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Reading in Circles: From Numbers to Rounds

(1852–53)

A Round of Stories by the Christmas Fire (1852) and Another Round of Stories by the Christmas Fire (1853) are the first Christmas numbers for which Dickens uses a loose concept to hold the contributions together. Although the Christmas fire acts as a reliably familiar symbol, the relationships of the people telling tales around it and the stories of the Rounds are fraught with complication. The contributions for the two Rounds, which come from thirteen authors, range from parables to ghost stories to poems of intense loss. Each piece bears the title of its teller: the host, the guest, the schoolboy, and Uncle George, for instance. In drawing upon oral storytelling modes with the round structure, Dickens creates a narrative atmosphere in which collaboration exists as part of a repetitive, polyphonic form.

Attention to the complicated narrative structure of these numbers reveals a Dickens whose contributors’ voices often destabilize his own. Considering the vocal qualities of the round as a form illuminates a new interpretive angle for the musical metaphor in Dickens’s role as the “conductor” of Household Words. Calling the 1852 and 1853 collections Rounds also implies a circular form that links each segment to the others through the others; this circle has a center, but its top changes depending on the tilt of one’s ear. Laurel Brake speaks of the periodical press “articulating eloquently . . . a cacophony of presence and absence.”¹ The sometimes-jarring juxtapositions of tales in these collections can certainly feel cacophonous, and the loudest voices in the din sometimes come from the unnamed contributors. Those names may have been absent from the title page, but the noise that they make, and their existence as part of the “Dickens” of the Christmas numbers, prompts one to reconsider the pitch of that iconic voice.

A Round of Stories by the Christmas Fire

The first Christmas number to have a unique title, the 1852 compilation suggests that a blaze for the holiday might differ uniquely from other fires, but for its content, Dickens seems to have realized that the previous numbers had exhausted the numbers’ ability to keep specifically Christmas-themed writing interesting. In a letter to Reverend James White, Dickens shares his plan for the 1852 issue: “I propose to give the number some fireside name, and to make it consist entirely of short stories supposed to be told by a family sitting round the fire. I don’t care about their referring to Christmas at all; nor do I design to connect them together, otherwise than by their names.”² Dickens’s declaration that he does not aim to “connect” the stories beyond the names might nudge future readers (and scholars) who value the intentionality of an author away from a cohesive approach to the text. That the writers did not discuss a shared strategy for their stories can lead to a view of the numbers as miscellanies—bits of discrete fiction that one can easily pluck apart. Dickens had edited Bentley’s Miscellany from its launch in January 1837 to February 1839 and fostered a much more unified vision for Household Words, but even he might seem to have encouraged a fragmented approach to the Christmas collections when he republished some of his own pieces without all of their original counterparts.³ The form itself, however, and the mandate of the collection titles lead in a different direction; threads of connection between and across all nineteen stories in the two Rounds are abundant. Closely examining the linkages between the stories not only results in stronger textual interpretations but also subverts the notion that Dickens is a figure with a single, stable voice.

Nine authors contribute to A Round of Stories by the Christmas Fire, and each title locates a speaker around the fire while isolating an identifying characteristic. The titles are more complicated than what Dickens describes to White and include nonrelatives, such as the deaf playmate, which evidences a flexible editor adjusting the frame in response to the contributions he receives. The finalized titles also signal that the assembled speakers are not complete strangers without explaining each relationship precisely. Even after some of the narrators address one another, the narrative revels in the ambiguity of this set of relationships. The number’s aesthetic lies partly in its awareness of the rich potentialities embedded in the titles, and the Round even teases its own frame with the broadly titled “Somebody’s Story.” The musical aspect of the collection’s title resonates with the structuring of Dickens’s phenomenally popular A Christmas Carol (1843), whose chapters are called staves, but nine years after the Carol, Dickens imagines singing that is both individual and communal in place of a single song. The initial speaker in a round may contribute an individual voice, but each part in a round can also be sung by the group, and the structure is decidedly circular.⁴ The fact that voices in a choral round literally overlap encourages readers to break out of a linear mode of reading and invites them to hear the story’s converse.⁵

The Round’s opening paragraphs immediately draw attention to complicated narrative positioning. “The Poor Relation’s Story” begins:

He was very reluctant to take precedence of so many respected members of the family, by beginning the round of stories they were to relate as they sat in a goodly circle by the Christmas fire; and he modestly suggested that it would be more correct if “John our esteemed host” (whose health he begged to drink) would have the kindness to begin. For, as to himself, he said, he was so little used to lead the way, that really—But as they all cried out here, that he must begin, and agreed with one voice that he might, could, would, and should begin, he left off rubbing his hands, and took his legs out from under his armchair, and did begin. (1)

This narrator’s speech temporarily but conspicuously bridges class divisions within the family as the “poor relation” humbly addresses his wealthier relatives and sets up a model for cross-class storytelling from other speakers. More significantly, the listeners encourage him “with one voice,” increasing the feeling of intimacy and closeness among the future narrators and establishing immediately that their voices will overlap. “The Poor Relation’s Story,” written by Dickens, also shows Dickens enlisting his contributors as cheerleaders; he makes them responsible for his narrator being the one to start the round, casting himself in a modest role that hardly matches his confidence as an artist and as an editor.

Shifting into a first-person voice, Michael (the poor relation) continues to reference “the assembled members of our family,” and understanding the possible relationships between those members becomes increasingly complicated as the round continues (1). The aged poor relation shares a tale in which he fantasizes about the life he might have lived if various people had not treated him poorly. A gullible and benevolent man, Michael loses his professional and personal well-being when his wealthy uncle disowns him for proposing marriage to a woman with no fortune. She marries a rich man instead, and Michael’s business partner takes advantage of his trust to force him out. An opposite trajectory of events constitutes his fantasy, and the tale concludes with the disheartening reality that John, the host, provides Michael’s actual financial support. Moving immediately to another contribution from Dickens that continues to develop family bonds among the storytellers, “The Child’s Story” presents a version of the parable of the seven ages via a traveller who experiences all phases of life in a single compressed day.⁶ The short piece features no real climax, but its conclusion reminds one of the relationships between listeners. The fictional traveller is surrounded at the end of his journey by the people he has lost to death, and their respectful love for one another leads the child to speculate, “I think the traveller must be yourself, dear Grandfather, because this is what you do to us, and what we do to you” (7). Forecasting his grandfather’s death, the naïve child also makes clear that even the cliché-driven stories in the collection pertain specifically to the family around this particular fire.

The number does not, however, settle into a consistent depiction of those family relationships, as William Moy Thomas’s “Somebody’s Story” remains deliberately vague. Adding to the confusion about which “somebody” tells the story, it is set in Germany with no recognizable characters from the frame. Successful, loyal, and strong, Carl is an apprentice cask maker who must travel to earn enough money to marry Margaret. After building his fortune in a distant town, Carl temporarily loses it when he hides gold pieces in his lucky hammer, which a comedic, monkey-like hired boy drops in the river (10). Carl’s homecoming is therefore subdued, but his luck returns when the gold-filled hammer appears in the river behind Margaret’s house and he is feted for having inadvertently discovered the source of the River Klar. The story’s message—that people should not doubt the honest intentions of hardworking young men with bad luck and that those young men should not rush the pursuit of their dreams—suits the mood of a family gathering at which people of various ages visit. Still, with no articulated link to the family around the fire, one might begin to suspect that the collection’s cohesion is weak, but Elizabeth Gaskell’s “The Old Nurse’s Story” potently brings the frame back to the fore.⁷

Given the scandalous nature of the family events the nurse relates, questions of relationality add to the story’s mysterious Gothic atmosphere. The nursemaid begins, “You know, my dears, that your mother was an orphan, and an only child; and I dare say you have heard that your grandfather was a clergyman up in Westmoreland, where I come from” (11). The mother to whom the nurse refers is Miss Rosamond, just a girl in the story, but we do not know for which people present she is a mother. The nurse, Hester, tends to the orphaned Rosamond in a household with the elderly Grace Furnivall and a few servants. Hester immediately senses the danger of the place when she hears booming music emanating from a broken organ, and Rosamond subsequently disappears during a heavy snowfall. Hester finds a shepherd carrying the child’s almost frozen body and learns from the revived Rosamond that another little girl tempts her outside then takes her to a weeping woman beneath a holly tree, where that woman lulls her to sleep (15–16). These figures are the ghosts of Grace’s sister (Maude) and her daughter, who froze to death when the former Lord Furnivall cast Maude from the house after discovering from her envious sister that she secretly married a “foreign musician” and had been hiding their child (17–18). Hester learns this history “not long before Christmas Day” (17) when she herself sees the spectre of the child, and at the end of the story, the ghosts of Lord Furnivall, Maude, and the girl appear to the entire household, reenacting the scene of Maude’s banishment. When Grace sees her own “phantom” take shape, “stony and deadly serene” in youth, shock and shame send her to her deathbed, muttering the story’s final words: “What is done in youth can never be undone in age!” (20).

The story’s account of bad behavior on the parts of both sisters and Lord Furnivall raises questions about the nurse’s motive and tone as she exposes this family history around the fireside in the company of outsiders (“The Guest,” for instance). Is she exposing a piece of shameful knowledge or resisting stigma by speaking truth and refusing to obscure family history? Does she speak in order to humiliate the main actors in the story, warn future generations to avoid certain behaviors, or advocate for the semifallen woman? Told from the perspective of a servant, her story’s indictment of the unyielding Lord Furnivall for his stern parenting stances also rebukes the more privileged classes of her social “superiors.” The narrator’s position significantly influences one’s interpretation of the story’s message, making its context crucial to complete readings. The original timing of the number in anticipation of the Christmas holiday, with its attendant emphasis on forgiveness and generosity, may also impact one’s assessment of the story’s moral lessons. The appearance of “The Old Nurse’s Story” in anthologies, sometimes without any reference to its original publication in the Christmas number, limits these fruitful interpretive possibilities.⁸

If the “Old Nurse” has told a story about the mother of some of the people sitting around the fire, then we must also wonder how this contribution relates to the collection’s final piece: “The Mother’s Story” by Eliza Griffiths. Readers certainly could envision Miss Rosamond, the little girl from Gaskell’s tale, growing up to be the one telling Griffiths’s story, as the nursemaid has already identified Rosamond as the mother of some of those present. Within the structure of the round, if the timing were such that Gaskell’s story and Griffiths’s poem overlapped, the story of the Furnivall woman dying in the snow with her child would be interwoven with Griffiths’s poem about a mixed-race woman who collapses in the snow just before reuniting with her son after having endured twenty years of slavery away from her children. Repeated imagery of this sort helps to explain how a collection of tales that might seem randomly collected sometimes exhibits an organic cohesiveness. In the conglomeration of narrative voices, individual writers’ voices often become indistinguishable, and even though Dickens is the “conductor,” he does not always control the combined effect of the voices he conducts.

Edmund Ollier’s “The Host’s Story,” following Gaskell’s piece, is in verse form and adds unexpected irony to the collection as it relates the adventure of a greedy travelling merchant setting his host’s palace aflame. Sneaking through the palace as the household sleeps, the merchant “fills a bag with jewels and with gold,” sets a fire that nearly traps him, then escapes by jumping out of a window, leaving his treasure behind. Again, a contributor’s piece adds rich possibilities to the relationships between the storytellers in the frame. The poor relation presents John as a generous and modest host, noting that John does not want the group to dwell on the fact that he supports the poor relation financially. Considering Ollier’s piece, however, we might question whether a cautionary tale warning against taking advantage of hospitality shows the host to be less content in his role. The irony in Ollier’s poem, if it undercuts the credibility of Dickens’s narrator in the first story, may pose a challenge to Dickens’s authority that one would expect him to have put in check, but his correspondence with Gaskell and others displays more flexible editorial behavior than most critics allow.

Already the successful author of Mary Barton, Gaskell was a writer whom Dickens esteemed highly and whose authorial voice, from the very first issue of Household Words, sometimes melded with the public voice of Dickens. He was thrilled when she agreed to write a multipart story to help launch the periodical.⁹ As Linda Hughes and Michael Lund point out, “When [‘Lizzie Leigh’] appeared without attribution in Household Words, many inferred that the story was Dickens’s own, given its prominent place in the first number. And the story was first published in the United States under Dickens’s name.”¹⁰ By December 1851, Gaskell’s Cranford series had also begun appearing in the journal, which sparked some sparring between Dickens and Gaskell over the sketches’ references to Dickens’s Pickwick Papers.¹¹ In regard to “The Old Nurse’s Story,” Dickens was confident enough to try to persuade Gaskell to change its conclusion. After complimenting the “wonderfully managed” writing and suggesting that Gaskell alter the ending so that the child sees more ghosts than the adults do, Dickens asks, “What do you say to this? If you don’t quite and entirely approve, it shall stand as it does.”¹² Gaskell immediately makes it known that she did not “entirely approve.” A few days later, Dickens persists in trying to change her mind: “What I would propose to do, is, to leave the story just as it stands for a week or ten days—then to come to it afresh—alter it myself—and send you the proof of the whole, and the manuscript (your original manuscript) of the altered part; so that if you should prefer the original to the alteration, or any part of the original to any part of the alteration, you may slash accordingly.”¹³ The process Dickens describes is not one in which he bullies Gaskell into accepting his revisions. Rather, she is the one who may “slash,” and his proposal includes a creative cooling-off period that places his “alteration” on a level equal (not superior) to hers, as he is careful not to discard her “original” brusquely. These interactions force one to reevaluate Harry Stone’s assertion that Dickens’s usual practice with the Christmas number contributions is to “edit them with his usual freedom.”¹⁴ To the contrary, with the print deadline approaching, Dickens repeatedly asks Gaskell for her permission before making permanent changes to her text, and their correspondence points to a stimulating collaborative relationship.¹⁵

Gaskell left the ending as originally written, and Dickens printed the story as she wished, knowing that readers might think the story was his own.¹⁶ His letters to her then mix defensiveness with reassurance: “I have no doubt, according to every principle of art that is known to me from Shakespeare downwards, that you weaken the terror of the story by making them all see the phantoms at the end. And I feel a perfect conviction that the best readers will be the most certain to make this discovery. Nous verrons. But it is greatly improved, and in making up the Xmas No. finally today, I shall of course be careful to preserve the New Ending, exactly as you have written it.”¹⁷ Even while placing himself in a direct line of descent from the Bard to defend his vision, Dickens concedes to Gaskell, demonstrating that their disagreement does not nullify the act of collaboration. As if to reinforce their status as creative allies, two days later he adds, “Pray don’t, in any corner cupboard of your mind, put away the least doubt or disparagement of the story. I read it carefully on Saturday (when I made up the Number finally) and did so with the greatest interest and admiration.”¹⁸ Dickens almost apologizes for having voiced his opinion so emphatically. He does not simply pay lip service to the idea of having an open mind when it comes to his collaborators’ choices but revisits their work and sometimes changes his valuation of it.

Once the number is published, Gaskell sends Dickens compliments on the stories she (correctly) guesses are his, while Dickens again contradicts his previous opinion: “I don’t claim for my ending of the Nurse’s Story that it would have made it a bit better. All I can urge in its behalf, is, that it is what I should have done myself.”¹⁹ The Dickens/Gaskell exchange bears out Rachel Sagner Buurma’s view that “literary authority in Victorian England was much more contingent, variable, and contested than has previously been thought.”²⁰ In this case, the critical binary between anonymous authors as either exploited or subversive does not do justice to the original collaborative texts. Dickens strives to present work that accomplishes his storytelling goals and also allows the Christmas Rounds to tell the stories of his contributors with respect for their artistic integrity. The issue’s “conductor” listens, calibrating final decisions with consideration for the wishes of his talent.

James White’s “The Grandfather’s Story” again shows Dickens changing his mind about what he deems acceptable for the number, as he initially rejects a story that he ultimately prints. In his letter to White about the number’s frame, Dickens specifies the types of characters and plot that he desires: “The grandfather might very well be old enough to have lived in the days of the highwaymen. Do you feel disposed, from fact, fancy, or both, to do a good winter-hearth story of a highwayman?”²¹ White obliged, and his narrator speaks of his days as a bank clerk when he and a colleague, Tom Ruddle, are robbed while delivering gold to the bank’s clients on Christmas Eve. Pursuing a thief who has slit a full bag but taken only three guineas, Ruddle and the grandfather become sympathetic toward the criminal because he is motivated only by trying to keep his wife and baby from starvation after having been swindled (25). They let the man celebrate Christmas freely and offer to loan him more money, which seems to embody the generosity of the holiday that Dickens often prizes, but he sends remarks of dissatisfaction to White: “You know what the spirit of the Christmas number is. When I suggested the stories being about a highwayman, I got hold of that idea as being an adventurous one, including various kinds of wrong, expressing a state of society no longer existing among us, and pleasant to hear (therefore) from an old man. Now, your highwayman not being a real highwayman after all, the kind of suitable Christmas interest I meant to awaken in the story is not in it.”²² What is the “spirit” that Dickens feels should characterize this number so strongly? Dickens’s piece for the 1851 Christmas issue defines it as “the spirit of active usefulness, perseverance, cheerful discharge of duty, kindness, and forbearance” (1). Alternatively, he could be referencing the “Carol philosophy”: his idea that compassion for others should guide people’s interactions all year long and the belief that drawing upon memories, even sorrowful ones, will restore proper moral principles.²³ Apparently, White either did not understand why his story—which indeed exhibits kindness, forbearance, and traits of the “Carol philosophy”—failed to meet expectations, or he did not care to exemplify his understanding with a new tale. The story Dickens claims is a poor fit is the one that he prints, allowing the visions of others to continue shaping the “spirit” of the numbers.

The relationships among storytellers continue to join the Round’s pieces in circular fashion as Edmund Saul Dixon’s “The Charwoman’s Story” begins with a servant figure complaining about her inclusion: “A person is flustered by being had up into the dining-room for to drink merry Christmases and them (though wishing, I am sure, to every party present as many as would be agreeable to their own selves), and it an’t easy rightly to remember at a moment’s notice what a person did see in the ghostly way” (25). Displaced from her usual position downstairs, the charwoman does not regard inclusion in the family circle as an honor but rather as an anxiety-producing burden because she is expected to wish people she serves a merry Christmas and to perform for them “at a moment’s notice.” Put on the spot with the imperative of telling a ghost story, the charwoman blames the “Nurse” for telling the “ladies” that she is in possession of such an account, creating tension between the two servant figures (who act as the fourth and seventh narrators) and reminding readers that both stories associated with servants deal with supernatural topics (25). The charwoman’s brief ghost story tells of how her colleague Thomas accurately foretells their employer’s death when he hears an alderman’s distinct step at what they later learn was the moment the alderman died several miles away. More poignant than the idea of the haunting, however, is the way in which Dixon’s story about the jarring quality of a noise dovetails into Harriet Martineau’s story, which explores hearing from a much different perspective.

In a collection whose title alludes to overlapping voices, whose genre almost demands cacophony, Martineau’s “The Deaf Playmate’s Story” forces one to ponder the absence of voices. As a child struggles to understand that he is losing his hearing, thinking that others are suddenly treating him meanly for no reason that he can perceive, he acts out violently and loses his friends. Even the adults in his life fail to realize that he is becoming deaf. The speaker of Martineau’s story is that child, never named and therefore identified primarily by his lack of hearing.²⁴ The deaf boy is the playmate of Charley Felkin, but because he never addresses Charley directly and identifies Charley as well as his own family with third-person references, the playmate does not seem to be in the presence of those people. The family around the fire, then, is not the Felkin family, nor is it the family of the deaf playmate, so we do not know why the deaf child spends time with the other narrators; the reader is left to wonder whether the deaf boy is in the company of strangers, extended family, the doctor who treats him kindly in the story, or friends. That ambiguity about the child’s location not only heightens his potential vulnerability as a narrator but also forces readers to continue puzzling over the relationships among the storytellers.

The most difficult questions the story raises pertain to the way one should comprehend a deaf child’s role in a verbal round. Up to this point, the round structure has suggested that each speaker may overlap with the previous one(s) and that something or someone gives a cue to commence. When a story begins without comment on the transition between narrators, the round structure invites the reader to imagine a head nod, eye contact, or some other nonverbal gesture to indicate which person will speak next. Those gestures would reach the deaf playmate, but the content of the previous narrators’ stories would not. Storytellers in a round might adjust the beginning of a tale depending on how the previous speaker has concluded, or a particular detail might suddenly seem humorous when juxtaposed with an earlier tale and merit an altered style of delivery. For the deaf playmate, however, even if he understands nonverbal cues passing among the fireside company, none of the interactions pertaining to events narrated in previous stories would reach him. His first words to the assembled group boldly declare, “I don’t know how you have all managed, or what you have been telling” (27). One speaker explicitly acknowledging his exclusion from the conversational nature of the round might raise doubts about whether the previous stories really do have any significance. The import of “The Deaf Playmate’s Story” lies in its raising of this question rather than in proposed answers, and Dickens may have been especially comfortable with such questions given his own inclusion of “the deaf gentleman” as a key member of the storytelling group in Master Humphrey’s Clock more than a decade earlier.²⁵ The deaf playmate suffers as much from the ignorance of adults as from his inability to hear. Early in his experiences of deafness, before he understands what is happening, the playmate reacts aggressively to changes in his hearing and kills an innocent dove, spotlighting the high stakes involved in suiting one’s method of communication to one’s audience. That point resonates strongly with a group of storytellers as the child becomes a source of wisdom. “The Deaf Playmate’s Story” holds as much weight as the stories narrated by adults, forcing the adults to reflect upon how exactly they decode the signs of others and lending a self-reflexive layer to the Round.

Reinforcing communal feeling around the fire and his sense of acceptance, the deaf boy concludes, “How you all nod, and agree with me!,” and the lack of transition to the next story makes “the guest” seem less integrated into the group (30). Samuel Sidney’s “The Guest’s Story” abruptly begins, “About twenty years ago, I was articled clerk in the small seaport town of Muddleborough” (30). The guest then explains how a one-handed Irishman, Peter, cons the entire town out of its money by promising to use their investments to go to Portugal and retrieve a buried treasure (31–32). After Peter disappears, misery and regret ensue, but justice catches up to Peter when he tries to take advantage of an American, who shoots him (33). Only by looking at the collection as a whole does one notice the connection between “The Guest’s Story” and “The Host’s Story.” The host warns against taking advantage of hospitality, while the guest’s tale stresses misplaced confidence and the penalty of death for those who scheme in the face of generosity. Seeing the link not only adds interest to each story but also uncovers a conversation that is audible only in the original context of collaboration.

Concluding the collection, Eliza Griffiths’s “The Mother’s Story” continues to complicate questions of narrative voice and challenges the primacy of the text’s “conductor.”²⁶ Griffiths’s poem depicts an interracial romance sympathetically, criticizing racial persecution and the destruction of family bonds in South America. Leena, the protagonist, is the orphan of an indigenous woman and a white hunter. Her solicitous care of Claude d’Estrelle, a Frenchman she discovers dying in the forest, leads to their marriage, but once Claude dies, his relatives mistreat her. The poem simultaneously emphasizes a highly idealized maternal love and Leena’s color, comparing her “brown cheek” to a “crimson streak” and taking Dickens’s voices across geographic, racial, and gender boundaries (34). That this is “The Mother’s Story” aligns Griffiths with the immediate speaker in the round. The “Mother” repeats a tale that an old male traveller, who also appears in the story, told her by this very same fireside. She thus appropriates a man’s voice that has already appropriated a woman’s. The entire poem is spoken in the “I” voice, and with the exception of the introductory stanza, that “I” is the male traveller even though Leena’s trials, not those of the traveller, guide the plot. Leena never controls her own story; it is the presumably white-identified mother around the fireside in England who has chosen the story of a racially mixed character to represent the pinnacle of maternity, which is not a vision one would usually associate with Dickens.

Yet Griffiths’s voice is both the “Mother’s” and Dickens’s, and her piece strategically essentializes maternity in a manner that advocates for cross-racial female solidarity and condemns oppressive men. When Leena seeks shelter with Claude’s brother, he insists that she leave the children with him so that they can “outgrow” and forget the shame he associates with their indigenous heritage (34). The uncle steals the children from a resistant Leena and bribes a tribe to enslave her. Most striking is the fact that the poem’s portrayal of the maternal takes place in the complete absence of white-identified women in the story, focusing on the experiences of multiracial women and other women of color. Leena is able to escape enslavement when maternal solidarity leads an indigenous woman to liberate her, but Claude’s brother sends her back into slavery on a “wild plantation” (35) in Africa from which it takes her twenty years to flee.²⁷ Upon returning home, Leena cannot track down her son, but she finds her daughter wedded to a wealthy white man. The melodramatic conclusion of the number revolves around this extremely troubled reunion. Whether Leena’s daughter understands herself to be multiracial is unclear. Once she recognizes her mother, their interaction is strained and truncated because they hear the footfall of her husband, a man she truly loves but whom she, “Fair” and with “auburn hair,” has married as a white woman (35). The young woman knows that her husband’s “title high / Would ne’er to Indian blood ally” (35), so she tells her mother that they may never meet again. Leena departs in fear and, true to the strained coincidences of nineteenth-century sensation fiction, discovers (after two nights of sleeping in the snow) a house of worship where her son is preaching about undying maternal love. Before the concluding tableaux of Leena and her grandchildren appears, Leena’s regretful daughter sends for her, and their deathbed reunion shows that the path to heaven lies with other women of color. The cost of not having seen that truth kills Leena’s daughter, and the poem’s final lines nearly deify Leena: “A very presence from above, / That simple woman’s faith and love” (36).

What do we make of the fact that the number closes with Griffiths’s words? Initially, Dickens had considered Martineau’s piece about the deaf boy to be the ideal final story, telling Wills, “For the last story in the Xmas No. it will be great. I couldn’t wish for a better.”²⁸ At that date, Dickens had not yet read Gaskell’s story, and we do not know whether he had read Griffiths’s contribution. He may have decided at a later date that Griffiths’s story was an even better concluding piece than Martineau’s, or, especially if Wills disagreed about the placement of Martineau’s story, Dickens may have changed his mind. Whatever the decision-making process, Griffiths’s poet’s voice assumes the authority to conclude the number as a whole, and readers must ponder the negotiation of power between this nearly anonymous woman writer, her fictionalized woman of color, and the white men publishing a journal that builds its audience with the story. I do not see an articulated set of points in Griffiths’s piece that Dickens would have found repulsive, but this story’s take on matters of race differs from Dickens’s often-hostile depictions of racially othered groups.²⁹ Although we know almost nothing about the relationship between Griffiths and Dickens, the collaborative practices of Household Words as a literary enterprise establish that, in Griffiths’s case, the voices of women collaborators become Dickens’s own voice even if he does not like what they say. And as the histories of Gaskell’s and White’s stories for this same number demonstrate, Dickens does not always use the Christmas number as a place to insist on his will over all others. In these ways, Dickens’s editing, collating, and framing are also a form of collaborative authorship—a form that he simultaneously controls and to which he submits. This model of collaboration differs distinctly from the type that has been delineated in most scholarship on Dickens’s collaborative ventures, and it continues in the following year.

Another Round of Stories by the Christmas Fire

Dickens is so pleased with the effect of the 1852 Round that he writes to Elizabeth Gaskell on April 13, 1853, to let her know that he has already decided to structure the next number “on the plan of the last” and to solicit her work for it.³⁰ Another Round of Stories by the Christmas Fire both acknowledges an existing audience from the 1852 number and informs new readers of its predecessor’s existence. The second Round contains pieces named for the following speakers: the schoolboy, the old lady, the angel, the squire, Uncle George, the Colonel, the scholar, nobody, and “over the way,” a nickname for the person living at that location. Sharing the first Round’s potentialities for cross-speaking within a single number, Another Round consistently includes family bonds that extend beyond the biological. The interpretive possibilities expand even further when one views the two collections in relation to each other. A complicated chorus exists within each Round, and those choruses subsequently combine in endlessly rich pairings. “Somebody’s Story” in the first Round is answered by “Nobody’s Story” in the second, but they do not occupy the same position in each. The title of “The Old Lady’s Story” echoes “The Old Nurse’s Story,” and their themes are somewhat similar in treating women whose deaths are caused by seductive “foreign” men. “The Angel’s Story,” rather than hovering above them all, exists on the same terrestrial plane as “The Charwoman’s Story,” and the threshold crossings are not only narrative or temporal when one attempts to imagine the ordering of the two Rounds. The interconnections between speakers cut across the landed aristocracy and the serving classes; spiritual and earthly realms; and military and civilian life. Such a levelling of speakers implicitly claims that a servant’s voice merits as much attention as a squire’s. This range of perspective, speech, and experience comes together in the authorial identity of “Dickens,” which, in the context of the two Rounds, becomes as much a concept as an individual identity.

The first story illustrates how narrative threads crisscross between the two years’ collections as Another Round begins not with an explanation of who is sitting around the fire or why and how they come to tell stories but rather with the first speaker launching right into “The Schoolboy’s Story.” The framing fundamentals of the first Round therefore carry over as the journal, Household Words, binds the two numbers and provides a rationale for readers to presume that the same household from 1852 hosts the second storytelling round in 1853.³¹ The schoolboy recalls not Dickens’s opening narrator of the first Round but rather Martineau’s deaf playmate, who likewise recounts his school days. This entertaining account, however, is much more cheerful in its childlike tone: “However, beef and Old Cheeseman are two different things. So is beer. It was Old Cheeseman I meant to tell about” (1). Living his entire life at the school as an orphan and enduring the ridicule of boys who label him a “traitor” for having turned from pupil to Latin master, Cheeseman shocks them by disappearing suddenly then returning with an inherited fortune (2). Having anticipated that Cheeseman would reappear with an avenging “prizefighter,” the boys prepare for battle by stockpiling stones in their desks only to find that, instead of warfare, the school fills with “sobbing and crying” when they take leave of their old friend (3).

The direct address of the schoolboy so early in the number also reminds readers that each speaker is sitting in the presence of others at a fictional fireside and positions readers as possible family members. Just before the story ends, the speaker suddenly commands, “Don’t look at the next storyteller, for there’s more yet,” then shares surprising twists: Cheeseman marries Jane, the school’s servant, and the schoolboy does not meet them until they take him home for Christmas well after the events he has been relating (5). The schoolboy reminds his audience, “[I]t was the year when you were all away; and rather low I was about it, I can tell you” (5). Not until the end of the story do we understand that the schoolboy is speaking to his family members—although, as in the first Round, we do not know precisely which other speakers are his kin. One’s curiosity continues to forge links across the numbers and to keep the narrators connected: for instance, the deaf playmate from the first Round could be this speaker’s friend, making the schoolboy Charley Felkin. The boy clearly shames his family for abandoning him at Christmas, and his report of having a grand time at Cheeseman’s hints that the Cheeseman family may provide better company than his own (5). The schoolboy’s insecurity about holding the attention of the adults at the fireside prepares readers for the pending narrative shift and suggests that the old lady of the next story hovers impatiently, waiting for the boy to finish.

“The Old Lady’s Story” from Eliza Lynn³² continues to develop family relationships in the group before describing a most extreme sacrifice as it begins, “I have never told you my secret, my dear nieces” (5). Noticeably, she does not speak directly to the schoolboy, who has just warned her off. Lizzie, the old lady, tells of her youthful infatuation with Mr. Felix, a “foreign man” who moves into the neighborhood with a retinue of servants whose darkness adds to his mystery: “Hindoos, or Lascars, or Negros; dark-coloured, strange-looking people” (6–7). Mr. Felix’s presence poses a racial threat, and the Orientalized description of the estate that he transforms into a “fairy palace” full of velvets and “foreign smells” accounts for how he is able to cast a seductive spell over Lizzie (7). She defies her father and neglects her sister, Lucy, whose concern for Lizzie has made her gravely ill. Lucy dies at the moment she stops Lizzie from eloping, and guilt prevents Lizzie from ever marrying (8–9). The story’s warning against allowing foreign charms to enchant vulnerable English girls is one that Lizzie shares because she anticipates dying soon, and it reinforces the undercurrent of imperial anxiety that runs through the Christmas numbers. Exactly to whom Lizzie issues the caution is unclear because she mentions no siblings beyond the dead Lucy in her tale, and the other speakers offer no clarification of how an unmarried, siblingless woman would come to have nieces. The most likely explanation seems to be that the aunt/niece relationship is one of endearment, with Lizzie as an “adopted” aunt of a family, allowing the collection to advocate for non–biological family bonds.³³ The reader’s inclusion in such a circle increases the text’s intimacy and justifies the next speaker, a neighbor who is included in the family grouping.

George A. Sala’s “Over the Way’s Story” brings fairy-tale tropes into the number and speaks back not just to the other narrators but also to Dickens. Barnard Braddlescroggs, called “the Beast,” is a grumpy merchant with a rigid attitude who runs a profitable warehouse (10). A clerk, Simcox, becomes the focus of the story, and his resemblance to Mr. Micawber, a character famous for always being in debt in David Copperfield (1849–50), is one reason that some identify the story as Dickensian. Simcox is a good-hearted man whose debt stems from his inability to control his drinking and the spending of his wife, who is characterized in a sudden and sharp emergence of the number’s underlying racism as a woman who is “of all domestic or household duties considerably more ignorant than a Zooloo Kaffir” (12). Ridiculing the idea of a black South African woman running an English household reinforces the notion that whiteness is synonymous with the idealized domestic hearth in the imaginary space of the number. Simcox compounds his family’s trouble by borrowing ten pounds from petty cash without permission, and when Braddlescroggs discovers the embezzlement, he plans to jail or transport the entire family. Bessy, Simcox’s ailing daughter, saves the day by accepting Braddlescroggs’s offer of employment as a housekeeper at the warehouse, where he forbids her from speaking to her father, and Bessy’s meekness in that role slowly softens Braddlescroggs’s character. The story invokes fairy tales in its characterization of Bessy, who occupies “an analogous position to that of the celebrated Cinderella” (13) in her own family but then becomes the heroine of a Beauty and the Beast transformation plot in the Braddlescroggs family: “So Beauty was married. Not to the Beast, but to the Beast’s son” (17).

Substituting “scrogg” for “scrooge,” Braddlescroggs’s name riffs on Ebenezer Scrooge, and the story’s plot converses with A Christmas Carol. Philip Collins and others have noted that Sala’s essays regularly feature him “out-Dickensing Dickens” with ease.³⁴ The unreformed Braddlescroggs dampens his son’s generous spirit in the same way that Scrooge curtails the cheer of his nephew Fred, and, like Scrooge, Braddlescroggs’s “compeers, fell away from him on ’Change” (11). For Braddlescroggs, a young girl whose patient duty to her alcoholic father threatens her health takes the place of the uncomplaining disabled boy who inspires Scrooge. The result for both protagonists is an excessive and buoyant generosity. Without published bylines to identify authors but with the common knowledge that Dickens “conducted” his contributors, readers could legitimately read this piece in numerous ways. With Dickens as the author, the story comes across as self-parody or an example of Dickens unoriginally repeating his own story lines. Speculating that someone else is the author, a contributor like Sala may be offering a tribute to the conductor via imitation or, alternatively, making fun of him. The unique collaborative context makes any or all of these readings feasible, and the plethora of possibilities attests to the rich interpretive arena that attention to collaboration opens.

Following Sala’s piece, Adelaide A. Procter’s “The Angel’s Story” brings the collection back to a more traditional Christmas setting, but decoding its message about death continues to illustrate the indeterminacy that the collection’s form enables. The poem takes one to a wealthy household as it endures the loss of a child. At the moment of death, an angel flies away with the boy then tells him the story of a poverty-stricken orphan who also used to dwell in London. That boy, in low health, wanders up to the garden gate of a rich family, and when the servants send him away with a little money because they are “tired of seeing / His pale face of want and woe,” the young boy living in the house takes pity on his poor counterpart and shares a handful of blooming roses (18). The roses comfort the orphan as he dies the next day, and he turns into the angel that now bears the wealthier boy to his own death while adorning him with the same red roses. Although the story initially appears to sanctify children’s solidarity across class lines as their pure souls console each other in heaven, a more disturbing interpretation emerges when one recognizes that the children also act as catalysts for death. The poor child is ill when he first meets the rose-bearing boy, and their encounter seems to speed up his decline. As an angel, he tells the wealthy boy,

Ere your tender, loving spirit

Sin and the hard world defiled,

Mercy gave me leave to seek you;—

I was that little child!

(19)

These closing words of the poem yoke the wealthy boy’s death to a vision of his corrupt future, making the angel an agent of death who takes the life of the generous boy as a means of proactive “mercy.” The wealthy boy, however, has already proven himself to be more compassionate than his servants even when living in luxury. The angel’s appearance pessimistically implies that humanity’s sin is too strong for even the most righteous children to withstand.³⁵ Crucially, we do not know who narrates “The Angel’s Story” at the fireside, information that could assist in determining its tone and message. The poem shifts from an unidentified third-person speaker to the voice of the angel, and its title does not match the others in the collection unless readers believe that an actual angel joins the assembled family. Gill Gregory, one of the only scholars to situate an analysis of a Christmas number story in relation to those of other collaborators, notes that the placement of Procter’s piece after Sala’s potentially creates a tension between those two contributors, as Sala’s emphasis on “essentially generous” qualities of children contrasts with the image of children as fatal deliverers of retributive justice.³⁶

The number moves quickly from the celestial realm back to worldly interests in Elizabeth Gaskell’s “The Squire’s Story,” and Dickens’s correspondence with her again reveals an excessively complimentary editor, perhaps anxious to be sure that she will contribute to the collection despite Dickens’s vociferous attempts to get her to change her story the previous year. In September, after Gaskell asks for more specificity about the frame concept, Dickens replies, “No. I won’t give any outline. Because anything that you like to write in the way of story-telling, when you come out of that tea-leaf condition will please me. All I say, is, it is supposed to be told by somebody at the Xmas Fireside, as before. And it need not be about Xmas and winter, and it need not have a moral, and it only needs to be done by you to be well done, and if you don’t believe that—I can’t help it.”³⁷ Countering Gaskell’s wish for more information with a playful but firm insistence on his vision, Dickens stresses her talent and creative vision rather than his own, declining to insist upon a theme or “moral” for her story. The setting—being “told by somebody at the Xmas Fireside”—Dickens finds important enough to mention, which associates the domestic hearth with appropriate subject matter. Given that the deadline for contributors to submit their pieces was not until early December,³⁸ Dickens may also have declined to send more details simply because he did not yet know how the number would shape up. Set in 1769, Gaskell’s story follows Dickens’s vague instructions by shying away from Christmas themes in its depiction of a sadistic thief who deceives an entire small village by masquerading as a respectable gentleman. The periodic absences of Mr. Higgins, necessary for “collecting his rents” in another region, are the times when he commits highway robbery (22). Eventually, he is caught and hanged after murdering an old woman in Bath who had reputedly been hiding a fortune. The story is fairly anticlimactic because it is so obvious from the start that Higgins is a sadistic, suspicious man. More surprising than his criminality are the story’s odd details; Higgins, for instance, is a kind husband with mysterious health-preservation habits that might contribute to the couple’s childlessness. The squire concludes by asking the listeners at the fireside if they would like to join the hunt for the fortune Higgins is rumored to have stashed in the house he rented: “Will any of you become tenants, and try to find out this mysterious closet? I can furnish the exact address to any applicant who wishes for it” (25). Listeners, then, are invited to participate actively in what could become a sequel to the squire’s tale as the stories in Another Round continue to unfold in circular patterns.

Treating a different aspect of criminality, “Uncle George’s Story,” by W. H. Wills and Edmund Saul Dixon, emerges from multiple layers of collaboration and shows the number again endorsing non–biological family bonds. George shares the story of his adventurous wedding day when his bride, Charlotte, stands alone at the altar because George has fallen into a shaft on unstable cliffs. George’s rescuer, the outcast Richard Leroy, explains that the town’s reason for ostracizing him stems from his work as a smuggler, which accounts for his familiarity with the hidden tunnel and exposes the previous occupation of George’s father. After Leroy becomes a close friend and stops smuggling, the families hope that their children might marry. The story evidences collaboration so thorough that no awkward transitions or recognizable marks of distinct voices diminish its delivery. Wills was clearly able to move between creating and editing with success, yet the story raises more unanswered questions about the frame. George is uncle to someone around the fire, which means that a grandfather figure for some people around the fire was a smuggler. This grandfather, however, must be different from the one who narrates “The Grandfather’s Story” because that speaker is a bank clerk. The criminality of a patriarch would certainly affect one’s reading of the other stories in the collection that touch upon illegal activities, such as Gaskell’s tale of the highwayman. At the same time, as with Linton’s aunt character, one cannot be sure whether the family relationships of the story titles are biological or metaphorical. George has no siblings, nor are any siblings of Charlotte’s mentioned in the story, but they have joined a kin group so completely that they fill familial roles and are comfortable enough to discuss their family’s criminal past. Overcoming such social hurdles in a celebration of Christmas camaraderie lends an enhanced sense of togetherness—because it is so purposeful—to the storytelling gathering.

The adoptive family story in Samuel Sidney’s “The Colonel’s Story” is not so uplifting. Orphaned, the Colonel is a teenager when his uncle adopts him and funds an indulgent lifestyle but forbids him to marry anyone who is not wealthy. After falling in love with a young widow, the young man marries her secretly then discovers that she is a spendthrift who is slightly mad and prone to violent quarrels. On the way home from visiting her at a remote cottage, the young lover falls from his horse, and when he wakes up, the blood covering him is taken as proof that he murdered his wife, whose dead body is discovered not long after he leaves her. Acquitted once the real murderer is found, the Colonel now enjoys the sharing of stories with the extended family at the fireside, but readers never learn whether the Colonel is a member of the host’s family or an honored guest.

The scholar’s position in the family is likewise unclear, but Elizabeth and William Gaskell’s “The Scholar’s Story” presents a more complicated scenario of collaboration. William Gaskell translated the ballad from Théodore Hersart de La Villemarqué’s Barzaz-Breiz (1845), a text based on ancient Breton oral folk tradition.³⁹ The letter in which Dickens first asks Elizabeth Gaskell to keep the Christmas number in mind also brings William Gaskell into the collaborative relationship: “I receive you, ever, (if Mr Gaskell will allow me to say so) with open arms.”⁴⁰ Asking Mr. Gaskell’s permission to violate a social code (wrapping metaphorical arms around another man’s wife) after he has already expressed that desire lessens the respect the letter might communicate, and one can further criticize Dickens for treating an immensely successful contributor as if she is an underling of her husband’s.⁴¹ In light of the ongoing professional relationship between Dickens and Mrs. Gaskell, who published under exactly that name, it is also possible to view the inclusion of her husband as a way Dickens expands the collaborative circle. William published another ballad from Barzaz-Breiz in the October 22, 1853, issue of Household Words and was involved in later negotiations surrounding the publication of Elizabeth’s novel North and South. All three individuals seem to have expected to interact through various pairings and triangulated communications. The Gaskell text appearing in Another Round is a translation of a translation, but the filtering does not stop there. Elizabeth writes the introductory paragraphs to the verse that William translates, and her preliminary note states that the scholar character hears the story from the mother of the woman who originally told it. Two layers of oral telling, one involving a fictional character, precede the written translations, and Elizabeth Gaskell, not Dickens in his role as conductor, is the one who massages all of these tellings and translations into the frame concept with impressive wit.⁴²

The scholar opens the story with a defensive maneuver that unsettles the harmony of the round and further questions authorial dynamics: “I perceive a general fear on the part of this pleasant company, that I am going to burst into black-letter, and beguile the time by being as dry as ashes. No, there is no such fear, you can assure me? I am glad to hear it; but I thought there was” (32). Since Dickens would provide Gaskell with no outline or list of speakers, it is likely that Gaskell herself decided to insert a scholar into the fireside circle as a means of introducing her husband’s translated poem. Her nursemaid narrator for the first round addresses the group, and she would have observed the other speakers delivering comments that bounce off of other characters. Given that Wills decided on the final ordering of the stories for 1853, his involvement as a collaborator is also crucial to this dynamic. The scholar’s resistance to an idealized fireside image skillfully balances congenial teasing with hostility, and his desire to avoid boring his companions with too learned of a story recalls the schoolboy’s worries that the assembled group will move too quickly away from him. Wills very well could have placed this joint piece late in the number so that its setup would tie back to the first story. Both he and Gaskell would have been aware of the way in which her opening for the story deftly points out that Dickens is not the only writer who can exploit the fire puns, and her narrative framing demonstrates that contributors sometimes pull Dickens’s voice into theirs rather than vice versa.

Far from pedantic, the verse the scholar shares is gripping in its portrayal of a young wife who is tormented then killed as a result of male jealousy, and this second violent story from Gaskell reminds one that Dickens’s emphasis on the setting of the domestic fireside never excludes gruesome topics from the Christmas season. Count Mathieu departs to fight in the crusades, leaving his wife and infant son under the protection of a cousin who serves him as a clerk. The wife, never named, maintains devotion to her husband but must lock herself in her room to hide from the psychotic cousin, who badgers her with declarations of love. To provoke the couple, the madman kills his master’s dog and horse, sending letters each time that blame their deaths on the negligent wife, whom he also reproaches for entertaining suitors at glamorous balls. Count Mathieu finally takes the bait after the cousin murders the family’s infant son and accuses the lady of having cavalierly left the baby near a giant, hungry sow. Oblivious to the improbability of such a scenario, the lord arrives in a rage, slays his cousin for not taking better care of his family, kills his wife before she can speak a word, and is left to regret the horror of his own ignorant brutality.⁴³ The ballad’s final lines describe a priest who sees the spirits of the hound, the steed, the wife, and the infant comforting each other in a churchyard, but they offer little relief from the deranged behavior that makes the verse so haunting.

The deeds that need amending in “Nobody’s Story” are not nearly as bloody, as Dickens closes the Round with his own prose in a tribute to workingmen. His story allegorically indicts the ruling classes for blaming societal ills on workers without funding infrastructures that would empower laborers to live more comfortably. The Bigwig family represents the wealthy classes while Nobody speaks for “the rank and file of the earth” who are ignored in monuments while the feats of less industrious noblemen are commemorated (36). As Nobody’s life advances, his children fall into immoral habits because they lack schooling while the Bigwigs debate educational policy, and his family dies from preventable disease that the Bigwigs care about only when their own families risk contagion (35–36). The final words of Another Round of Stories by the Christmas Fire implicate the reader directly in these dilemmas as Nobody implores, “O! Let us think of them this year at the Christmas fire, and not forget them when it is burnt out” (36). This plea for compassion addresses not only readers but also the fictional narrators of both Rounds with an inclusive “us” around the Christmas fire. The call brings all of the voices together and places the conductor’s baton firmly back in Dickens’s hand as he transforms it into a sort of poker to extinguish the fire that, for two years, has helped to create a polyvocal space where Dickens loosens his conductor’s grip and enjoys the music for a bit.

Dickens’s lack of autocratic control is even more apparent when we pay close attention to his correspondence with Wills. Dickens was traveling in Europe from October to early December when the 1853 Christmas issue was finished and sent to press—and when the details of a moustache-growing contest with his travel companions, Wilkie Collins and Augustus Egg, were more exciting to Dickens than the Christmas number.⁴⁴ Dickens does not imagine his own stories, composed in Italy, specifically as framing pieces: “In making up the Christmas number, don’t consider my paper or papers, with any reference saving to where they will fall best. I have no liking, in the case, for any particular place.”⁴⁵ Consistent with the round metaphor, Dickens thinks that his stories will work equally well in any position, but Wills’s placement of them in the first and last positions affords them extra prominence in published form and enhances their subsequent significance in the collection.

For the first time, Dickens’s own stories stand as bookends for a Christmas number, but he is not the person who decided to place them there. This fact reinforces Wills’s significance as a coeditor and leads one to envision the act of editing as a collaborative authorial endeavor.⁴⁶ The fact that Wills, not Dickens, was reviewing and ordering submissions doubles the layers of collaboration. Discussing the number-in-progress in a letter to Emile de la Rue, Dickens reports that he has not read several of the pieces Wills plans to include.⁴⁷ The same letter offers evidence that such confidence in Wills was not restricted to the Christmas numbers. Answering la Rue’s question about a piece in the weekly issue from November 19, Dickens writes, “I diffuse myself with infinite pains through Household Words, and leave very few papers indeed, untouched. But Kensington Church is not mine, neither have I ever seen it.”⁴⁸ Prevailing critical tendencies make it more likely for one to have seen Dickens’s comment about self-diffusion cited as confirmation that he arrogantly controlled the journal rather than as an example showing that he was simultaneously ignorant of exactly what appeared in that journal. In this instance, travel presents itself as a logistical reason for such sharing of editorial authority, but as I demonstrate throughout the present volume, openness to other people’s input and willingness to share power persist in varying degrees as Dickens produces fourteen more Christmas numbers. Beyond Wills, Dickens draws into the collaborative group another major figure, John Forster, as he anticipates the need to proofread “The Schoolboy’s Story”: “Let Forster have the MS. with the proof, and I know he will correct it to the minutest point.”⁴⁹ The number of pens, and minds, at work on the collection does not seem to have worried Dickens in the slightest, as he accepts that he is not in complete control of his work.⁵⁰ Theories of collaboration in the periodical press must accommodate such an approach to authorship, as ceding control and allowing others to make decisions are crucial elements of Dickens’s collaborative practices.

The success of the Rounds’ structure is evident in its lasting appeal both to competitors and to Dickens. As Household Words attracted a growing audience, the Christmas numbers also increased in popularity throughout the 1850s and 1860s and spawned imitators. In 1856, Edwin Roberts published a collection titled The Christmas Guests round the Sea-Coal Fire, which an obituary for Dickens in The Bookseller lists as one of the most successful imitations.⁵¹ Roberts is credited as sole author, and each story has two titles: “Phoebe Gray’s Troth-Plight,” for instance, is “The Niece’s Story,” and “The Lost Fiddler” is “The City Friend’s Story.” The double titling creates ambiguity, but the confusion feels unintentional, as if Roberts has patched together as many elements as possible from Dickens’s previous Christmas numbers (snowed up people, telling tales around a fire, stories named for their tellers) without careful craft. Many of the stories begin by disclosing their plots, doing away with suspense and illustrating why Dickens’s Christmas numbers, with their constantly evolving frame narratives, continue to grow in popularity over others.⁵² Five years after the second Round, Dickens stated that if he and Wilkie Collins were unable to devise a satisfactory new frame idea, they could always fall back on yet another Round, but doing so was not Dickens’s preference, as he wisely sensed that he had exhausted the Round structure by the end of 1853.⁵³ In the next Christmas numbers, Dickens moves to a much more fully developed and linear narrative frame and, perhaps inspired by Wills’s placement of stories in the second Round, continues the practice of positioning his own work to start and finish the next two special issues.