Various Authors: A Message from the Sea. v1. 15 May 2015
 

Charles Dickens' journals 'Household Words' and 'All the Year Round' had Extra Christmas Numbers each year, and several of these contained stories co-authored by Dickens and staff writers who shared his social activism.

A list of the collaborations between Charles Dickens and Wilkie Collins is available on the Victorian Web site, and the text of every journal is available on the Dickens Journals Online site.

A Message from the Sea was the 'All the Year Round' Extra Christmas Number for 1860, and was co-authored by Charles Dickens; Charles Allston Collins, a younger brother of Wilkie Collins and son-in-law of Charles Dickens; and Wilkie Collins.

The 'Message from the Sea' was a letter in a bottle found by an American sea captain who took it back to England to solve a mystery about money stolen many years before. During his investigations he attended a club where several ghost and horror stories were told, and later met a seafaring man who had been shipwrecked.

The source was plain text from the Dickens Journals Online site, checked against the images of the original journal pages. I have set off documents as blockquotes, italicised the names of ships, silently corrected typos and inconcistencies, and made changes to spelling and hyphenation using oxforddictionaries.com.