(2).3 The messages of the travellers’ stories, however, turn out to be much more complicated than the vague notion that keeping Christmas in one’s heart can solve the world’s ills.
Before launching into the storytelling, the narrator provides a description of each traveller, which creates early interest in the interpolated tales to come and increases one’s curiosity about what type of story each will tell. The group consists of the host; a man with an injured arm who smells like shipbuilding wood; a young sailor boy; a disheveled man with papers bulging out of his pockets and tape holding his clothes together; a Swiss watchmaker; a frightened, widowed young woman; and a book peddler (3). The transitions between stories are brief, but the frame is so strong that the pieces cohere despite radical differences in subject matter. Discussing Elizabeth Gaskell’s use of a Dickens-inspired frame concept in 1859, Larry Uffelman notes that the reader progresses through such a text by “forming a series of loops that return at the end of each story to the setting and characters of the frame. Readers begin in the frame, read straight through a story, return to the frame, and then move into the next story in the sequence. . . . Furthermore, the ‘metafictional frame’ becomes a small drama in its own right, providing continuity, as readers move through the edition.”4 This process holds true for many of the Christmas numbers as the framing and looping form knots whose architecture relies on mental motion.
For The Seven Poor Travellers, the storytelling chain begins with the host sharing the story of Richard Doubledick, whom he identifies vaguely as a “relative.”5 The centrality of Dickens’s Doubledick story to the number’s intensely positive reception warrants a detailed examination of the piece, which celebrates intense bonds between men as part of Christmas.6 Already “better known as Dick,” Richard joins the army under a dubious, self-invented name so that he will be Dick Doubledick when killed (4). Full of shame, he hopes to die as penance for years of profligate behavior that have hurt himself and Mary Marshall, a fiancée he offends with an unnamed act of betrayal (5). Having failed to achieve his goal of being shot, Doubledick’s severe insubordination puts him at risk of being flogged when Captain Taunton’s looks and demeanor save him: “Now, the Captain of Richard Doubledick’s company was a young gentleman not above five years his senior, whose eyes had an expression in them which affected Private Richard Doubledick in a very remarkable way. They were bright, handsome, dark eyes—what are called laughing eyes generally, and, when serious, rather steady than severe—but, they were the only eyes now left in his narrowed world that Private Richard Doubledick could not stand” (5). Given their closeness in age, the accountability Doubledick feels in Taunton’s presence is not paternal; rather, there is an attraction between the men that consistently prevents Doubledick from speaking or behaving in any way falsely to Taunton. Taunton’s “bright, handsome, dark eyes” rivet Doubledick, inspiring his complete transformation into a steadfast soldier and devotee.7 Doubledick seals the pact of his own reformation “with a bursting heart” by kissing Taunton’s hand, and the kiss remains significant enough for Doubledick to recount it decades later: “I have heard from Private Richard Doubledick’s own lips, that he dropped down upon his knee, kissed that officer’s hand, arose, and went out of the light of the dark bright eyes, an altered man” (6). The kneeling position equally resonates with oaths of fealty and oaths of marriage, and the story presents that ambiguity comfortably.8
This intensity of male emotion apart from a domestic heterosexual unit is as much a part of the Christmas tradition in this number as anything else. Doubledick and Taunton subsequently experience thirteen years of togetherness in which they travel to many sites of conflict, and although Doubledick saves Taunton’s life repeatedly, the captain ultimately receives a fatal wound from a French officer at Badajoz. The description of his death mirrors the earlier account of the men’s union:
The bright dark eyes—so very, very dark now, in the pale face—smiled upon [Doubledick]; and the hand he had kissed thirteen years ago, laid itself fondly on his breast.
“Write to my mother. You will see Home again. Tell her how we became friends. It will comfort her, as it comforts me.”
[Taunton] spoke no more, but faintly signed for a moment towards his hair as it fluttered in the wind. The Ensign understood him. He smiled again when he saw that, and gently turning his face over on the supporting arm as if for rest, died, with his hand upon the breast in which he had revived a soul. (6–7)
The fellow soldiers have lived in a professional and personal partnership that far surpasses the superior/subordinate relationship of rank. Their embrace at Taunton’s moment of death is extended as Doubledick carries Taunton’s lock of hair “near his heart” for over a year until he can deliver it to Taunton’s mother (7). When Doubledick goes to France to visit Mrs. Taunton, he discovers that her host is the officer who killed her son, but rather than vengefully murdering the man, Doubledick forgives. Reflecting the shift from English-French animosity to alliance that took place relatively quickly between the Napoleonic and Crimean conflicts, the children of the men grow up as friends who later unite to fight “in one cause . . . fast united” (10). Holly Furneaux’s analysis of this story focuses on the Doubledick character and Dickens’s treatment of “military men of feeling” while, refreshingly, including consideration of the resonances between Doubledick’s plight and other pieces in the number: “Like Dickens’s story Procter’s poem considers the thorny question of allegiance in wartime. . . . Both contributions, too, are concerned with the appropriate gendering of military heroism and the personal characteristics of a hero.”9 Indeed, the heterosexual pairing of Doubledick with Mary, which the story barely mentions, takes place only because of the transformation he experiences in his relationship with another man. In a frame story that involves a man fantasizing about the succor he will provide to poor travellers, all but one of which are men, the relationship depicted in the first traveller’s story suggests a path forward not just for individual travellers who might be in need of character reform but for the entire nation to overcome animosities that run through deeply violent episodes of its history.10
The direct, first-person voice of the next speaker keeps the second story anchored to the frame as the shipwright begins his portion by explaining that his arm sling results from an adze-wielding coworker having inflicted an “unlucky chop” at the shipyards. He then moves into the tale by saying, “I have nothing else in particular to tell of myself, so I’ll tell a bit of a story of a seaport town” (10). Following the first traveller’s references to an unspecified time in the future, the voice of the second traveller pulls readers right back into Christmas Eve at Watts’s, which acts as a reminder that the storytellers are randomly assembled. Such a reminder is especially fitting to introduce George A. Sala’s psychedelic story about Acon-Virlaz, a Jewish shopkeeper and jeweller whose characterization complicates critical understanding of ethnic “others” in Dickens’s collaborative canon. In Acon-Virlaz’s dream vision, he joins his friend Mr. Ben-Daoud on a shopping trip to Sky Fair, a bizarre place full of “live armadillos with their jewelled scales,” diamonds the size of ostrich eggs, and jewels that are sold “by the gallon, like table beer” (14). Weighed down by treasures, Acon-Virlaz fails to leave the fair before the closing bell and offers the gatekeeper his daughter’s hand in marriage to avoid being locked in for a hundred years. Although “women and children from every nation under the sun” (15) help block his way to the exit, the quick reference to other ethnicities does not lessen the story’s excessive attention to Jewishness. Early in the tale, some attempt at moderation appears when, on the subject of Acon-Virlaz’s name, the narrator says, “He went by a simpler, homelier, shorter appellation: Moses, Levy, Sheeny—what you will; for most of the Hebrew nation have an inner name as well as an inner and richer life” (11). Despite this defensive statement on behalf of “the Hebrew nation,” the story’s depiction of Ben-Daoud, who owes Acon-Virlaz money, is directly anti-Semitic. Ben-Daoud is “oily” with “a perceptible lisp” and pink eyes, and Acon-Virlaz casts him as the dream’s villain because he lures Acon-Virlaz to Sky Fair only to abandon him (12). In actuality, Acon-Virlaz has returned home drunk, and falling out of his chair “into the fire-place” wakes him from the dream (16).11
