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  • Collaborative Dickens: Authorship and Victorian Christmas Periodicals by Melisa Klimaszewski
  • Pete Orford (bio)
Melisa Klimaszewski. Collaborative Dickens: Authorship and Victorian Christmas Periodicals. Ohio UP, 2019. Pp. xii + 282. $80. ISBN 978-0-8214-2365-3.

Between 1850 and 1867, Dickens produced special Christmas numbers of Household Words and All the Year Round in which he and a selection of co-writers would contribute short stories within an overarching framework devised by Dickens himself. Melisa Klimaszewski has great experience with Dickens's Christmas numbers, having edited several of them alongside Melissa Valiska Gregory for Hesperus Classics. Those editions are notable for including not just Dickens's contributions to the numbers, but rather replicating each number in full with Dickens's stories nestled among those of his contributors, as first published. In Collaborative Dickens, we see the fruits of this experience as Klimaszewski now offers an academic study of the Christmas numbers that is as much a celebration of them and their collaborative nature, as it is an introduction to the topic.

The relative obscurity of the Christmas numbers is the greatest justification for this monograph. While A Christmas Carol is faithfully trotted out year after year for another adaptation, these multi-authored collections of short stories remain largely unread, even among Dickensians. While there has been a growing appreciation and awareness for Dickens's work as a journalist and journal editor, the sheer bulk of material contained in Dickens's journals is often a deterrent in itself. The Christmas numbers offer a compromise of self-contained issues within the deluge, but are equally hampered by their collaborative nature which means the casual Dickens reader will often choose to focus on the solo-authored novels instead. The ultimate aim of Klimaszewski's book is to set this right by championing not only the Christmas numbers but moreover their collaborative authorship as something to be celebrated, not excused.

In her introduction, Klimaszewski states three objectives: "to read collaborative texts in their complete forms, to complicate hierarchical models of collaboration, and to acknowledge the powerful polyvocal potential of periodical forms such as the Christmas number" (9). In order to do this, she works methodically through the eighteen numbers, attempting to offer analysis as much as summary. This is an ambitious project, and the confines of a single monograph are understandably limiting here. But what Klimaszewski offers is an opening discussion, and she is to be commended for initiating interrogation of the topic. At the same time there are necessary hurdles the book has to go through, being the first lengthy study on this topic: namely having to take time to introduce each number and offer a synopsis of the individual stories within. While an article on Bleak House can comfortably assume reader knowledge and dive straight into discussion of individual [End Page 296] characters and themes, here Klimaszewski maintains a merciful awareness of her readers' likely ignorance of the source text. Her thoughtfulness means that there is an unavoidable amount of time given to summarising plots, which places further pressure on the remaining pages to achieve meaningful analysis of these numbers. The result is a working compromise in which stories are introduced, many key themes identified, and some deeper themes explored more fully, with a number of areas left for future scholars to pick up and debate further.

This is emphatically not a criticism. Rather, I applaud Klimaszewski's decision to embark on this topic and truly hope it sparks more discussion of the Christmas numbers. The areas she does cover work as potential models of discussion for the areas she does not have time to discuss, and I can foresee a number of postgraduate students keenly stepping forward to build on this work. For example, her final chapter "Coming to a Stop (1866–67)" focuses at length on the working relationship between Wilkie Collins and Dickens, with several interesting conclusions and comparisons raised. Allowing time for close focus on this one relationship allows for a nuanced and informative read and identifies how similar discussions can be teased out of Dickens's working relationship with his other collaborators. Elsewhere–in chapter three, "Orderly Travels and Generic Developments (1854–55)," for example–Klimaszewski...

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