Dickens's Collaborative Genres

Recent readings of Dickens's collaborative relationships tend to focus on the struggle for literary control between Dickens and his less famous colleagues. But when the question of genre is brought to bear on his collaborative writing, it becomes apparent that Dickens created new literary forms which permit for more complex authorial negotiations than scholars have acknowledged. Despite Dickens's dictatorial tendencies, the collaborative genres he developed over the course of his career often promote a model of authorship where power relationships are in flux, and this fluidity creates new opportunities for epistemological exploration and authorial self-definition. I explore two of Dickens's collaborative genres that appeared in Household Words and All the Year Round. The first is the annual Christmas number; the second is the “excursion article,” which revolved around holiday outings taken by Dickens and his staff. An investigation of these collaborative genres reveals that they refuse to conform neatly to hierarchical patterns of dominance and subordination, thus enriching our understanding of the many and varied kinds of creative partnerships that emerged between male writers during the Victorian period.