Charles Dickens et al: Somebody's Luggage (1862)

When Charles Dickens was preparing the extra Christmas Number of All the Year Round for 1862 he told potential contributors that "the tales are not supposed to be narrated to any audience, but are supposed to be in writing". It was an important clarification. In Somebody's Luggage the inset stories were to be pieces of writing discovered by the waiter Christopher, conceived as all written by the same unfortunate Somebody (who had secreted them in various articles of his abandoned luggage). 

This was indeed unlike the norm. Since 1852 the Christmas Numbers had been mostly framed as collections of stories that were told by various characters to each other, like a miniature Canterbury Tales; for instance in a charity lodging (The Seven Poor Travellers), an inn (The Holly Tree Inn), an open boat (The Wreck of The Golden Mary), a haunted house (The Haunted House), a club night (A Message from the Sea), a hermit's hovel (Tom Tiddler's Ground). 

It was a format that made sense. After all these Christmas Numbers, published a few days before each Christmas Eve and immensely popular (with sales approaching 300,000 at their peak), would probably be re-oralized at family firesides.  Family members might each read a different story aloud. The Christmas Number was thus a kit for domestic recreation, like sheet music for the piano. In 1862 it cost 4d, double the price and double the length of a normal weekly number. 

Anyway, Dickens' collaborators evidently took note of the point about their stories being written. In various ways they acknowledged their text's textuality (for instance, when John Oxenford's narrator comments on "the words I have italicised"). They also considered the narrator of their text. 

An orally recounted tale has by definition a first-person narrator, and such narrators do not need to be literary, they only need to be able to talk. This allows the possibility of stories told by such socially unprivileged voices as Poor Dick, the old seaman and the Scotch Boy (in The Wreck of the Golden Mary); or the various child narrators who appeared in the work of Dickens and other contributors (see Chapter 2 of Aine Helen McNicholas' thesis -- details below).

A story in writing is a different proposition. One option is to have an impersonal narrator (Dickens in "His Boots", and Julia Cecilia Stretton in her story of the complacent Mr Blorage, which is partly a drunken dream). A second approach is to have a first person narrator who is definitely portrayed as a writer: for example, Charles Allston Collins' narrator tells us at one point that he had "certain literary labours to which I was obliged to devote myself".

 A third approach, retaining some of the social inclusiveness of the oral tales, is to choose a narrator who is not normally a writer, but who takes to writing in exceptional circumstances. Dickens embraced that idea with relish, giving us the waiter Christopher of the frame stories, acutely conscious of appearing for the first and only time before a large public; giving us, too, the resentful Tom ("His Brown Paper Parcel") whose testament  "is looked over by a friend of mine, a ticket writer, that is up to literature".

John Oxenford's narrator is less easily defined, but not because we don't attend to him; on the contrary, he's as much on our minds as the superb ghost story he relates. He's a kind of flaneur, a bachelor from a good family, cultivated, apparently idle, comfortable but not ostentatiously wealthy, and agreeably selfish in small ways. Naturally we heartily enjoy his discomfiture at the claw-like hands of a haunted umbrella while secretly admiring him as a model, both in his selfishness and his humility; a narrator who's recognizably in the direct line leading to Three Men in a Boat (1889) and Bertie Wooster. He may have a job, and it might well be a literary one (a theatre critic like Oxenford himself?), but he has far too much taste to mention it.

Here he is in full flow:

I sneaked out of the parlour to the bar, endeavoured to ingratiate myself by asking for something cheap that I did not want (a biscuit, I think it was), and then with the grossest affectation of vagueness, propounded the following question:

"Excuse the liberty, but did not I overhear -- unintentionally, of course -- something about some person who walked in some field in some remarkable manner?"

"That's right, master," replied a man in a shaggy great-coat.

"Oh yes, quite correct," said the landlord, "but for further particulars you had better address yourself to this good lady here. You know there's some sort of knowledge that thrives best in the heads of elderly ladies," he added with a wink.

I am overwhelmed with shame and confusion when I write down the humiliating fact that I actually -- winked in return. If I were a member of Parliament, I wonder whether I should ever, by the remotest chance, find myself voting with the minority!

"Oh, the gentleman is quite welcome to hear the story if he likes," said the old lady: a most respectable inoffensive-looking person. "I don't care for a laugh or two."

How unworthy was I to walk on the same soil with that heroic old woman!

I shall not repeat the words of her narrative, for it was somewhat prolix, and abounded in details that did not bear directly on the main subject ...

After exchanging a look of bland superiority with the landlord -- despicable being that I was! -- I asked if the ghost were in the habit of carrying an umbrella. 

"Ho-ho-ho!" roared the landlord. "Why, of course it would, if it went out on a wet evening like this. Well,  that's a good 'un. The gentleman has given it her there, and no mistake; hasn't he, Jim?"

The man in the shaggy great-coat grunted his assent, with a low chuckle. And there was I -- wretch that I was -- allowing myself to be applauded for inflicting a stupid sarcasm on a defenceless female, when I firmly believed every word of her statement, and was merely endeavouring to satisfy my curiosity with reference to my strangely acquired treasure. I even joined in the laugh, and allowed them all, the old woman included, to believe that I regarded myself as an exceedingly witty and facetious person. The old woman merely observed that she knew nothing about umbrellas, and left the house in a state of irascibility that was not only justifiable, but highly laudable. As for me, I swaggered back into the parlour with the air of a conqueror by whom a worthy adversary has been valiantly demolished. 

(from John Oxenford, "His Umbrella")

Arthur Locker's story demonstrates another possibility of the written story; a text whose identity changes as we read. It begins as an apparently sober account of an adventure at sea. After a shipwreck the travellers and crew are marooned on an iceberg, and our sense of incredulity begins to be palpable; still more so when the iceberg providentially comes to rest in the harbour of Port Stephens on the Falkland Islands. But what really transforms our view of the story is its ending, in which the supposed witness and narrator, Mr Monkhouse, is slyly revealed as a Baron Munchausen: the whole performance is a "tall story", whose exposure wipes away any residue of belief in its contents, narrator included. 

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What Dickens didn't need to tell his collaborators was the kind of thing that worked in a Christmas number. Each contribution was a party piece in a variety show; it must be diverting. All of these stories had an element of caprice. Melodrama, sentimentality, morality, adventure, but not gravity or tragedy. Realism was to be held at arm's length, deployed to various degrees but not embraced. Art was to be portrayed only as craft, or else as a sham or something one didn't mention. Mr Mopes (Tom Tiddler's Ground) was to be lightly abandoned, society must be fortified against such disturbing negativity. In Les Fleurs du Mal (1857) and Notes from Underground (1864), the Mr Mopeses were already stirring in response. (Arguably they stirred closer to home, say within the Collins brothers, even within Dickens' own heart.) 

Of the eighteen Christmas numbers Somebody's Luggage has been one of the most discussed, chiefly because of its wry glances at the teeming literature industry of Victorian times, of which the Christmas numbers are themselves notable examples. Anonymous literary labour, lack of appreciation, the profusion and recycling and destruction of printed matter, the eccentricities of hack authorship, the appropriation of others' work and reputation and style, are all themes touched on here, well treated for instance in Chapter I of Aine Helen McNicholas' thesis, and in the Hesperus editors' introduction (details below). I've tried not to go over the same ground too much. 

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Something that the unspoken Christmas story format licensed, and which perhaps comes under the banner of "caprice", is the reckless mingling of different kinds of diversion. Thus John Oxenford's hilarious scenes of social discomfiture don't preclude the authentic chill of the hero's graphic nightmares or his gropings in the nocturnal lumber room. Charles Allston Collins' brilliant screenplay of dinner-party small talk at the ducal house of Creel is abruptly followed by a shocking riding accident; it is not the beautiful Miss Crawcour's career that is marred (as the narrator fears), but her beautiful face.  

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I'm trying to get from that perception (such as it is) to saying something about Dickens' off-message contribution "His Boots". It's a story that's been dismissed as a piece of sentimentality, and it doesn't play to our interest in the Victorian literature industry. But of all the various entertainments in Somebody's Luggage it leaves the deepest impression.  

... All day long, upon the grass-grown ramparts of the town, practising soldiers trumpeted and bugled; all day long, down in angles of dry trenches, practising soldiers drummed and drummed.  Every forenoon, soldiers burst out of the great barracks into the sandy gymnasium-ground hard by, and flew over the wooden horse, and hung on to flying ropes, and dangled upside-down between parallel bars, and shot themselves off wooden platforms,—splashes, sparks, coruscations, showers of soldiers.  At every corner of the town-wall, every guard-house, every gateway, every sentry-box, every drawbridge, every reedy ditch, and rushy dike, soldiers, soldiers, soldiers.  And the town being pretty well all wall, guard-house, gateway, sentry-box, drawbridge, reedy ditch, and rushy dike, the town was pretty well all soldiers.

What would the sleepy old town have been without the soldiers, seeing that even with them it had so overslept itself as to have slept its echoes hoarse, its defensive bars and locks and bolts and chains all rusty, and its ditches stagnant!  From the days when VAUBAN engineered it to that perplexing extent that to look at it was like being knocked on the head with it, the stranger becoming stunned and stertorous under the shock of its incomprehensibility,—from the days when VAUBAN made it the express incorporation of every substantive and adjective in the art of military engineering, and not only twisted you into it and twisted you out of it, to the right, to the left, opposite, under here, over there, in the dark, in the dirt, by the gateway, archway, covered way, dry way, wet way, fosse, portcullis, drawbridge, sluice, squat tower, pierced wall, and heavy battery, but likewise took a fortifying dive under the neighbouring country, and came to the surface three or four miles off, blowing out incomprehensible mounds and batteries among the quiet crops of chicory and beet-root,—from those days to these the town had been asleep, and dust and rust and must had settled on its drowsy Arsenals and Magazines, and grass had grown up in its silent streets.

(from Charles Dickens, "His Boots")

There's often a secret quality to Dickens' writings about France. It isn't all about Ellen Ternan, either. The secret quality was there before he met her, in his Boulogne piece "Our French Watering Place" (November 1854). It was at Boulogne, too, that he and his family stayed with a M. Beaucourt-Mutuel, who had "about 150 soldiers" billeted on him. 

Nevertheless, the intensity and detail of these pages is undoubtedly connected with his mysterious trips to France in 1862, presumably with Ellen alongside or at journey's end (Dickens himself remarked in a letter, re the sales of Somebody's Luggage, “I wonder how many people among those purchasers have any idea of the numbers of hours of steamboat, railway train, dusty French walk, and looking out of window, boiled down in ‘His Boots?’”)

It would be nice to think that Dickens had spent some time at one of Vauban's fortified towns, but the letter doesn't say so and I'm not convinced. The town in "His Boots" has a remote dream-like quality, for instance in its sleepiness and apparent lack of a river, that doesn't seem a good match for, say, Besançon. Vauban's real fortifications aren't incomprehensible, but these ones are: nothing suggests that this "dull" "sleepy old" town, becalmed in weedy canals and chicory fields, has any strategic significance. Dickens' writing yearns towards the symbolic, as eventually made clear in its apostrophe to the "Vaubans of your own hearts".

It's a story, then, about the softening of a hard heart; in the familiar line of A Christmas Carol and Dombey and Son, and perfectly in tune with the Christmas season. Mr The Englishman's eventual forgiveness of his erring daughter (who has given birth to an illegitimate child) begins, here in France, with witnessing the young Corporal Théophile's love for little Bebelle, herself an illegitimate orphan. When the Corporal dies in a fire, Mr The Englishman adopts the unwanted Bebelle; modern readers may be rather taken aback by how simple it seems to have been ("a brief recourse to his purse and card case"). 

This however is to jump ahead to the midnight train and to him "skulking into his own lodging like a man pursued by Justice" (guilty of warm-heartedness); an image strangely reflected in John Oxenford's embarrassed hero dodging the servants: "I could almost fancy I was breaking into my own house". I confess I find the sentimental story quite moving, but I sense that this agony of the heart concerns the author as much as its lingistically-challenged hero. In its ordinary French people, the soldiers "able to turn to cleverly at anything, from a siege to soup, from great guns to needles and thread, from the broadsword exercise to slicing an onion, from making war to making omelettes", he registers a vision of something lost from his own eminent but curdled life. 

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In the cemetery, "little round waiters, whereon were depicted in glowing hues either a lady or a gentleman with a white pocket handkerchief out of all proportion..." ("His Boots")

waiter: A salver or small tray (OED, sense 11).

Outside the pawn shop, [I] "lingered at neighbouring windows, contemplating objects wholly devoid of interest. How long I looked at some pigs' pettitoes in one shop, and at some blacking bottles in another, I cannot conjecture." ("His Umbrella")

pettitoes: Pigs' trotters. 

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I realize I've largely neglected three of the authors of Somebody's Luggage, so here are some samples to finish:

A brood of young ducks, always erratic, obstinate, and greedy, had squeezed their mucilaginous little bodies through nothing, and were out on the loose, their vigilant foster mother, 'in a fine frenzy', clacking within the shut-up poultry house.  

(From Julia Cecilia Stretton, "His Portmanteau", story completed in "His Hat-Box")

"Stout ship? Ha, ha! Why, this is a softwood ship -- a regular New Brunswicker. She'd have no more chance against the ice, than a chaney cup again a soup-and-bully tin; and then, with all this here copper ore in her inside, down she'd go -- and you along with her."

"And you too, Tom."

"Well, I don't know about that. Sailors ain't like passengers. There's the boats to cut adrift. Besides, I'm on deck, and you'd be below, smothered like a rat in his hole."

(from Arthur Locker, "His Dressing Case")

"Oh, he's not such a bad fellow," he said, "when you come to know him. He's affected, you know, and pretends to be wonderfully refined, and to be a petit-maître, and all that, but he has his good points. We fellows who are always shooting, or fishing, or riding over stone dykes, are apt to undervalue a man of quieter tastes, and more sedentary pursuits. Sneyd goes in, you know, for being a sort of artist. ..."

(from Charles Allston Collins, "His Black Bag", story completed in "His Writing-Desk") 

Collins himself went in "for being a sort of artist". And Dickens, who lamented his favourite daughter Kate's marriage to Collins in 1860, probably saw his son-in-law more as a Sneyd type than as the manly but improvident Jack Fortescue. Collins, whose health was as poor as his brother's, was certainly no rider over stone dykes. What was worse in Dickens' eyes, Collins had by now jacked in being an artist and taken to writing instead; it was just the kind of dilettantism that Dickens despised; Kate was set on marrying a Henry Gowan! He blamed himself; he knew that his own dreadful behaviour to her mother had made Kate's life within the family intolerable. And his fears proved correct: the marriage was apparently not happy. All the same, Collins was an excellent painter and an excellent writer too. 

I've been reading Somebody's Luggage (Christmas 1862) in the 2006 Hesperus edition, edited by Melissa Valiska Gregory and Melisa Klimaszewski. [Hesperus have published quite a few of the Christmas Numbers in their complete form, with introductions and notes.]

Somebody's Luggage is one of the eighteen Christmas Numbers of Household Words and All The Year Round that Dickens "conducted" between 1850 and 1867. After the first few years Dickens typically provided a frame for a collection of diverse stories. The other approach (e.g. 1858, 1867) was a longer narrative written in collaboration with Wilkie Collins. 

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This is a scratchpad of information I've gathered on Dickens' Christmas writings, but with particular emphasis on the eighteen collaborative Christmas numbers published between 1850 and 1867 in Household Words and All The Year Round.

They have most commonly been re-published in fragmentary form, i.e. just the bits written solely or mainly by Dickens (e.g. Somebody's Luggage here, on Project Gutenberg). But the links I've supplied in the list below are to the full text, i.e. including all the contributions by other authors. 

All of the Christmas numbers can be read in their entirety on Dickens Journals Online, which is an amazing resource. But it retains the original lineation of those double-column pages, which doesn't make for a very pleasant on-screen reading experience. 

I had written most of this note when I discovered Aine Helen McNicholas' brilliant PhD thesis Dickens by Numbers: the Christmas Numbers of Household Words and All The Year Round (University of York, 2015). https://etheses.whiterose.ac.uk/10391 . Her Appendix supplies a more detailed and complete list, including information about every one of the 130-odd contributions. 

Dickens Christmas writings. 

The Christmas Books (Dickens as sole author):

A Christmas Carol (Chapman & Hall, 19 December 1843, sold out by Christmas Eve)

The Chimes (Chapman & Hall, 1844)

The Cricket on the Hearth (Bradbury & Evans, 20 December 1845)

The Battle of Life (Bradbury & Evans, 1846)

[In 1847 Dickens agonized about what to do. He wanted to concentrate on Dombey and Son, so decided against a Christmas publication for that year, but he wrote to Forster that he was "loath to lose the money" and even "more so to leave any gap at Christmas firesides which I ought to fill".]

The Haunted Man (Bradbury & Evans, 19 December 1848)

In Household Words:  

[When published these Christmas Numbers, like the regular numbers, were simply "Conducted by Charles Dickens". No other authors were named.]

Christmas Number (21 December 1850): This was in fact the regular number of Household Words, but was devoted to seasonal pieces by various authors, mainly essays rather than fiction. Dickens began it with "The Christmas Tree". The number went down very well, and henceforth it was decided to produce an "extra" number each Christmas. 

Extra Christmas Number (1851): Seasonal pieces by various authors, mainly essays rather than fiction. Included Dickens' "What Christmas Is, As We Grow Older".

Extra Christmas Number (1852): A Round of Stories by the Christmas Fire. Stories. "The Poor Relation's Story" (Dickens), "The Child's Story" (Dickens), "Somebody's Story" (William Moy Thomas), "The Old Nurse's Story" (Elizabeth Gaskell), "The Host's Story" (Edmund Ollier), "The Grandfather's Story" (the Rev. James White), "The Charwoman's Story" (Edmund Saul Dixon), "The Deaf Playmate's Story" (Harriet Martineau), "The Guest's Story" (Samuel Sidney) and "The Mother's Story" (Eliza Griffiths). This was the first number to increase the length from the standard 24 double-column pages to 32. [Available in Hesperus Editions.]

Extra Christmas Number (1853): Another Round of Stories by the Christmas Fire. Stories, by Dickens, Elizabeth Gaskell, George Augustus Sala and others. 

Extra Christmas Number (1854): The Seven Poor Travellers, framed stories. Dickens wrote the frame and the narrator's own story. Other stories were written by Wilkie Collins, George Augustus Sala, Adelaide Anne Procter, Mrs. Lynn Linton. [Available in Hesperus Editions.]

Extra Christmas Number (1855): The Holly Tree Inn, framed stories. Dickens wrote the frame and one of the inset stories ("The Boots"). Other stories were by Wilkie Collins, William Howitt, Adelaide Anne Procter, and Harriet Parr (aka Holme Lee). [Available in Hesperus Editions.]

Extra Christmas Number (1856): The Wreck of the Golden Mary, main narrative with inset stories. Dickens wrote most of the first part ("The Wreck"), except for an addendum by Wilkie Collins. The second part ("The Beguilement in the Boats") consisted of five inset stories by four authors: The armourer's story (Percy Fitzgerald), poor Dick's story (Harriet Parr aka Holme Lee), the supercargo's story (Percy Fitzgerald), an old seaman's ballad (Adelaide Anne Procter) and the Scotch boy's story (the Rev. James White). The third part ("The Deliverance") was by Wilkie Collins. Full text: https://www.fadedpage.com/books/20180640/html.php  . [Available in Hesperus Editions.]

NB The Lazy Tour of Two Idle Apprentices, by Dickens and Wilkie Collins, was not a Christmas story. It came out over several numbers in October 1857. [Available in Hesperus Editions.]

Extra Christmas Number (1857): The Perils of Certain English Prisoners, story by Dickens and Wilkie Collins. Full text on Google Books.

Extra Christmas Number (1858): A House to Let, collaborative story. The first and last chapters were collaborations by Charles Dickens and Wilkie Collins. The chapters in between were "The Manchester Marriage" (Elizabeth Gaskell), "Going into Society" (Dickens), "Three Evenings in the House" (Adelaide Anne Procter), "Trottle's Report" (Wilkie Collins). [Available in Hesperus Editions.]

In All The Year Round:

Extra Christmas Number (1859): The Haunted House, framed stories. Dickens wrote the frame narrative and two of the inset ghost stories. The others are by Hesba Stretton, George Augustus Sala, Adelaide Anne Procter, ​Wilkie Collins, and Elizabeth Gaskell. Full text on Google Books. With the advent of All the Year Round the length of the extra number was once more increased, from 32 double-column pages to 48. 

Extra Christmas Number (1860): A Message from the Sea, story/framed stories. Chapter 1 ("The Village") by Charles Dickens. Chapter 2 ("The Money") by Dickens and Wilkie Collins. Chapter 3 ("The Club-Night") by Dickens with inset stories by Charles Allston Collins, Harriet Parr (Holme Lee), Robert Buchanan (poem), H.F. Chorley, and Amelia B. Edwards. Chapter 4 ("The Seafaring Man") by Wilkie Collins. Chapter 5 ("The Restitution") by Dickens and Wilkie Collins.  Full text on Google Books.

Extra Christmas Number (1861): Tom Tiddler's Ground, framed stories. Dickens wrote the frame and the last of the inset stories. The others were by Charles Allston Collins, Amelia B. Edwards, Wilkie Collins and John Harwood. Full text on Google Books.

Extra Christmas Number (1862): Somebody's Luggage, framed stories. Dickens wrote the frame and two of the inset stories. One of them, "His Brown Paper Parcel", was written to replace a planned contribution by Wilkie Collins, who was too ill. The others were by John Oxenford, Charles Allston Collins, Arthur Locker and Julia Cecilia Stretton. Full text on Google Books. [Available in Hesperus Editions.]

Extra Christmas Number (1863): Mrs Lirriper's Lodgings, framed stories. Dickens wrote the frame. The other stories were "How the First Floor went to Crowley Castle" (Elizabeth Gaskell), "How the Side-Room was Attended by a Doctor" (Andrew Halliday), "How the Second-Floor Kept a Dog" (Edmund H. Yates), "How the Third-Floor Knew the Potteries" (Amelia B. Edwards) and "How the Best Attic was Under a Cloud" (Charles Allston Collins). Full text on Google Books. [Available in Hesperus Editions.]

Extra Christmas Number (1864): Mrs Lirriper's Legacy, framed stories. Dickens wrote the frame. Inset stories by Charles Allston Collins, Rosa Mulholland, Henry Spicer, Amelia B. Edwards, and Hesba Stretton. Full text on Google Books. [Available in Hesperus Editions.]

Extra Christmas Number (1865): Doctor Marigold's Prescriptions, framed stories. Dickens wrote the outer frame and one inset story. The others were by Rosa Mulholland, Charles Allston Collins, Hesba Stretton, Walter Thornbury, and Mrs. Gascoyne. Full text on Google Books.  [Available in Hesperus Editions.]

Extra Christmas Number (1866): Mugby Junction, framed stories. Dickens wrote two introductory chapters and the first two inset stories. Other stories were by Andrew Halliday, Charles Allston Collins, Hesba Stretton and Amelia B. Edwards. Full text on Google Books. [Available in Hesperus Editions.]

Extra Christmas Number (1867): No Thoroughfare, story by Dickens and Wilkie Collins, based on their play of the same year. Full text on Google Books.

[In 1868, Dickens intended a Christmas Number, but lamented in a letter to Wills:  

I have been, and still am -- which is worse -- in a positive state of despair about the Xmas No. I cannot get an idea for it which is in the least satisfactory to me, and yet I have been steadily trying all this month. I have invented so many of these Christmas Nos. and they are so profoundly unsatisfactory after all with the introduced Stories and their want of cohesion or originality, that I fear I am sick of the thing. I have had serious thoughts of abandoning the Xmas No.! There remain but August and September to give to it (as I begin to read in October), and I CAN NOT see it. 

And so it would prove; he never produced another Christmas Number. Apparently Dickens couldn't contemplate delegating the whole thing to other hands. It had to be his show.]