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3

Orderly Travels and Generic Developments

(1854–55)

Early in The Holly-Tree Inn, its narrator declares, “[W]hen I travel, I never arrive at a place but I immediately want to go away from it” (3). The speaker’s back-and-forth desires could create an elliptical visual image, but in this case, a snowstorm prevents the traveller from being able to backtrack or skip to his next destination quickly. Instead, he must slow down and proceed through the space he currently inhabits in a direct, uncomplicated motion, which is a fitting way to visualize both the 1854 and 1855 Christmas numbers. For these years, in contrast to the preceding Rounds, the numbers move from circularity to structures that are more linear, and the storytelling moves from one speaker to another with a clear sense of forward motion.¹ Dickens reins in the storytelling, limiting the mixing that characterizes the Rounds and keeping his travellers under at least temporary control with his own narrator framing them.

The Seven Poor Travellers (1854) and The Holly-Tree Inn (1855) are Dickens’s first forays into fully developed frame narratives for the Christmas numbers. The narrative lacing structures that emerge in each collection come to characterize the Christmas numbers for more than a decade. These heretofore-overlooked techniques enable the stories to cohere in contexts that feature group as well as individual storytelling, and Dickens’s correspondence on the subject reveals intriguingly inconsistent stances toward the dynamics of collaboration: sometimes he embraces joint creative processes, and sometimes he complains about them. Even when contributors shared no apparent communication about their stories’ emphases, the numbers for 1854 and 1855 evidence lively intertextual dynamics. Approaches that emphasize attribution blind critics to those dynamics and prevent appreciation of the symbiotic relationships that enhance both the interpolated stories and their respective frames. The frames enabling these collections to cohere are, for instance, important elements of the collaborative contexts from which detective fiction emerges. These collections also fold close male bonds into Christmas visions and exhibit the ways in which shifting representations of imperial projects continue to underpin celebrations of idyllic English holidays.

The Seven Poor Travellers

The first Christmas number in which a narrative frame completely encloses the other stories and is woven through them to enhance coherence, The Seven Poor Travellers succeeds in creating orderly storytelling. Each traveller speaks in numbered sequence, and the frame story gives good reason for possible variations in narrative style, theme, or idiom between the inset pieces. For its premise, the collection relies on Watts’s Charity, an actual institution in Rochester, Kent (the same region featured in Chaucer’s famous framed tales).² On May 11, 1854, Dickens visited the charity house with Mark Lemon, and although that visit may not have been Dickens’s first, it would have been freshest in his mind during the composition of this issue.

Despite the very real place from which this Christmas number takes its name, its narrator immediately injects fiction into the reading experience with an opening disclaimer:

Strictly speaking, there were only six Poor Travellers; but, being a Traveller myself, though an idle one, and being withal as poor as I hope to be, I brought the number up to seven. This word of explanation is due at once, for what says the inscription over the quaint old door?

RICHARD WATTS, ESQ.

BY HIS WILL, DATED 22 AUG. 1579,

FOUNDED THIS CHARITY

FOR SIX POOR TRAVELLERS,

WHO NOT BEING ROGUES, OR PROCTORS,

MAY RECEIVE GRATIS FOR ONE NIGHT,

LODGING, ENTERTAINMENT,

AND FOUR-PENCE EACH. (1)

Taking it upon himself to become the Christmas Eve benefactor of the six actually poor visitors at the charity, the narrator plays host by providing a sumptuous feast. The entire interaction relies on his difference from the travellers, yet his addition of himself to their number creates the illusion of comradeship. The only things linking the seven individuals in the title are their status as poor and their transience, but once the host asks each traveller to tell a story, the group shares another trait; they are joined in a project of speaking and listening. Each speaker’s self-consciousness acts as a device to keep the seven figures connected to the frame, and in some cases, the content of the inset contributions further strengthens such cohesion.

The host/narrator’s logic in requesting these stories may seem uncomplicated, but the moral reasoning behind his sudden benevolence questions the precepts of the type of charity often associated with Christmas. He is so moved by looking at Watts’s tomb and the inscription on the house that he begins to regard the establishment possessively, thinking of it as “my property” (1) and calling the visitors “my travellers” as he imagines their destitution: “I made them footsore; I made them weary; I made them carry packs and bundles; I made them stop by fingerposts and milestones, leaning on their bent sticks and looking wistfully at what was written there; I made them lose their way, and filled their five wits with apprehensions of lying out all night, and being frozen to death” (3). The host somewhat sadistically enjoys envisioning the suffering of these people so that he can delight all the more in alleviating it. The exaggerated quality of the host’s thought process reveals the self-serving rather than altruistic nature of this model of patronage as he revels even in another person’s fear of being frozen to death, but the number avoids completely vilifying him by showing that he is aware of his self-aggrandizing wishes, then shifting to humor.

The host’s Christmas Eve dinner preparations involve issuing orders at his inn for a grand meal that must be transported to the charity house, and the curious parade of hot dishes down the High Street draws readers into a cheering fantasy of a Christmas hastily done up for the comfort of others. Waiters sprinting with steaming puddings, the host bearing a pitcher of wassail (called his “brown beauty”) as if it were an infant, and a “Man with Tray on his head, containing Vegetables and Sundries” join to form a “Comet-like” procession, while a servant boy waits for a whistle to dash down the street to “the sauce-female, who would be provided with brandy in a blue state of combustion” (3–4). The instant feast is just one aspect of the number’s opening that recalls A Christmas Carol (1843). Although this host does not undergo a Scrooge-esque character transformation, the surprise turkey and his excessive joy in providing a meal call that character to mind. The host also echoes Scrooge in lamenting that Christmas is only a once-per-year event: “[F]or when it begins to stay with us the whole year round, we shall make this earth a very different place” (2).³ The messages of the travellers’ stories, however, turn out to be much more complicated than the vague notion that keeping Christmas in one’s heart can solve the world’s ills.

Before launching into the storytelling, the narrator provides a description of each traveller, which creates early interest in the interpolated tales to come and increases one’s curiosity about what type of story each will tell. The group consists of the host; a man with an injured arm who smells like shipbuilding wood; a young sailor boy; a disheveled man with papers bulging out of his pockets and tape holding his clothes together; a Swiss watchmaker; a frightened, widowed young woman; and a book peddler (3). The transitions between stories are brief, but the frame is so strong that the pieces cohere despite radical differences in subject matter. Discussing Elizabeth Gaskell’s use of a Dickens-inspired frame concept in 1859, Larry Uffelman notes that the reader progresses through such a text by “forming a series of loops that return at the end of each story to the setting and characters of the frame. Readers begin in the frame, read straight through a story, return to the frame, and then move into the next story in the sequence. . . . Furthermore, the ‘metafictional frame’ becomes a small drama in its own right, providing continuity, as readers move through the edition.”⁴ This process holds true for many of the Christmas numbers as the framing and looping form knots whose architecture relies on mental motion.

For The Seven Poor Travellers, the storytelling chain begins with the host sharing the story of Richard Doubledick, whom he identifies vaguely as a “relative.”⁵ The centrality of Dickens’s Doubledick story to the number’s intensely positive reception warrants a detailed examination of the piece, which celebrates intense bonds between men as part of Christmas.⁶ Already “better known as Dick,” Richard joins the army under a dubious, self-invented name so that he will be Dick Doubledick when killed (4). Full of shame, he hopes to die as penance for years of profligate behavior that have hurt himself and Mary Marshall, a fiancée he offends with an unnamed act of betrayal (5). Having failed to achieve his goal of being shot, Doubledick’s severe insubordination puts him at risk of being flogged when Captain Taunton’s looks and demeanor save him: “Now, the Captain of Richard Doubledick’s company was a young gentleman not above five years his senior, whose eyes had an expression in them which affected Private Richard Doubledick in a very remarkable way. They were bright, handsome, dark eyes—what are called laughing eyes generally, and, when serious, rather steady than severe—but, they were the only eyes now left in his narrowed world that Private Richard Doubledick could not stand” (5). Given their closeness in age, the accountability Doubledick feels in Taunton’s presence is not paternal; rather, there is an attraction between the men that consistently prevents Doubledick from speaking or behaving in any way falsely to Taunton. Taunton’s “bright, handsome, dark eyes” rivet Doubledick, inspiring his complete transformation into a steadfast soldier and devotee.⁷ Doubledick seals the pact of his own reformation “with a bursting heart” by kissing Taunton’s hand, and the kiss remains significant enough for Doubledick to recount it decades later: “I have heard from Private Richard Doubledick’s own lips, that he dropped down upon his knee, kissed that officer’s hand, arose, and went out of the light of the dark bright eyes, an altered man” (6). The kneeling position equally resonates with oaths of fealty and oaths of marriage, and the story presents that ambiguity comfortably.⁸

This intensity of male emotion apart from a domestic heterosexual unit is as much a part of the Christmas tradition in this number as anything else. Doubledick and Taunton subsequently experience thirteen years of togetherness in which they travel to many sites of conflict, and although Doubledick saves Taunton’s life repeatedly, the captain ultimately receives a fatal wound from a French officer at Badajoz. The description of his death mirrors the earlier account of the men’s union:

The bright dark eyes—so very, very dark now, in the pale face—smiled upon [Doubledick]; and the hand he had kissed thirteen years ago, laid itself fondly on his breast.

“Write to my mother. You will see Home again. Tell her how we became friends. It will comfort her, as it comforts me.”

[Taunton] spoke no more, but faintly signed for a moment towards his hair as it fluttered in the wind. The Ensign understood him. He smiled again when he saw that, and gently turning his face over on the supporting arm as if for rest, died, with his hand upon the breast in which he had revived a soul. (6–7)

The fellow soldiers have lived in a professional and personal partnership that far surpasses the superior/subordinate relationship of rank. Their embrace at Taunton’s moment of death is extended as Doubledick carries Taunton’s lock of hair “near his heart” for over a year until he can deliver it to Taunton’s mother (7). When Doubledick goes to France to visit Mrs. Taunton, he discovers that her host is the officer who killed her son, but rather than vengefully murdering the man, Doubledick forgives. Reflecting the shift from English-French animosity to alliance that took place relatively quickly between the Napoleonic and Crimean conflicts, the children of the men grow up as friends who later unite to fight “in one cause . . . fast united” (10). Holly Furneaux’s analysis of this story focuses on the Doubledick character and Dickens’s treatment of “military men of feeling” while, refreshingly, including consideration of the resonances between Doubledick’s plight and other pieces in the number: “Like Dickens’s story Procter’s poem considers the thorny question of allegiance in wartime. . . . Both contributions, too, are concerned with the appropriate gendering of military heroism and the personal characteristics of a hero.”⁹ Indeed, the heterosexual pairing of Doubledick with Mary, which the story barely mentions, takes place only because of the transformation he experiences in his relationship with another man. In a frame story that involves a man fantasizing about the succor he will provide to poor travellers, all but one of which are men, the relationship depicted in the first traveller’s story suggests a path forward not just for individual travellers who might be in need of character reform but for the entire nation to overcome animosities that run through deeply violent episodes of its history.¹⁰

The direct, first-person voice of the next speaker keeps the second story anchored to the frame as the shipwright begins his portion by explaining that his arm sling results from an adze-wielding coworker having inflicted an “unlucky chop” at the shipyards. He then moves into the tale by saying, “I have nothing else in particular to tell of myself, so I’ll tell a bit of a story of a seaport town” (10). Following the first traveller’s references to an unspecified time in the future, the voice of the second traveller pulls readers right back into Christmas Eve at Watts’s, which acts as a reminder that the storytellers are randomly assembled. Such a reminder is especially fitting to introduce George A. Sala’s psychedelic story about Acon-Virlaz, a Jewish shopkeeper and jeweller whose characterization complicates critical understanding of ethnic “others” in Dickens’s collaborative canon. In Acon-Virlaz’s dream vision, he joins his friend Mr. Ben-Daoud on a shopping trip to Sky Fair, a bizarre place full of “live armadillos with their jewelled scales,” diamonds the size of ostrich eggs, and jewels that are sold “by the gallon, like table beer” (14). Weighed down by treasures, Acon-Virlaz fails to leave the fair before the closing bell and offers the gatekeeper his daughter’s hand in marriage to avoid being locked in for a hundred years. Although “women and children from every nation under the sun” (15) help block his way to the exit, the quick reference to other ethnicities does not lessen the story’s excessive attention to Jewishness. Early in the tale, some attempt at moderation appears when, on the subject of Acon-Virlaz’s name, the narrator says, “He went by a simpler, homelier, shorter appellation: Moses, Levy, Sheeny—what you will; for most of the Hebrew nation have an inner name as well as an inner and richer life” (11). Despite this defensive statement on behalf of “the Hebrew nation,” the story’s depiction of Ben-Daoud, who owes Acon-Virlaz money, is directly anti-Semitic. Ben-Daoud is “oily” with “a perceptible lisp” and pink eyes, and Acon-Virlaz casts him as the dream’s villain because he lures Acon-Virlaz to Sky Fair only to abandon him (12). In actuality, Acon-Virlaz has returned home drunk, and falling out of his chair “into the fire-place” wakes him from the dream (16).¹¹