this periodical form that resists easy categorization, in part because the texts that constitute Household Words simultaneously exist as the words of Dickens and the words of others.3 Many writers were honored to have their work appear under Dickens’s name, as after only a couple of years of publication, “Dickens’s journal had a readership and a kind of glamour no other journal had.”4 Household Words also paid well at one guinea or more per page for a Christmas number contribution, making it an attractive venue. For the first two Christmas issues, a fair amount of scholarship exists on the pieces Dickens authored as they relate to his personal conceptions of Christmas and youth, but few scholars have viewed them alongside the contributors’ pieces. The first Christmas number establishes important precedents, particularly in regard to contested imperial ideologies, that are visible only when the number is read in its entirety. In building a definition of acceptable English Christmas celebrations, the 1850 issue functions as a foundation for future years. The 1851 number continues to draw upon that base while also demonstrating that Dickens and Wills stumble in their second attempt as they learn how to sustain the Christmas numbers. Rather than showcasing a smooth progression of the form, the second number’s repetitive missteps illustrate the need for the stronger framing apparatuses that appear in subsequent years.
Until 1866, the Christmas issues of Household Words eschewed bylines, following the same practice as the regular issues, and the unprinted name most crucial to the success of both the regular issues and the Christmas numbers is that of William H. Wills, Dickens’s coeditor. Wills tended to the details of every Household Words issue as he communicated with printers and contributors, corrected galley proofs, reviewed more contributions than Dickens did, coauthored essays and stories, and arranged business matters such as payments and contracts. As John Drew points out, “Often portrayed as the anchor and engine of the editorial team, punctual, steady, unimaginative—Charlie Watts to Dickens’s Jagger—Wills was a hugely versatile and skilled literary craftsman.”5 Shu Fang Lai also persuasively argues that Wills’s role has been inaccurately diminished in most critical treatments of Dickens’s editorship. Lai charts a perplexing resistance to acknowledging Wills as an instrumental component of Dickens’s journalistic success even in the wake of persuasive studies from well-respected critics such as Drew.6 Although I agree with Lai’s assessment, Lai persistently draws Dickens as an editor who always wished for greater control and evaluates the Wills/Dickens relationship with an emphasis on contention rather than collaboration. Dickens often sent blunt instructions to Wills but also frequently needed his advice. In a letter about whether to publish poems eulogizing the Duke of Wellington in an issue that would coincide with his funeral, for example, Dickens writes, “I can’t quite decide. What do you think?”7 An earlier exchange between the two editors shows that when they disagree, Wills does not hesitate to challenge Dickens. Just a few months after the launch of Household Words, Dickens complains about a title Wills suggested, declaring, “I don’t think there could be a worse one within the range of the human understanding,” and then chastises Wills: “[D]on’t touch my articles without consulting me.”8
In a lengthy reply, Wills stakes out his position as a coeditor who will not accept provocative or unfair criticism without argument: “I hope you will understand what I endeavour always to intimate:—that when I make an objection to any article I do it suggestively.”9 Wills makes clear that Dickens’s consternation is a result of his own misunderstanding, not a mistake on Wills’s part, and that Dickens’s articles do not exist in a special zone exempt from comment. Explaining his editorial choices, Wills also snaps, “I did not suppose you would wish me to consult you upon so simple a matter of mechanical convenience.” Drawing upon years of experience at both Punch and Chambers’s Edinburgh Journal to put Dickens’s presumption in check, Wills retorts (in regard to the title), “I am sure it is not the worst one within the range of human understanding. Forgive me for claiming for my worst suggestion a locus within that pale.”10 Wills’s teasing tone again shifts from the merits or shortcomings of his suggestion to Dickens’s hyperbolic reaction, which contributes to an atmosphere of robust, collaborative friendship rather than hostile attack. The letter closes with Wills telling Dickens that he plans to take a couple of days off—obviously the comment of a man secure in his position. Wills kept a copy of this missive in his book of letters, perhaps to record his own strong voice for posterity in anticipation of a legacy that would cast him in a submissive role. In revising critical perspectives to account consistently for Wills’s coeditorship, we must also regard him as a constant, influential presence in the Christmas numbers. As we shall see, his involvement in some years is even more determinant of the final outcome than Dickens’s input, and his is one of a plethora of voices that speaks back to Dickens’s own consistently.
The Christmas Number
The first Christmas issue of Household Words, called simply “The Christmas Number,” was published as a regular issue on Saturday, December 21, 1850. The issue includes no table of contents, no passages linking the pieces, and no frame concept; the naming of “Christmas” in the title constitutes its strongest gesture toward commonality of theme. One senses that Dickens was still figuring out how he wanted to shape the Christmas number, blurring the lines between fiction and nonfiction without fully indulging either and including Christmas carols while avoiding the sheet music and visual art of literary annuals.11 In many ways, the 1850 number is a collection of random musings about a holiday, but consideration of the number in its entirety reveals a coherence that has less to do with Dickens’s request for essays on the Christmas theme and more to do with midcentury imaginings of empire.
The voices Dickens conducts advocate for England’s “civilizing” mission and self-consciously defend the English citizenry’s demand for the materials that make an idyllic English Christmas possible. The stories do not ignore the human costs behind the production of materials such as spices and fruits but rather justify them as part of an appropriate and beneficial system of global commerce that maintains English superiority. Whether the Franklin Expedition explorers or the “Genius of the Sugar,” who “is a freed Negro,” the figures dominating these stories collectively call for the preservation of imperial ideology alongside the preservation of plums.12 The collection of nine stories, all written by men, depicts Christmas through various objects, with various types of people, and in various locations. In all of these contexts, the privileged consumer must not forget that each ornament, decoration, and taste of Christmas should be experienced as a conscious enactment of a specifically English Christian joy.
Dickens’s “A Christmas Tree” begins the number: “I have been looking on, this evening, at a merry company of children assembled round that pretty German toy, a Christmas Tree” (289). Just two years earlier, a published sketch of Queen Victoria and Prince Albert celebrating around a Christmas tree raised the profile of the tradition and lent the authority of the monarch to the anglicized adoption of the custom.13 Calling the tree a “pretty German toy” in the first sentence immediately indicates that English Christmas, from childhood on, includes the navigation and appropriation of things, traditions, and people whose origins remain identified as non-English. Delivering a long list of everything on and around the tree, the story “describes such a cornucopia of toys and gifts in its reminiscences about Christmases past, that it anticipates the growing commercialization of the festival.”14 The narrator is an unidentified man watching a group of children, and he returns home in a reverie of childhood memories of Christmas, imagining years as branches on the tree. He recalls books, plays, songs, and toys that are diverting or terrifying enough to cause nightmares. Some details, such as reading the Arabian Nights and enjoying a toy theatre, correlate with Dickens’s accounts of parts of his childhood, but the story makes broader points about nostalgia and tradition rather than acting as an autobiographical essay.15 The narrator’s recollection of several “Winter Stories,” or ghost stories, told “round the Christmas fire” foresees the frame concept Dickens develops two years later and embeds the supernatural in his delineation of Christmas festivities (293). Although the narrator’s recollections span the varied nature of childhood experience, he nonetheless idealizes his memories:
