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Dickens by Numbers: the Christmas Numbers of Household Words and All the Year Round

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Dickens by Numbers: the Christmas Numbers of Household Words and All the Year Round Dickens by Numbers: the Christmas Numbers of Household Words and All the Year Round Aine Helen McNicholas PhD University of York English May 2015 Abstract This thesis examines the short fiction that makes up the annual Christmas Numbers of Dickens’s journals, Household Words and All the Year Round. Through close reading and with reference to Dickens’s letters, contemporary reviews, and the work of his contributors, this thesis contends that the Christmas Numbers are one of the most remarkable and overlooked bodies of work of the second half of the nineteenth century. Dickens’s short fictions rarely receive sustained or close attention, despite the continuing commitment by critics to bring the whole range of Dickens’s career into focus, from his sketches and journalism, to his late public readings. Through readings of selected texts, this thesis will show that Dickens’s Christmas Number stories are particularly powerful and experimental examples of some of the deepest and most recurrent concerns of his work. They include, for example, three of his four uses of a child narrator and one of his few female narrators, and are concerned with childhood, memory, and the socially marginal figures and distinctive voices that are so characteristic of his longer work. But, crucially, they also go further than his longer work to thematise the very questions raised by their production, including anonymity, authorship, collaboration, and annual return. This thesis takes Dickens’s works as its primary focus, but it will also draw throughout on the work of his contributors, which appeared alongside Dickens’s stories in these Christmas issues. In doing so this thesis aims to acknowledge the original conditions under which these stories were produced and published, but more importantly to underline the rich plurality of the Victorian periodical, which these Numbers demonstrate. 2 Contents Abstract ................................................................................................................................................................. 2 List of Illustrations.......................................................................................................................................... 4 Acknowledgments .......................................................................................................................................... 5 Author’s Declaration...................................................................................................................................... 6 Preface.................................................................................................................................................................... 7 Introduction........................................................................................................................................................ 9 Chapter 1 – The Waiter and the Writer: Somebody’s Luggage (1862) ........................ 24 Chapter 2 – Dickens’s Child Narrators (1852, 1853, 1866) ............................................... 77 Chapter 3 – Lodging in Language: The Lirriper Stories (1863-64)............................. 130 Chapter 4 – Time and Repetition: Mugby Junction (1866)............................................... 187 Conclusion...................................................................................................................................................... 237 Appendix......................................................................................................................................................... 249 Abbreviations............................................................................................................................................... 279 BIBLIOGRAPHY........................................................................................................................................... 280 3 List of Illustrations Plate 1 – “The Boy at Mugby” by J. Mahoney 118 4 Acknowledgments I would like to thank my supervisor, Professor John Bowen, for his guidance and his patience. Thanks also to Professor Matthew Campbell for his advice, and to John Griffiths for his support over the best part (in all senses) of the last decade. 5 Author’s Declaration The material presented here has not appeared in publication or previously been submitted for examination for a degree at this or any other university, and is the sole work of the author. 6 Preface This preface offers a brief description of the Extra Christmas Numbers as they were originally published, as an introduction to the primary texts of this thesis, and to complement the information provided in the appendix.1 Produced between 1850 and 1867, the Christmas Numbers of Dickens’s journals, Household Words and All the Year Round, were “Extra” issues, published in addition to the regular weekly numbers, on various dates between 1 and 21 December.2 Extremely popular with their first audiences, reaching sales of almost 300,000 at their peak, the Christmas Number initially covered 24 pages in double columns, which increased to 36 pages in 1852, and again to 48 pages when Dickens replaced Household Words with All the Year Round in 1859.3 Each Number was split into parts, usually between 6 and 10, which were written by Dickens and other authors, or sometimes by Dickens and Wilkie Collins in collaboration. These parts, which were published anonymously and without illustrations, usually included a narrative frame written by Dickens, which set up a scenario into which the contributed material could be 1 Please see the abbreviations page for more detailed information about the primary sources used. 2 See appendix for individual publication dates. On the relation of the “Extra” issue to regular numbers, see footnote (7) on page 9. 3 On sales, see John M. L. Drew, Dickens the Journalist (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2003), 147–48; on the length of the Numbers, see Charles Dickens, The Christmas Stories, ed. Ruth Glancy (London: J. M. Dent, 1996), xxxvii. introduced.4 Dickens would write to potential contributors in advance with instructions about the basic overall theme and style of the framing story, so that they could develop their stories in keeping with his scheme for the Number.5 As is evidenced by footnotes here and throughout, Ruth Glancy and others have done much of the crucial information gathering about the Christmas Numbers already. Glancy’s annotated bibliography, Dickens’s Christmas Books, Christmas Stories, and Other Short Fiction is a valuable resource to anyone studying this material, with information on each Number relating to, for example, Dickens’s letters, contemporary reviews, critical studies, adaptations, and subsequent editions.6 4 See appendix for a detailed break down of each Number. 5 See Dickens, The Christmas Stories. Glancy includes details of Dickens’s instructions to contributors in many of her introductions to the individual Numbers throughout this edition. 6 Ruth F. Glancy, Dickens’s Christmas Books, Christmas Stories, and Other Short Fiction: An Annotated Bibliography (New York: Garland Publishing Inc, 1985). 8 Introduction To read the “Extra” Christmas Numbers of Charles Dickens’s Household Words and All the Year Round, is at once to recognise the astonishingly rich world of the Victorian periodical, and the particular power of Dickens’s voice that set him apart in this noisy and burgeoning literary marketplace. 7 The Christmas Numbers, which Dickens produced in collaboration with other authors over eighteen years, form a miscellaneous trove of stories. From a dwarf who wins the lottery, to a man whose life is ruined by the ague; from babies switched at birth, to cannibalism aboard a stranded lifeboat; the variety signifies a readership that was accustomed to diversity and the broad pool of authors that Dickens had to call upon – from famous names in journalism and literature, to those who were relatively unknown and have since been forgotten by history. The short form allowed authors to explore a broad range of subjects, including isolation, disability, violence, sexuality, dysfunctional families, chance encounters, and strange mental states, including dreams, premonitions, and delirium. The endings of these stories are often ambivalent, unresolved, or tragic.8 7 The Christmas Number became an “Extra” Number after its initial success in 1850, after which it was published in addition to the regular issue. See Ruth F. Glancy, “Dickens and Christmas: His Framed-Tale Themes,” Nineteenth-Century Fiction 35, no. 1 (1980): 59. For sake of ease, I will be referring to them all as the Christmas Numbers throughout. 8 This is looked at in more detail in the conclusion. 9 These single editions commanded the highest sales of Dickens’s journals and, according to John Forster, of his career.9 Nevertheless, the cultural dominance of the novel, and the now unusual publication format, means that they rarely receive sustained attention, and are more often subsumed into discussions of Dickens’s longer work, relegated to footnote status, or not mentioned at all.10 This thesis takes as its starting point that there is a great deal to be gained for the study of Dickens and Victorian periodical fiction in examining the Christmas Numbers. Dickens’s stories for the Numbers have aspects in common with his longer work, for example, an interest in distinctive performative voices, in socially marginal people and work, and in childhood. But they are also exceptional in the context of his career, as they
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