Collaborative Dickens : Authorship and Victorian Christmas Periodicals

Authors

Melisa Klimaszewski

Files

Series

Series in Victorian Studies

Description

From 1850 to 1867, Charles Dickens produced special issues (called “numbers”) of his journals Household Words and All the Year Round, which were released shortly before Christmas each year. In Collaborative Dickens, Melisa Klimaszewski undertakes the first comprehensive study of these Christmas numbers. She argues for a revised understanding of Dickens as an editor who, rather than ceaselessly bullying his contributors, sometimes accommodated contrary views and depended upon multivocal narratives for his own success.

Klimaszewski uncovers connections among and between the stories in each Christmas collection. She thus reveals ongoing conversations between the works of Dickens and his collaborators on topics important to the Victorians, including race, empire, supernatural hauntings, marriage, disability, and criminality. Stories from Wilkie Collins, Elizabeth Gaskell, and understudied women writers such as Amelia B. Edwards and Adelaide Anne Procter interact provocatively with Dickens’s writing. By restoring links between stories from as many as nine different writers in a given year, Klimaszewski demonstrates that a respect for the Christmas numbers’ plural authorship and intertextuality results in a new view of the complexities of collaboration in the Victorian periodical press and a new appreciation for some of the most popular texts Dickens published.

Copyright Statement

Collaborative Dickens © 2019 by Ohio University Press is licensed under Creative Commons License CC BY-NC-ND. To view a copy of this license, visit https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/

Language

eng

ISBN

9780821446737

Publication Date

6-11-2019

Publisher

Ohio University Press

City

Athens

Keywords

Literary criticism, Victorian Studies, Books, Reading, Christmas stories, Charles Dickens, Authorship collaboration

Disciplines

Creative Writing | Literature in English, British Isles | Reading and Language

Creative Commons License

This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-No Derivative Works 4.0 International License.

Recommended Citation

Klimaszewski, Melisa, "Collaborative Dickens : Authorship and Victorian Christmas Periodicals" (2019). Ohio University Press Open Access Books. 78.
https://ohioopen.library.ohio.edu/oupress/78