent dove, spotlighting the high stakes involved in suiting one’s method of communication to one’s audience. That point resonates strongly with a group of storytellers as the child becomes a source of wisdom. “The Deaf Playmate’s Story” holds as much weight as the stories narrated by adults, forcing the adults to reflect upon how exactly they decode the signs of others and lending a self-reflexive layer to the Round.
Reinforcing communal feeling around the fire and his sense of acceptance, the deaf boy concludes, “How you all nod, and agree with me!,” and the lack of transition to the next story makes “the guest” seem less integrated into the group (30). Samuel Sidney’s “The Guest’s Story” abruptly begins, “About twenty years ago, I was articled clerk in the small seaport town of Muddleborough” (30). The guest then explains how a one-handed Irishman, Peter, cons the entire town out of its money by promising to use their investments to go to Portugal and retrieve a buried treasure (31–32). After Peter disappears, misery and regret ensue, but justice catches up to Peter when he tries to take advantage of an American, who shoots him (33). Only by looking at the collection as a whole does one notice the connection between “The Guest’s Story” and “The Host’s Story.” The host warns against taking advantage of hospitality, while the guest’s tale stresses misplaced confidence and the penalty of death for those who scheme in the face of generosity. Seeing the link not only adds interest to each story but also uncovers a conversation that is audible only in the original context of collaboration.
Concluding the collection, Eliza Griffiths’s “The Mother’s Story” continues to complicate questions of narrative voice and challenges the primacy of the text’s “conductor.”26 Griffiths’s poem depicts an interracial romance sympathetically, criticizing racial persecution and the destruction of family bonds in South America. Leena, the protagonist, is the orphan of an indigenous woman and a white hunter. Her solicitous care of Claude d’Estrelle, a Frenchman she discovers dying in the forest, leads to their marriage, but once Claude dies, his relatives mistreat her. The poem simultaneously emphasizes a highly idealized maternal love and Leena’s color, comparing her “brown cheek” to a “crimson streak” and taking Dickens’s voices across geographic, racial, and gender boundaries (34). That this is “The Mother’s Story” aligns Griffiths with the immediate speaker in the round. The “Mother” repeats a tale that an old male traveller, who also appears in the story, told her by this very same fireside. She thus appropriates a man’s voice that has already appropriated a woman’s. The entire poem is spoken in the “I” voice, and with the exception of the introductory stanza, that “I” is the male traveller even though Leena’s trials, not those of the traveller, guide the plot. Leena never controls her own story; it is the presumably white-identified mother around the fireside in England who has chosen the story of a racially mixed character to represent the pinnacle of maternity, which is not a vision one would usually associate with Dickens.
Yet Griffiths’s voice is both the “Mother’s” and Dickens’s, and her piece strategically essentializes maternity in a manner that advocates for cross-racial female solidarity and condemns oppressive men. When Leena seeks shelter with Claude’s brother, he insists that she leave the children with him so that they can “outgrow” and forget the shame he associates with their indigenous heritage (34). The uncle steals the children from a resistant Leena and bribes a tribe to enslave her. Most striking is the fact that the poem’s portrayal of the maternal takes place in the complete absence of white-identified women in the story, focusing on the experiences of multiracial women and other women of color. Leena is able to escape enslavement when maternal solidarity leads an indigenous woman to liberate her, but Claude’s brother sends her back into slavery on a “wild plantation” (35) in Africa from which it takes her twenty years to flee.27 Upon returning home, Leena cannot track down her son, but she finds her daughter wedded to a wealthy white man. The melodramatic conclusion of the number revolves around this extremely troubled reunion. Whether Leena’s daughter understands herself to be multiracial is unclear. Once she recognizes her mother, their interaction is strained and truncated because they hear the footfall of her husband, a man she truly loves but whom she, “Fair” and with “auburn hair,” has married as a white woman (35). The young woman knows that her husband’s “title high / Would ne’er to Indian blood ally” (35), so she tells her mother that they may never meet again. Leena departs in fear and, true to the strained coincidences of nineteenth-century sensation fiction, discovers (after two nights of sleeping in the snow) a house of worship where her son is preaching about undying maternal love. Before the concluding tableaux of Leena and her grandchildren appears, Leena’s regretful daughter sends for her, and their deathbed reunion shows that the path to heaven lies with other women of color. The cost of not having seen that truth kills Leena’s daughter, and the poem’s final lines nearly deify Leena: “A very presence from above, / That simple woman’s faith and love” (36).
What do we make of the fact that the number closes with Griffiths’s words? Initially, Dickens had considered Martineau’s piece about the deaf boy to be the ideal final story, telling Wills, “For the last story in the Xmas No. it will be great. I couldn’t wish for a better.”28 At that date, Dickens had not yet read Gaskell’s story, and we do not know whether he had read Griffiths’s contribution. He may have decided at a later date that Griffiths’s story was an even better concluding piece than Martineau’s, or, especially if Wills disagreed about the placement of Martineau’s story, Dickens may have changed his mind. Whatever the decision-making process, Griffiths’s poet’s voice assumes the authority to conclude the number as a whole, and readers must ponder the negotiation of power between this nearly anonymous woman writer, her fictionalized woman of color, and the white men publishing a journal that builds its audience with the story. I do not see an articulated set of points in Griffiths’s piece that Dickens would have found repulsive, but this story’s take on matters of race differs from Dickens’s often-hostile depictions of racially othered groups.29 Although we know almost nothing about the relationship between Griffiths and Dickens, the collaborative practices of Household Words as a literary enterprise establish that, in Griffiths’s case, the voices of women collaborators become Dickens’s own voice even if he does not like what they say. And as the histories of Gaskell’s and White’s stories for this same number demonstrate, Dickens does not always use the Christmas number as a place to insist on his will over all others. In these ways, Dickens’s editing, collating, and framing are also a form of collaborative authorship—a form that he simultaneously controls and to which he submits. This model of collaboration differs distinctly from the type that has been delineated in most scholarship on Dickens’s collaborative ventures, and it continues in the following year.
Another Round of Stories by the Christmas Fire
Dickens is so pleased with the effect of the 1852 Round that he writes to Elizabeth Gaskell on April 13, 1853, to let her know that he has already decided to structure the next number “on the plan of the last” and to solicit her work for it.30 Another Round of Stories by the Christmas Fire both acknowledges an existing audience from the 1852 number and informs new readers of its predecessor’s existence. The second Round contains pieces named for the following speakers: the schoolboy, the old lady, the angel, the squire, Uncle George, the Colonel, the scholar, nobody, and “over the way,” a nickname for the person living at that location. Sharing the first Round’s potentialities for cross-speaking within a single number, Another Round consistently includes family bonds that extend beyond the biological. The interpretive possibilities expand even further when one views the two collections in relation to each other. A complicated
