collection should be able to use this book’s introduction and conclusion alongside any of its individual chapters to understand its essential argument. The reference list of each number’s contents and contributors in appendix A also enables one to place each story in context quickly and to explore additional connections between and across numbers. Readers might notice that, to avoid excessive and jarring verb tense changes in the chapters that follow, I often use the present tense to discuss not just literary texts but also Dickens’s choices, authorial presence, and actions. Rather than, for instance, referring to what “Dickens wrote,” I often refer to what “Dickens writes,” which decreases historical distance and places emphasis on the ways in which Dickens’s actions continue to influence critical assessment of his texts.
My first two chapters show how Dickens moves from producing Christmas collections that reflect upon the various ways that people around the world celebrate the holiday to crafting Christmas numbers with narrative frames that are enhanced by collaboration. Chapter 1 elucidates the ways in which the special issues for 1850 and 1851 link celebrations of Christmas to colonial ideologies that pervade the rest of the numbers. Chapter 2 argues that, drawing on oral storytelling modes in A Round of Stories by the Christmas Fire and Another Round of Stories by the Christmas Fire, Dickens creates a narrative atmosphere in which collaboration exists as part of a repetitive, polyphonic form. Chapter 3 demonstrates that, in contrast to the preceding Rounds, the numbers for 1854 and 1855 move from circularity to more linear structures. Limiting the type of mixing that characterizes the Rounds, The Seven Poor Travellers and The Holly-Tree Inn develop lacing structures that enable the stories to cohere. With Dickens’s narrator organizing fictional travellers, the stories weave close male bonds and varied imperial visions into Christmas celebrations while revealing the importance of collaborative contexts to the emergence of detective fiction.
Chapter 4 argues that, as the 1856 and 1857 Christmas issues engage directly with questions of empire building and fortune seeking, collaboration is crucial to the ways in which the collections continue to explore the foundational ideologies laid out in the first two numbers. Restoring connections between the narrative parts of The Wreck of the Golden Mary, I recuperate the neglected dialogic aspects of the original text to assert that the interpolated stories of the middle section are essential to the success of the frame story and to one’s comprehension of the links between trauma and storytelling. The Perils of Certain English Prisoners is the first number for which Dickens collaborates with only one other author, Wilkie Collins, and I demonstrate that their voices blend much more thoroughly than critics have been willing to acknowledge, even at the text’s most racist moments. Collins’s and Dickens’s jointly created narrative device in The Perils routes their voices through an illiterate man who is unable to present his own voice in print and thus explores narrative impotence as a parallel to social inferiority in the face of colonial and racial violence. Chapter 5 reveals the range of outcomes exhibited in collaborative work as Collins and Dickens move from success to disappointment in A House to Let, the number that comes closest to collaborative failure. Dickens navigates personal crisis from 1858 to 1859, and collaboration enables him to experiment with representations that blur the boundaries between reality and fiction. As the frame concept unfolds in The Haunted House, Dickens weaves together commentary not only on the psychological dynamics of perceiving a thing, or place, to be haunted but also on storytelling, trauma, and the interpersonal dynamics of collaboration.
Three collections that revel in the chaos of collaborative storytelling form the focus of chapter 6. Spotlighting a poem in A Message from the Sea that depicts cannibalism and race in a manner that most scholars identify as antithetical to Dickens’s usual aims, I continue to build a case for the necessity of constantly reading the numbers with attention to multivocal authorship. I also note the number’s questioning of generic distinctions between pieces to excavate its ironic stance toward the storytelling its characters are trying to accomplish. Tom Tiddler’s Ground comingles Dickens’s real and fictional personas and further indulges irony by showing how storytelling can fail to have any positive effect on an audience. An especially strong example of how collaborative texts can volunteer responses to the very questions they raise, Somebody’s Luggage is the most playful and entertaining in its metatextuality as its narrative framing simultaneously insists on and deconstructs textual divisions.
Chapter 7 proposes that the use of kindly adoptive parental figures in frame narratives enables Mrs. Lirriper’s Lodgings, Mrs. Lirriper’s Legacy, and Doctor Marigold’s Prescriptions to present collaborative storytelling as an act of cross-generational love. I argue that collaboration and story gathering are crucial aspects of how these collections validate non-biological family structures and advocate for working-class characters. The figures of Mrs. Lirriper, Major Jemmy Jackman, and Doctor Marigold were extremely popular, and their collecting of texts as a legacy-making act assumes a moral weight equivalent to their rescuing of children. Chapter 8 examines the final two Christmas numbers to show that as Dickens concludes the Christmas collaborations, he introduces major changes to the format but maintains other collaborative traditions as he identifies other authors in print for the first time, then returns to crafting a narrative solely with Wilkie Collins. Mugby Junction, a seemingly misordered set of contributions, is disjointed but nevertheless develops hitherto overlooked themes across stories that profoundly impact attempts at biographical readings of Dickens’s fictionalized responses to trauma. No Thoroughfare mixes authorial voices seamlessly and reverts to a reinforcement of English identity in opposition to less pure others. The final Christmas number also illustrates a further new direction in scholarship that Collaborative Dickens makes possible: an investigation of how the collaborative conversations of Collins and Dickens persist in their joint works from the years of the Christmas numbers through to Dickens’s unfinished novel, The Mystery of Edwin Drood, and Collins’s best seller The Moonstone.
The range, skill, and complexity of the Christmas numbers, which have been overlooked in academic studies and popular accounts of Dickens and Christmas, illuminate an annual event in the nineteenth-century periodical press that involved readers in engaging, multivocal experiments. Evaluating the Christmas collections in their polyvocal completeness forces one to regard Dickens as a collaborator whose working methods and interactions with his colleagues shifted productively over nearly two decades and leads to a fresh awareness of Dickens as a multigendered and multimodal authorial voice. The Christmas collaborations also reveal that the idealized Englishness of what has come to be regarded as a typical Christmas is linked to a chorus of voices articulating sometimes conflicting racial and imperial ideologies. Accounting for the polyphonic nature of the complete Christmas numbers inspires a more comprehensive understanding of plural authorship in the nineteenth-century periodical press that prompts us to reconceptualize “Dickens.”
1
Writing Christmas with “a Bunch of People”
(1850–51)
The standard practice of Household Words and many other Victorian journals was to print the work of contributors without naming them. In the absence of bylines, editors in chief hoped their journals would construct distinct, unified voices of their own, and the practice of publishing contributions anonymously “prevailed almost universally until the late 1860s and 1870s.”1 Dickens published his first pieces anonymously in the 1830s.2 By midcentury, readers were familiar with the fact that Dickens and other editors did not write every column that appeared in their journals’ pages but
