Charles Dickens and Joseph Parkinson: Disentangling Composite Authorship in All the Year Round

The extent of Dickens’s written output is legendary. In his relatively short lifetime he completed fourteen and a half novels, as well as an impressive array of short fiction, travel books, plays, poems, and major and minor works of prose. The complete extent of his published works may never be known, partly on account of the convention of anonymity that dominated early and mid-Victorian publication – especially journalism (see Drew 117–8, 151, 183). The most recent attempt to produce a “Complete listing of Dickens’s known journalism” was undertaken by Michael Slater and John Drew, in the final volume of their Dent Uniform Edition of Dickens’ Journalism (Slater and Drew 436–46). Yet this inventory, featuring 370 items, is only as reliable as the supporting evidence, which comes from a variety of sources, including Dickens’s correspondence, the discovery of manuscripts, and the Office Book for his journal Household Words (Collins, “Dickens on Ghosts”; Brice; and Lohrli). It is rare nowadays for a new piece of journalism by Dickens to be authenticated; yet such breakthroughs are possible, given the right circumstances and effective modes of investigation.

In the spring and summer of 2015 a set of fortuitous events culminated in a public announcement that the “Rosetta Stone of Victorian Studies” had been found (Dugan). In May of that year a group of academics met a scholar and antiquarian book dealer named Jeremy Parrott, to authenticate a series of carefully inscribed annotations in a recently purchased, handsomely bound set of the first series of All the Year Round (Fig. 1), the journal that Dickens edited from 1859 until his death in 1870. The scholars came away convinced that the marginalia, which identified by name the authors of each of the individual pieces, were genuine. These findings were confirmed by Leon Litvack, who observed in an interview with the Independent newspaper that

This is probably the most important find for [Dickens] scholars in my lifetime. It gives us an insight into the links between Dickens and other authors, whose names have been all too often lost in the mists of time. It will be of inestimable value to scholars.

(Milmo)

The annotations – not in Dickens’s hand (Parrott, “George Holsworth,” and Litvack, “Letters”) – confirmed the authorship of previously anonymous pieces; among the most notable revelations were works by Elizabeth Gaskell, Eliza Lynn Linton, Lewis Carroll and Wilkie Collins, together with a host of lesser-known figures. The complete story of the discovery was recounted in an article by Litvack in the Dickens Quarterly, in December 2015 (Litvack, “Dickens”). Since then Parrott has been working to compile and publish a Bio-Bibliographical Guide to Contributors to All the Year Round, based on the marginalia in what has now come to be called the “Parrott set” of the journal (Parrott, “The Annotated Set” 14).

There was further excitement when it was revealed that new writing by Dickens had been uncovered. In July 2015 an article appeared in the Independent, carrying the title “The unseen Charles Dickens: read the excoriating essay on Victorian poverty that no-one knew he had written.” It identified Dickens as the lead author of an All the Year Round article entitled “What is Sensational?”, a diatribe focusing on conditions in workhouse infirmaries (Wills). The Independent boasted that the piece, previously attributed to “one Joseph Parkinson” (1833–1908), had been “presumed to be only a commission from [Dickens]. But from the newly studied margin notes, it now seems that Dickens not only supplied the idea but was chief author of the polemic” (Wills). The previous attribution to Parkinson alone was based largely on a memorandum written by Dickens, which provided Parkinson with a detailed set of instructions about what to include in the article (Figs. 2, 3); now the shared authorship is confirmed by the marginal annotation in the Parrott set (Fig. 4).

Before examining the content of “What is Sensational?”, and whether Dickens was indeed the “chief author,” it would be useful to consider the career of his lesser-known collaborator. Joseph Charles Parkinson (Fig...