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method, we must accept both “partial collaborations, in which full mutually acknowledged coauthorship does not occur” and “full collaborations,” and we must avoid viewing full collaborations as “necessarily more balanced, more equitable, or more mutually rewarding than partial or ‘approximate’ . . . collaborations between authors and editors, speakers and writers.”³⁹ Granting legitimacy to varying degrees and types of coauthorship means that one can no longer disqualify a text from the “collaborative” category based only on a printed byline or lack thereof. In part because I am persuaded by Laird’s argument against “authorless textuality,” my suggestions for how to rethink Dickens as a collaborative entity sometimes echo Marjorie Stone’s and Judith Thompson’s formulation of the author as heterotext without adopting their stance completely. Although Stone and Thompson intend to return “hetero” to its “older root,” which includes meanings such as “mixed,” I am not convinced that the prefix lends itself to the kind of intermittent blending evidenced in the Christmas numbers or that it avoids obliterating human agency.⁴⁰ In the case of an editorial authorial presence such as Dickens, the texts he published at times fit into a heterotextual model of mixture but at other times are unable to achieve narrative coherence. Therefore, rather than pursuing a theory of collaboration as heterotext, I am more compelled by extending and expanding the notion of collaboration as conversation.

      To envision collaboration as conversational enables one to accommodate the fact that the Christmas numbers Dickens produced changed over the years, undulating in format, style, and number of voices in response to various factors. To converse is, in its most basic definition, “to communicate or interchange ideas (with any one) by speech or writing or otherwise.”⁴¹ A conversational model of analysis, then, can account for and examine verbal exchanges between writers, written correspondence about a text under construction, and narrative exchanges between the fictional voices created by each collaborator. Conversation also importantly honors the verbal or written exchanges that influence a creative team regardless of which collaborator’s hand puts pen to paper to create a manuscript. Yet another advantage to the conversational model is that it complements Dickens’s conducting metaphor: emphasizing conversation does not elide conducting, and conducting does not drown out conversation. Conversations can be conducted, and conducting requires conversation, whether metaphorically between instrument and wand or literally between composer, conductor, and/or musician as assorted creative visions converge. A conversational model upsets the more usual mode of tracing who influenced whom with the goal of determining which author should receive “credit” for passages or ideas. Instead, it listens to the dialogue inherent in literary texts written in an atmosphere of consistent creative exchange. This interpretive approach also enables one to see how texts communicate back and forth across space and time. My insistence is not that we abandon discussions of attribution or exploitation altogether but rather that we avoid relying on them as primary methodologies when reconstituting collaborative texts such as the Christmas numbers.

      Within periodical studies, there is precedent for reading some types of Victorian literature from this more holistic position. Robert L. Patten, Laurel Brake, and others have pointed out that scholars should be aware of the conversations between part sellers and purchasers; between author, typesetter, and publisher; between writers and illustrators;⁴² and between each installment and the advertisements or other articles surrounding it. Jerome McGann includes editors, printers, publishers, and readers in his formulations and warns that approaches focusing too intensely on the individuality of authors result in literary works being “divorced from the social relationships which gave them their lives.”⁴³ Delving into the crisscrossings of major figures at the center of London’s literary marketplace on Wellington Street, Mary Shannon’s recent work importantly includes consideration of how “writers and editors represented their readers as active participants in a network” that also extended to imperial streets.⁴⁴ Such critics have illustrated that rich interpretive possibilities arise from studying advertisements, individual issues or entire runs of periodicals, logistics, geographical locations, and the simultaneous existence of a text in different forms. Examining Christmas numbers in their entirety, then, would seem to be an already common approach, but it is exceedingly rare.

      By isolating Dickens’s Christmas numbers, I do not attempt a systematic study of the Victorian press. As Joanne Shattock and Michael Wolff have put it, “The sheer bulk and range of the Victorian press seem to make it so unwieldy as to defy systematic and general study.”⁴⁵ What this book offers is a new view of a small section of the massive whole that might serve as a microcosm for collaborative dynamics that also appear elsewhere. If John Plunkett and Andrew King are correct that “it is more helpful to conceptualize nineteenth-century authorship in terms of the existence of a range of what Foucault called author-functions,”⁴⁶ then it is also helpful to explore the overlapping of those author functions in texts that confuse the lines between editor, author, contributor, and creator. Drew has called the Christmas collections a “remarkable fusion of occasional journalism and communal storytelling,” and we must persist in the challenging task of conceptualizing that “communal” aspect.⁴⁷

      The structure of this book follows the chronological publication order of the stories in the Christmas numbers. In part, this choice is dictated by the fact that Collaborative Dickens is the first study of its kind. To shift critical practice away from the arbitrary isolation of stories and toward the collaborative context in which the stories first appeared, this book must establish a foundation that values the numbers as whole texts. In the chapters that follow, each story does not receive the same amount of attention, and some I mention only briefly, but each story surfaces in its proper place as my argument about the collaborative dynamics of these texts emerges. To skip over stories whose quality I determine to be low would invalidate this book’s premise that all of the stories constituting the Christmas numbers remain instructive parts of the collaborative oeuvre. Fortuitously, many of the usually overlooked stories offer surprising moments of suspense or narrative complexity that exemplify the value of a comprehensive approach. Each chapter below begins with a brief forecasting section, which helps to orient readers seeking an in-depth treatment of just one year’s Christmas number. This study is not organized as a casebook, and each chapter’s argument relates to the others, but time-restricted readers investigating one Christmas 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

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