Sea-Coal Fire, which an obituary for Dickens in The Bookseller lists as one of the most successful imitations.51 Roberts is credited as sole author, and each story has two titles: “Phoebe Gray’s Troth-Plight,” for instance, is “The Niece’s Story,” and “The Lost Fiddler” is “The City Friend’s Story.” The double titling creates ambiguity, but the confusion feels unintentional, as if Roberts has patched together as many elements as possible from Dickens’s previous Christmas numbers (snowed up people, telling tales around a fire, stories named for their tellers) without careful craft. Many of the stories begin by disclosing their plots, doing away with suspense and illustrating why Dickens’s Christmas numbers, with their constantly evolving frame narratives, continue to grow in popularity over others.52 Five years after the second Round, Dickens stated that if he and Wilkie Collins were unable to devise a satisfactory new frame idea, they could always fall back on yet another Round, but doing so was not Dickens’s preference, as he wisely sensed that he had exhausted the Round structure by the end of 1853.53 In the next Christmas numbers, Dickens moves to a much more fully developed and linear narrative frame and, perhaps inspired by Wills’s placement of stories in the second Round, continues the practice of positioning his own work to start and finish the next two special issues.
3
Orderly Travels and Generic Developments
(1854–55)
Early in The Holly-Tree Inn, its narrator declares, “[W]hen I travel, I never arrive at a place but I immediately want to go away from it” (3). The speaker’s back-and-forth desires could create an elliptical visual image, but in this case, a snowstorm prevents the traveller from being able to backtrack or skip to his next destination quickly. Instead, he must slow down and proceed through the space he currently inhabits in a direct, uncomplicated motion, which is a fitting way to visualize both the 1854 and 1855 Christmas numbers. For these years, in contrast to the preceding Rounds, the numbers move from circularity to structures that are more linear, and the storytelling moves from one speaker to another with a clear sense of forward motion.1 Dickens reins in the storytelling, limiting the mixing that characterizes the Rounds and keeping his travellers under at least temporary control with his own narrator framing them.
The Seven Poor Travellers (1854) and The Holly-Tree Inn (1855) are Dickens’s first forays into fully developed frame narratives for the Christmas numbers. The narrative lacing structures that emerge in each collection come to characterize the Christmas numbers for more than a decade. These heretofore-overlooked techniques enable the stories to cohere in contexts that feature group as well as individual storytelling, and Dickens’s correspondence on the subject reveals intriguingly inconsistent stances toward the dynamics of collaboration: sometimes he embraces joint creative processes, and sometimes he complains about them. Even when contributors shared no apparent communication about their stories’ emphases, the numbers for 1854 and 1855 evidence lively intertextual dynamics. Approaches that emphasize attribution blind critics to those dynamics and prevent appreciation of the symbiotic relationships that enhance both the interpolated stories and their respective frames. The frames enabling these collections to cohere are, for instance, important elements of the collaborative contexts from which detective fiction emerges. These collections also fold close male bonds into Christmas visions and exhibit the ways in which shifting representations of imperial projects continue to underpin celebrations of idyllic English holidays.
The Seven Poor Travellers
The first Christmas number in which a narrative frame completely encloses the other stories and is woven through them to enhance coherence, The Seven Poor Travellers succeeds in creating orderly storytelling. Each traveller speaks in numbered sequence, and the frame story gives good reason for possible variations in narrative style, theme, or idiom between the inset pieces. For its premise, the collection relies on Watts’s Charity, an actual institution in Rochester, Kent (the same region featured in Chaucer’s famous framed tales).2 On May 11, 1854, Dickens visited the charity house with Mark Lemon, and although that visit may not have been Dickens’s first, it would have been freshest in his mind during the composition of this issue.
Despite the very real place from which this Christmas number takes its name, its narrator immediately injects fiction into the reading experience with an opening disclaimer:
Strictly speaking, there were only six Poor Travellers; but, being a Traveller myself, though an idle one, and being withal as poor as I hope to be, I brought the number up to seven. This word of explanation is due at once, for what says the inscription over the quaint old door?
RICHARD WATTS, ESQ.
BY HIS WILL, DATED 22 AUG. 1579,
FOUNDED THIS CHARITY
FOR SIX POOR TRAVELLERS,
WHO NOT BEING ROGUES, OR PROCTORS,
MAY RECEIVE GRATIS FOR ONE NIGHT,
LODGING, ENTERTAINMENT,
AND FOUR-PENCE EACH. (1)
Taking it upon himself to become the Christmas Eve benefactor of the six actually poor visitors at the charity, the narrator plays host by providing a sumptuous feast. The entire interaction relies on his difference from the travellers, yet his addition of himself to their number creates the illusion of comradeship. The only things linking the seven individuals in the title are their status as poor and their transience, but once the host asks each traveller to tell a story, the group shares another trait; they are joined in a project of speaking and listening. Each speaker’s self-consciousness acts as a device to keep the seven figures connected to the frame, and in some cases, the content of the inset contributions further strengthens such cohesion.
The host/narrator’s logic in requesting these stories may seem uncomplicated, but the moral reasoning behind his sudden benevolence questions the precepts of the type of charity often associated with Christmas. He is so moved by looking at Watts’s tomb and the inscription on the house that he begins to regard the establishment possessively, thinking of it as “my property” (1) and calling the visitors “my travellers” as he imagines their destitution: “I made them footsore; I made them weary; I made them carry packs and bundles; I made them stop by fingerposts and milestones, leaning on their bent sticks and looking wistfully at what was written there; I made them lose their way, and filled their five wits with apprehensions of lying out all night, and being frozen to death” (3). The host somewhat sadistically enjoys envisioning the suffering of these people so that he can delight all the more in alleviating it. The exaggerated quality of the host’s thought process reveals the self-serving rather than altruistic nature of this model of patronage as he revels even in another person’s fear of being frozen to death, but the number avoids completely vilifying him by showing that he is aware of his self-aggrandizing wishes, then shifting to humor.
The host’s Christmas Eve dinner preparations involve issuing orders at his inn for a grand meal that must be transported to the charity house, and the curious parade of hot dishes down the High Street draws readers into a cheering fantasy of a Christmas hastily done up for the comfort of others. Waiters sprinting with steaming puddings, the host bearing a pitcher of wassail (called his “brown beauty”) as if it were an infant, and a “Man with Tray on his head, containing Vegetables and Sundries” join to form a “Comet-like” procession, while a servant boy waits for a whistle to dash down the street to “the sauce-female, who would be provided with brandy in a blue state of combustion” (3–4). The instant feast is just one aspect of the number’s opening that recalls A Christmas Carol (1843). Although this host does not undergo a Scrooge-esque character transformation, the surprise turkey and his excessive joy in providing a meal call that character to mind. The host
