Short Fiction Various Authors: The Seven Poor Travellers. v3. 3 May 2015

[AlexBell]

Charles Dickens' journals 'Household Words' and 'All the Year Round' had Extra Christmas Numbers each each year, and several of these contained stories co-authored by Dickens and staff writers who shared his social activism. Dickens and Wilkie Collins provided the linking text between each chapter. Some of the chapters were later published separately in other versions, but this edition contains the original text from the journals.

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.

'The Seven Poor Travellers' was the 'Household Words' Extra Christmas Number for 1854, and was co-authored by Charles Dickens and Wilkie Collins, who were established novelists; George Augustus Sala and Eliza Lynn Lynton, who at wrote that time as journalists though they went on to write novels; and Adelaide Anne Procter, Queen Victoria's favourite poet who in her time was ranked second only to Tennyson.

In the story a well to do young man visits a homeless shelter on Christmas Eve and provides a feast for the six people staying there that night - a shipwright, a sailor boy, a lawyer, a watchmaker, a young widow, and a book pedlar. Each of them tells a story.

A version of the introduction and the first and last stories appeared as part of Dickens' collected editions as 'The Seven Poor Travellers,' and a version of the fourth story appeared as 'The Lawyer's Story of the Stolen Letter' in Collins' 1856 short story collection 'After Dark.'

The source texts for the introduction, first story, and last story, and for the fourth story cannot be named as I have corrected typos. The other texts were taken from the Dickens Journals Online site. All texts were checked against the texts in the original journal. I have set off letters as blockquotes, italicised the names of ships and titles of books, and made changes to spelling and hyphenation using oxforddictionaries.com.

Edit: 28 Apr 2015 version 2 corrects lack of indentation in the last two verses of the poem

edit: 3 May 2015 Version 3 corrects an embarrassing error in the 'About this ebook' section

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[AlexBell]

Version 2 correct lack of indentation in the last two verses of the poem.

[AlexBell]

Version 3 corrects an embarrassing error in the 'About this ebook' section.