Short Fiction Various Authors: The Wreck of the Golden Mary. v1, 3 May 2015

[AlexBell]

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. Dickens and Wilkie Collins provided the linking text between the chapters.

A list of the collaborations between Charles Dickens and Wilkie Collins is available on the Victorian Web site, and the text of every copy of Household Words and All the Year Round is available on the Dickens Journals Online site.

The Wreck of the Golden Mary was the Household Words Extra Christmas Number for 1856, and was co-authored by Charles Dickens and Wilkie Collins, already established authors; Percy Hetherington Fitzgerald, a biographer and music critic; Holmes Lee (pen name of Harriet Parr), who wrote many novels but is little read today; Adelaide Anne Procter, Queen Victoria's favourite poet; and Reverend James White, a friend of Dickens.

The story is 'the captain's account of the loss of the ship, and the mate's account of the great deliverance of her people in an open boat at sea,' with five stories told by the sailors to keep up their spirits. The Extra Christmas Number is said to have sold 100,000 copies. It was published in book form in 1898 as The Wreck of the Golden Mary by Charles Dickens and Others and is still in print.

The source was the plain text version available on the Dickens Journal Online site, checked against the images of the original journal. I have silently corrected typos, italicised the names of ships and titles of books, and made changes to spelling and hyphenation using oxforddictionaries.com.

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