Les Standiford

by The Man Who Invented Christmas: Charles Dickens's

  In Irving’s works, excited descriptions of Christmas Eve parties and Christmas dinners abound, most of them in comfortable rural settings where there are still hints of the libidinous tomfoolery that was said to swell the birthrate of every September in England until the Puritans toppled the throne and put their collective foot down: “The mistletoe is still hung up in farmhouses and kitchens at Christmas; and the young men have the privilege of kissing the girls under it, plucking each time a berry from the bush. When the berries are all plucked, the privilege ceases.”

  Irving’s sentiments regarding the joy and fellow-feeling brought about by Christmas could not have fallen on any ears more predisposed to hear them than those of Charles Dickens. In an essay, Dickens once wrote of how the sight of one of those “new German toys,” i.e., a Christmas tree—freshly popularized by Queen Victoria’s Bavarian husband, Prince Albert—surrounded by a crowd of excited children aroused in him the veritable reexperience of his own childhood celebrations of the season. “I begin to consider,” Dickens says, “what do we all remember best upon the branches of the Christmas Tree of our own young Christmas days, by which we climbed to real life.”

  And what he remembers of his own early days is not always pleasurable. Though there were toys enough scattered throughout his earliest recollections, some of them had a demonic effect on the imagination of the youthful Dickens, including a jack-in-the-box that particularly troubled him: “[an] infernal snuff-box, out of which there sprang a demoniacal Counsellor in a black gown, with an obnoxious head of hair, and a red cloth mouth, wide open, who was not to be endured on any terms, but could not be put away either; for he used suddenly, in a highly magnified state, to fly out of Mammoth Snuff-boxes in dreams, when least expected.”

  But in the main, Christmas for the young Dickens was a time that encouraged his imagination to soar, when, as he puts it, the most significant of the “decorations” of the holidays of his youth were the books and legends that he came to read and hear at that time. At Christmas, it seemed to him, “Oh, now all common things become uncommon and enchanted to me. All lamps are wonderful; all rings are talismans.”

  Judging from his recollections, the Christmas season itself accounts in large part for his development as an artist. At this time of year, he says, “Any iron ring let into stone is the entrance to a cave which only waits for the magician, and the little fire, and the necromancy, that will make the earth shake.”

  For Dickens it was a time when the mundane world could be put aside, “school-books shut up; Ovid and Virgil silenced; the Rule of Three, with its cool impertinent inquiries, long disposed of; Terence and Plautus acted no more.”

  This cessation of serious endeavor was necessary, Dickens said, defending his abiding interest in the holiday: “And I do come home at Christmas. We all do, or we all should. We all come home, or ought to come home, for a short holiday—the longer, the better—from the great boarding-school, where we are for ever working at our arithmetical slates, to take, and give a rest.”

  Much of Dickens’s enthusiasm for the season transcended religiosity. He was appreciative of the benevolence associated with the example of the Christian savior and embodied in the star atop the tree: “In every cheerful image and suggestion that the season brings, may the bright star that rested above the poor roof, be the star of all the Christian World.” But it was the tree that enraptured him: “Encircled by the social thoughts of Christmas-time, still let the benignant figure of my childhood stand unchanged!”

  Dickens was surely banking that in A Christmas Carol he could convey his own enthusiasm for the Christmas holidays to his readers; but, oddly enough, the pleasure that he found in the season as an adult may well have derived from the terrible upset that he suffered when his family’s fortunes collapsed. Given what that experience had done to his childhood, it is possible to see his glowing portrait of an idealized, Edenic Christmas as an attempt to compensate for all that he had lost.

  Dickens may have been distressed enough by his father’s imprisonment, but perhaps as devastating was his mother’s suggestion to him when the family was finally released from the poorhouse: in fact, it might be a good thing if he kept up his employment there at Warren’s despite the fact that the rest of them were free, she told young Charles, for the family still needed the money.

  And he did remain there for many months after his family had been released, standing near a window as he worked “for the sake of the light,” and feeling “inexpressible grief and humiliation” when pedestrians gathered to watch. Imagine the day, in fact, when young Dickens glanced out to see his own father—free and easy on a London street corner—staring up along with the other gawkers as he worked.

  In time, Dickens’s perspective on the chief misfortune of his childhood would change. The twelve-year-old boy who might have gone to work for Jonathan Warren in resignation, to help his father struggle out of debt, became the adult who looked back with bitterness upon a kind of betrayal.

  An older Dickens began to ask himself how his father could have ended up in such a position, anyway. Naval pay clerks were not paid like princes, of course, but the fact is that John Dickens was making about £350 in 1820, far more than the £40 or so that a poor wretch like Cratchit made, and certainly enough to live comfortably on. In time, Dickens became aware that his father and mother were poor managers of their money all their adult lives, and, along with his shame at what he had been forced to do, he came to feel resentment toward his parents as well.

  At the time of the writing of A Christmas Carol, in fact, as Forster points out, Dickens was not only having trouble meeting his own financial obligations: “Beyond his own domestic expenses necessarily increasing, there were many, never-satisfied, constantly-recurring claims from family quarters, not the more easily avoidable because unreasonable and unjust.”

  Dickens had, in essence, been paying his parents’ expenses for a number of years, with his father’s stay in the Marshalsea debtors’ prison—if the most distressing—only the first in a string of financial embarrassments. John Dickens had been released from Marshalsea, in fact, only after declaring himself bankrupt, giving up any item in his possession worth more than £20, and agreeing to discharge his debts—which totaled £700—as soon as he was able.

  As it turned out, he inherited £450 from his mother, who died only a few days after his release, but even with this wind-fall, and the annual pension of £146 granted him upon his subsequent discharge from service to the navy, it was more than two years before his debts were finally cleared.

  Despite this, John Dickens was buoyed by his release from prison, and soon embarked upon a second career as a journalist for the British Press. He was able to remove Charles from Warren’s Blacking and send him back to school, and to enroll Charles’s sister Fanny in the Royal Academy of Music. For a time it seemed that the family’s fortunes were on the upswing.

  Disaster struck again, however, when the British Press failed in 1827, and the loss of income forced the family’s eviction from their rented house. Once again, Charles—now fifteen—was removed from school, and Fanny was forced to give up her studies at the academy. Charles would end up in his law clerkship, and Fanny would teach music to a series of her own pupils, helping to keep the family afloat.

  John Dickens continued an erstwhile career as a journalist, squeaking by on that spotty income, the contributions of his children, and his pension from the Admiralty, though the fact that he was sued for debt in 1831, 1834, and 1835 testifies to the difficulties he faced all his adult life.

  In 1834 Charles—then twenty-two, and beginning to establish himself in his own right—moved out of the family home. Not long thereafter his earnings grew to the point where he could, and did, assume chief responsibility for his parents’ support. John Dickens, however, proved able to spend his son’s money as easily as he spent his own, and in 1839 the frustrated Charles hit upon a solution. He rented a cottage for his parents in Devon, far from the London shops and pubs that
seemed to siphon off so much money, and John and his wife, Elizabeth, lived there until 1842. The fact that his parents had no ostensible vices—no gambling, no shoddy investment practices, no particular fondness for jewels—was likely to account for the extraordinary patience that Charles displayed in providing for them. They simply were and always had been the sort of people who earned seven pounds a week and spent eight.

  But by 1842, things were beginning to deteriorate once again. John Dickens had taken to selling scraps of manuscript he’d pilfered from his son’s dustbin, and was offering up the odd document containing Charles’s signature as well. He even wrote Dickens’s publishers and friends, complaining of one financial embarrassment and another, and seeking loans to set himself right. “Contemporaneous events of this nature place me in a difficulty,” went such a letter to Miss Burdett Coutts, “[one] from which, without some anticipatory pecuniary effort, I cannot extricate myself.” If only he could avail himself of twenty-five pounds, he told her, things might be set aright.

  His father’s actions led Dickens to place advertisements in the London papers declaring himself unaccountable for the debts of anyone other than himself. In April of 1842, he wrote to his lawyer, Thomas Mitton, of his exasperation with his father’s irresponsible behavior, saying that he had decided to bring his parents back from Devon so that he might keep a better eye on them.

  Despite that move, the troubles continued. “The thought of him besets me, night and day,” Dickens wrote early in 1843, “and I really do not know what is to be done with him.” By September of that year, with his own outlook bleak, he was reaching the end of his rope. His father had gone so far as to write to Chapman and Hall, asking if the publishers might provide him with a ticket for passage on the Thames riverboat so that he could visit the British Museum. Otherwise, “I must doze away the future,” John Dickens complained, “in my armchair in re-reading the works of Boz.”

  Charles was more than embarrassed by such petty, bald-faced begging. “He, and all of them,” he wrote, “look upon me as something to be plucked and torn to pieces for their advantage.” Such intrusions were one more thing that led the beleaguered author to consider a flight to France or Italy. “My soul sickens at the thought of them,” he wrote. “I am amazed and confounded by the audacity of his ingratitude. Nothing makes me so wretched.”

  Indeed, the ability to immerse himself in the writing of A Christmas Carol had provided a much-needed respite for Dickens’s psyche. It was as if, in writing the book, he could will into existence a world of universal charity, empathy, and family harmony that he had not experienced in his life. The writing had been a tonic to his spirits, all right. Now if only its reception could offer a similar remedy to his pocketbook, he might just stay sane yet.

  11.

  You fear the world too much,” Ebenezer Scrooge’s fiancée tells him when she breaks off their engagement. “All your other hopes have merged into the hope of being beyond the chance of its sordid reproach.”

  More than one commentator has suggested that in this fictional exchange Dickens is also speaking obliquely of himself and his own fears and doubts. Though an outside observer might have thought that a person of Dickens’s accomplishments would have left behind such feelings forever, he was clearly still burdened with quite ordinary concerns. Given his current uncertainties—both artistic and economic—A Christmas Carol could easily be read as an allegory for his own life: a once-successful man receives a final opportunity to redeem himself.

  Certainly, Dickens was well aware of how the deprivations of a childhood, monetary or otherwise, could have profound effects later in life. While the works of William James and Sigmund Freud were still a half-century away, Wordsworth’s lines had been around since 1802:

  So was it when my life began;

  So is it now I am a man;

  So be it when I shall grow old…

  The Child is father of the Man….

  Though Dickens was not himself a miserly person, his correspondence makes it clear that he was more than a little preoccupied with his own monetary affairs and with the desire to earn as much money as possible. He had once asserted to one of his brothers, regarding his potential for greed, that “there is not a successful man in the world who attaches less importance to the possession of money,” but as he was laying out his publication plan for A Christmas Carol, he was also capable of writing, “I hope to get a great deal of money out of the idea.”

  Certainly, one of the principal themes of A Christmas Carol is avarice, and Scrooge’s only hope of salvation is to learn the concept of charity. But if Scrooge’s arc of development from miser to benevolent merrymaker can be viewed as a theoretical reminder from the author to himself, Dickens also had practical concerns on the line. He was placing his hopes for a resuscitation of his own finances upon a cautionary tale that he had written about money.

  If asked, Dickens would likely have shrugged it off. He had never been a rich man, he once wrote, “and never was, and never shall be,” but he had a wife and four children, with a fifth on the way, and on the morning of December 19, he was not thinking so much about getting rich—as he wrote to Thomas Mitton, he was simply hoping to keep his personal enterprise afloat:

  “For on looking into the matter this morning, for the first time these 6 weeks, I find (to my horror) that I have already overdrawn my account. This month’s money I have paid [out]. Next month’s is bespoke. And therefore I must anticipate the Christmas Book, by the sum I mention, which will enable me to keep comfortable.”

  In that same letter, he begged Mitton for a loan of £200 to put off some of his creditors, closing with the gloomy observation that Chapman and Hall were not doing their part to help the book’s prospects: “Can you believe that with the exception of Blackwood, the Carol is not advertized in One of the Magazines?”

  It was a bit of an exaggeration on the author’s part. In truth, A Christmas Carol had been advertised in the November 18 issue of the weekly literary review the Examiner, as well as in the November 25 editions of several other weekly papers, and it was also featured by Chapman and Hall, who—foreshadowing the practice of placing similar advertisements for forthcoming works in an author’s current paperback editions—folded into the December installment of Martin Chuzzlewit a full-page announcement:

  * * *

  A New Christmas Book by Mr. Dickens.

  In December will be published…with Four Coloured Etchings and Woodcuts by Leech A CHRISTMAS CAROL In Prose.

  Being a Ghost Story of Christmas.

  * * *

  The ads in the weeklies and in Blackwood’s Monthly, and the announcement in Chuzzlewit would have been welcome, of course, but Dickens was rightly concerned that the book would not be given wide placement in the holiday issues of the monthly magazines. Still, Chapman and Hall might be forgiven for holding back on advertising a book that was not fully their enterprise. While they would receive a commission on sales, this was Dickens’s project, after all.

  William Bradbury, who printed Dickens’s works for Chapman and Hall, had told Dickens that he, for one, could not believe this omission. “And he [Bradbury] says that nothing but a tremendous push can possibly atone for such fatal negligence,” an anxious Dickens wrote to Mitton.

  Mitton, who had already received a copy of the proofs of A Christmas Carol, came through with the loan and wrote back to buck up the spirits of his friend and client, assuring Dickens that it was excellent work indeed. Dickens responded graciously, “I am extremely glad you feel the Carol,” he told him. “For I knew I meant a good thing.” Still, there was a hint of desperation in the postscript of this letter to his solicitor: “Bradbury predicts Heaven knows what. I am sure it will do me a great deal of good; and I hope it will sell, well.”

  Along with the proofs to Mitton, Dickens is known to have presented pre-publication copies of A Christmas Carol to at least eleven others, including Miss Burdett Coutts, Thomas Carlyle, Forster, Walter Savage Landor, and William Makepeace
Thackeray, whose copy is inscribed, “To W. M. Thackeray from Charles Dickens (Whom he made very happy once, a long way from home).” While the source of the sentiment of this inscription is uncertain, and while Thackeray was known to be somewhat patronizing even when approving of Dickens’s work, the reference is probably to a scathing review Thackeray wrote the year before for Fraser’s Magazine, a condemnation of a bastardized French stage production of Nicholas Nickleby. (“Of the worthy Boz,” Thackeray said, “he has no more connection with the geniuses who invested this drama than a peg has with a gold-laced hat.”) Dickens also sent off a presentation copy to the poet Samuel Rogers. “If you should ever have inclination and patience to read the accompanying little book,” he told Rogers, who was then in his eighties, “I hope you will like the slight fancy it embodies.”

  While Forster, Mitton, and others had written encouraging replies to Dickens regarding A Christmas Carol, it is fortunate for the author that he didn’t know what Rogers thought of it. Rogers’s nephew wrote to an acquaintance that when Dickens’s new book was mentioned, his uncle “said he had been looking at it the night before; the first half hour was so dull it sent him to sleep, and the next hour was so painful that he should be obliged to finish it to get rid of the impression. He blamed Dickens’s style very much, and said there was no wit in putting bad grammar into the mouths of all his characters, and showing their vulgar pronunciation by spelling ‘are’ ‘air’, a horse without an h: none of our best writers do that.”