do not occupy the same position in each. The title of “The Old Lady’s Story” echoes “The Old Nurse’s Story,” and their themes are somewhat similar in treating women whose deaths are caused by seductive “foreign” men. “The Angel’s Story,” rather than hovering above them all, exists on the same terrestrial plane as “The Charwoman’s Story,” and the threshold crossings are not only narrative or temporal when one attempts to imagine the ordering of the two Rounds. The interconnections between speakers cut across the landed aristocracy and the serving classes; spiritual and earthly realms; and military and civilian life. Such a levelling of speakers implicitly claims that a servant’s voice merits as much attention as a squire’s. This range of perspective, speech, and experience comes together in the authorial identity of “Dickens,” which, in the context of the two Rounds, becomes as much a concept as an individual identity.
The first story illustrates how narrative threads crisscross between the two years’ collections as Another Round begins not with an explanation of who is sitting around the fire or why and how they come to tell stories but rather with the first speaker launching right into “The Schoolboy’s Story.” The framing fundamentals of the first Round therefore carry over as the journal, Household Words, binds the two numbers and provides a rationale for readers to presume that the same household from 1852 hosts the second storytelling round in 1853.31 The schoolboy recalls not Dickens’s opening narrator of the first Round but rather Martineau’s deaf playmate, who likewise recounts his school days. This entertaining account, however, is much more cheerful in its childlike tone: “However, beef and Old Cheeseman are two different things. So is beer. It was Old Cheeseman I meant to tell about” (1). Living his entire life at the school as an orphan and enduring the ridicule of boys who label him a “traitor” for having turned from pupil to Latin master, Cheeseman shocks them by disappearing suddenly then returning with an inherited fortune (2). Having anticipated that Cheeseman would reappear with an avenging “prizefighter,” the boys prepare for battle by stockpiling stones in their desks only to find that, instead of warfare, the school fills with “sobbing and crying” when they take leave of their old friend (3).
The direct address of the schoolboy so early in the number also reminds readers that each speaker is sitting in the presence of others at a fictional fireside and positions readers as possible family members. Just before the story ends, the speaker suddenly commands, “Don’t look at the next storyteller, for there’s more yet,” then shares surprising twists: Cheeseman marries Jane, the school’s servant, and the schoolboy does not meet them until they take him home for Christmas well after the events he has been relating (5). The schoolboy reminds his audience, “[I]t was the year when you were all away; and rather low I was about it, I can tell you” (5). Not until the end of the story do we understand that the schoolboy is speaking to his family members—although, as in the first Round, we do not know precisely which other speakers are his kin. One’s curiosity continues to forge links across the numbers and to keep the narrators connected: for instance, the deaf playmate from the first Round could be this speaker’s friend, making the schoolboy Charley Felkin. The boy clearly shames his family for abandoning him at Christmas, and his report of having a grand time at Cheeseman’s hints that the Cheeseman family may provide better company than his own (5). The schoolboy’s insecurity about holding the attention of the adults at the fireside prepares readers for the pending narrative shift and suggests that the old lady of the next story hovers impatiently, waiting for the boy to finish.
“The Old Lady’s Story” from Eliza Lynn32 continues to develop family relationships in the group before describing a most extreme sacrifice as it begins, “I have never told you my secret, my dear nieces” (5). Noticeably, she does not speak directly to the schoolboy, who has just warned her off. Lizzie, the old lady, tells of her youthful infatuation with Mr. Felix, a “foreign man” who moves into the neighborhood with a retinue of servants whose darkness adds to his mystery: “Hindoos, or Lascars, or Negros; dark-coloured, strange-looking people” (6–7). Mr. Felix’s presence poses a racial threat, and the Orientalized description of the estate that he transforms into a “fairy palace” full of velvets and “foreign smells” accounts for how he is able to cast a seductive spell over Lizzie (7). She defies her father and neglects her sister, Lucy, whose concern for Lizzie has made her gravely ill. Lucy dies at the moment she stops Lizzie from eloping, and guilt prevents Lizzie from ever marrying (8–9). The story’s warning against allowing foreign charms to enchant vulnerable English girls is one that Lizzie shares because she anticipates dying soon, and it reinforces the undercurrent of imperial anxiety that runs through the Christmas numbers. Exactly to whom Lizzie issues the caution is unclear because she mentions no siblings beyond the dead Lucy in her tale, and the other speakers offer no clarification of how an unmarried, siblingless woman would come to have nieces. The most likely explanation seems to be that the aunt/niece relationship is one of endearment, with Lizzie as an “adopted” aunt of a family, allowing the collection to advocate for non–biological family bonds.33 The reader’s inclusion in such a circle increases the text’s intimacy and justifies the next speaker, a neighbor who is included in the family grouping.
George A. Sala’s “Over the Way’s Story” brings fairy-tale tropes into the number and speaks back not just to the other narrators but also to Dickens. Barnard Braddlescroggs, called “the Beast,” is a grumpy merchant with a rigid attitude who runs a profitable warehouse (10). A clerk, Simcox, becomes the focus of the story, and his resemblance to Mr. Micawber, a character famous for always being in debt in David Copperfield (1849–50), is one reason that some identify the story as Dickensian. Simcox is a good-hearted man whose debt stems from his inability to control his drinking and the spending of his wife, who is characterized in a sudden and sharp emergence of the number’s underlying racism as a woman who is “of all domestic or household duties considerably more ignorant than a Zooloo Kaffir” (12). Ridiculing the idea of a black South African woman running an English household reinforces the notion that whiteness is synonymous with the idealized domestic hearth in the imaginary space of the number. Simcox compounds his family’s trouble by borrowing ten pounds from petty cash without permission, and when Braddlescroggs discovers the embezzlement, he plans to jail or transport the entire family. Bessy, Simcox’s ailing daughter, saves the day by accepting Braddlescroggs’s offer of employment as a housekeeper at the warehouse, where he forbids her from speaking to her father, and Bessy’s meekness in that role slowly softens Braddlescroggs’s character. The story invokes fairy tales in its characterization of Bessy, who occupies “an analogous position to that of the celebrated Cinderella” (13) in her own family but then becomes the heroine of a Beauty and the Beast transformation plot in the Braddlescroggs family: “So Beauty was married. Not to the Beast, but to the Beast’s son” (17).
Substituting “scrogg” for “scrooge,” Braddlescroggs’s name riffs on Ebenezer Scrooge, and the story’s plot converses with A Christmas Carol. Philip Collins and others have noted that Sala’s essays regularly feature him “out-Dickensing Dickens” with ease.34 The unreformed Braddlescroggs dampens his son’s generous spirit in the same way that Scrooge curtails the cheer of his nephew Fred, and, like Scrooge, Braddlescroggs’s “compeers, fell away from him on ’Change” (11). For Braddlescroggs, a young girl whose patient duty to her alcoholic father threatens her health takes the place of the uncomplaining disabled boy who inspires Scrooge. The result for both protagonists is an excessive and buoyant generosity. Without published bylines to identify authors but with the common knowledge that Dickens “conducted” his contributors, readers could legitimately read this piece in numerous ways. With Dickens as the author, the story comes across as self-parody or an example of Dickens unoriginally repeating his own story lines. Speculating that someone else is the author, a contributor like Sala may be offering a tribute to the conductor via imitation or, alternatively, making fun of him. The unique collaborative context makes any or all of these readings feasible, and the plethora of possibilities attests to the rich interpretive arena that attention to collaboration opens.
Following Sala’s piece, Adelaide A. Procter’s “The Angel’s Story” brings the collection back to a more traditional
