Collaborative Dickens

Melisa Klimaszewski is Professor of English and the director of the Women's and Gender Studies Program at Drake University. She has edited several of Dickens's collaborative works, authored a critical bibliography of scholarship on Dickens for Oxford University Press's Oxford Bibliographies in British and Irish Literature, and published short biographies of Charles Dickens and Wilkie Collins.

"This is a mature and original piece of scholarship that adds substantially to the critical understanding of Dickens and is the first comprehensive overview of his Christmas numbers. Considering each number as its own aesthetic unit, Klimaszewski convincingly argues for a different and more flexible understanding of authorship (and of "Dickens") as polyvocal, often contradictory, and conversational in nature. Her discussion of Dickens's collaborations with Wilkie Collins is particularly strong." "Collaborative Dickens is a new and distinct contribution that will be of substantial interest to Dickens scholars, to those working more broadly on Victorian studies, to researchers focused on the periodical press, and to scholars examining models of collaborative authorship." "Melisa Klimaszewski masterfully guides the reader through the Christmas numbers Charles Dickens edited for Household Words and All the Year Round—eighteen in total from 1850 to 1867, with forty writers represented—making a compelling case for a re-evaluation of collaborative writing and academic approaches to it, whether in the case of Dickens, the Victorians, or more broadly." (British Association for Victorian Studies Newsletter 22.2 (Summer 2022))