The Skeleton out of the Closet: Authorship Identification in Dickens’s All the Year Round

Most items in All the Year Round, like those in most other mid-Victorian periodicals, were published anonymously. Ever since the late nineteenth century, there has been intense speculation about the identity of the contributors, with various attempts to find primary sources of information. This article tells the story of the recent discovery of a complete marked set of the first series of All the Year Round (1859–68), which provides the names of over 300 contributors who were responsible for some 2,500 items in the journal. The author recounts the background leading up to this discovery, reveals some of the new information it discloses, and gives a conjectured provenance for the set, tracing it back to Charles Dickens himself.