Mrs Lirriper's Lodgings by Charles Dickens, Elizabeth Gaskell, Andrew Halliday, Edmund Yates, Amelia B. Edwards and Charles Alston Collins (1863)

 One of those portmanteau pieces so favoured in Victorian times particularly. This came out under Dickens' auspices in All the Year Round - all seven pieces were printed together as the special Christmas issue for 1863. They vary enormously. Dickens' starter is a classic rendering in a lower middle class landlady's voice, replete with jealousy of a rival landlady down the street, and the posturing of superiority associated with it. He holds the voice brilliantly in his usual theatrical vein. Various lodgers come to the fore, both sympathetic and otherwise, with a mainstay in the Major, who has been with her for a while (having started out down the street!) and who provides chorus-like support. It culminates with an ill-starred couple together under false pretences, where the female of the pair ends up abandoned at Mrs Lirriper's and dying in misery. She does leave a little son, whom Mrs Lirriper and the Major take on, and who becomes the light of their lives, thus fulfilling the required sentimental elevation for a Christmas number. Gaskell's follow-up, Crowley Castle, is barely associated. A stirring and serious tale of a young woman's errors in love and their dire consequences, including bitterness to the depth of murder, it only belongs because she has wrapped it in an extra layer of being related to the Major, I think by Mrs Lirriper as a story she's heard (in a less obviously characterful voice), but I could have misinterpreted that. Halliday's third is a strange one, which begins as potentially supernatural with a doctor suddenly appearing in the midst of a mutual appreciation society of young men starting out in life, full of sweetness and belief. He corrupts it slowly with cynicism and doubt. Then, in a big twist, which frankly feels cranked, he is discovered by one of the young men not to be an unholy demon, but rather a profoundly good man who is ashamed of being kind-hearted! My suspicions were activated; perhaps this was to be used some other way, and Dickens agreed to have it as a contribution if the tone could be lightened? It falls oddly into two parts. Yates' fourth suffers from the same disease. An unbearable braggart and dominator comes to stay at an inn in Wales, planning as part of his stay to visit distant, as yet unknown, relatives nearby. The family are quickly horrified by his boorishness and attempt to avoid him as best they can. He particularly dismisses, as a lofty metropolitan, the fiancé of one of the daughters of the family, and all is set for conflagration as the family take against him more seriously. But then, suddenly, the fiancé gets into trouble while out swimming, and it is our man who dives into dangerous seas to save him. Again the unmistakable feeling of something which starts out as a portent for comeuppance twisting into a tale of heroism in pursuance of a more wholesome tone. Edwards' fifth is a splendid tale of jealousy and ultimately murder among the kilns of the Potteries. It has a quiet mystery which indicates how good a writer of ghost tales she is, with the murdered man appearing to a lonely kiln worker late at night with the deep red oven-glow on his face among the shadows. Why Dickens didn't require of Gaskell and Edwards the same turn to sentiment as Halliday and Yates is a question - were they too well-established to brook interference? Collins' sixth is what could be described as a successful essay upon the terms of Yates' earlier piece. Another stupid boor with pretensions is inveigled into a duel by friends who ostensibly support his objection with a love rival. But we are quietly let into the knowledge, by implication anyway, that his conception of himself is a long way from that of others. In the end a whole charade is gone through; the rival suddenly stops the proceeding to apologise, but is heard laughing on leaving the field. Our man and his friends retire to an inn to celebrate his victory, but their speeches are interrupted by church bells. As these grow more clamorous, he goes to the window just in time to see the love rival and sweetheart riding by in their wedding carriage; they laugh and kiss their hands to him, waving - all his ludicrous dreams of claiming the woman for wife are smashed. This one has been allowed its intended conclusion and is more satisfying for it. Allowed because the author was married to Dickens' daughter? Then Dickens himself returns for a short seventh, rehashing the absolute pleasure the Major and Mrs Lirriper take in Jemmy, the boy they have adopted. He tells a story which highlights his delight in the hearth and home he's been allowed through being their charge. A fun collection with some ups and downs seemingly in its making.