If Dickens had invoked the term sledge-hammer, then Mitton well knew that this was an undertaking that truly mattered to his client. Accordingly, the attorney filed a bill of complaint on January 9, in which Dickens, as the orator, or plaintiff, stated that while he had invented and written A Christmas Carol, the defendants had nevertheless on the sixth of that month published a “colourable imitation” of one half of his book in the sixteenth issue of a periodical known as Parley’s Illuminated Library. Therefore, Dickens was asking for an injunction to restrain the defendants from “printing, publishing, selling, or otherwise disposing of said publication, or any continuation thereof.”
In his affidavit, Dickens pointed out that “the subject, characters, personages, and incidents” were identical to those in his own novel, “except that the name ‘Fezziwig’ has been altered to ‘Fuzziwig.’” By “colourable,” he continued, he meant that while much of the original language of his own had been altered, it was only to conceal the fact of the theft. In total, Dickens sought injunctions against five separate parties, including a number of booksellers who had planned to sell what Lee and Haddock had published.
Injunctions against all five were granted immediately by the judge with whom the complaint was filed, and four of the parties agreed to destroy or deliver up their stocks of the offending magazines. Only publisher Lee countered (Haddock seems to have disappeared), asking that the injunction be dissolved, and going so far as to argue that “A Christmas Ghost Story,” as written by its author, Henry Hewitt, contained a number of “very considerable improvements and large original additions.”
In Dickens’s book, Lee pointed out, “Tiny Tim is merely described as having sung a song,” whereas Mr. Hewitt had “written a song of sixty lines, such song being admirably adapted to the occasion and replete with pathos and poetry.” Furthermore, Lee, in what might seem an excess of zeal, called attention to the fact that Hewitt had “re-originated” several of Dickens’s works before, including The Old Curiosity Shop and Barnaby Rudge, and there had been no complaint. In fact, Lee suggested, Dickens had probably found his inspiration for A Christmas Carol in Hewitt’s writings, rather than the other way around.
And if Dickens’s jaw might have dropped in astonishment at such a preposterous claim, Hewitt in his own affidavit gives some clue to what his publisher might have meant. Since he had “re-originated” the works of a number of well-known authors for his employers, and had even sent gift copies of these versions—as well as his abridgements of The Old Curiosity Shop and Barnaby Rudge—to Dickens for his enjoyment, it is quite likely that Dickens was introduced to the books of Washington Irving through Hewitt’s work, including Irving’s books celebrating Christmas.
Dickens, Hewitt proposed, was complaining about the theft of material that Dickens had himself stolen from Washington Irving, albeit from versions of Irving “re-originated” by Hewitt. Thus, Hewitt had the gall to say, he “verily believes Dickens to be more indebted to Washington Irving for the materials of his Christmas Carol than the deponent [Hewitt] is to Dickens as regards the Christmas Ghost Story.” Furthermore, Hewitt said, in the tones of a humble fellow just trying to eke out a living (he was probably paid about ten shillings to “pot down” A Christmas Carol), that he was actually doing a great favor for the “humbler classes” who had neither the time nor the money to spend on “larger, or high-priced works.” There is no record describing Dickens’s expression as he read these depositions, but one can well imagine it.
Still, as Mitton would have explained to his client, there were certain things in the statements of Lee and Hewitt that would have to be responded to, outlandish as they might seem. As Supreme Court solicitor E. T. Jaques explained in a turn-of-the-century monograph, Charles Dickens in Chancery, Lee and Hewitt’s allegation of “laches and acquiescence” on Dickens’s part was a perfectly acceptable issue to raise in a court of claims. If indeed Dickens had been aware of the previous “re-originations” and had done nothing to stop them, then the court might legitimately find that he had in fact condoned their piracy through inaction.
Thus Dickens was reduced to making a counterclaim in which he denied having received any inscribed volumes of Parley’s Illustrated Library, including Hewitt’s “re-originations” of Washington Irving, his own work, or that of anyone else. And, furthermore, if any such items had been deposited on his doorstep, he had certainly never read them. It was to be clearly understood, Dickens said, “that he has never sanctioned, or knowingly permitted, anyone to copy or imitate the Carol, The Old Curiosity Shop, or Barnaby Rudge, or any of them.”
The motion by Lee and the absent Haddock to dissolve the injunction against them was heard before Judge Knight Bruce on January 18. If we go by Dickens’s account to Forster, the lead attorney for the petitioners had a difficult time of it: “He [Judge Bruce] had interrupted Anderton [actually Thomas Oliver Anderson] constantly by asking him to produce a passage which was not an expanded or contracted idea from my book. And at every successive passage he cried out: ‘That is Mr. Dickens’s case. Find another!’”
When Anderson and his subcounsel had finally run down, and as Thomas Noon Talfourd, hired by Dickens to argue his side of the matter, was scraping back his chair to begin, Judge Bruce motioned him to stay still. According to Dickens, the judge’s subsequent words warmed the cockles of his heart: “He said that there was not a shadow of doubt upon the matter,” he reported gleefully to Forster. “That there was no authority which could bear a construction in their favour; the piracy going beyond all previous instances. They might mention it again in a week…if they liked, and might have an issue if they pleased, but they would probably consider it unnecessary after that strong expression of his opinion.”
E. T. Jaques, a veteran combatant in the courts of chancery, adds a poignant postscript to his account of the court battle: “It adds a new interest to Westminster Hall when one thinks of the radiant party which turned out of Knight Bruce’s court after judgment had been delivered: Dickens—the eager, beautiful young Dickens of Maclise’s drawings [he was, for all his accomplishments and his travails, only thirty-one]—all aglow with his victory, and bubbling over with thanks to Talfourd and the rest…and Mitton, nearly as excited as the plaintiff himself.”
In this regard, it might be noted that what Dickens saw vindicated that day was not simply his right to control the sale of his intellectual property (for it would be the rare author who regarded his writings solely as “property”). This battle was over far more than pounds and pennies. To the extent that his words—especially the words that were woven up into A Christmas Carol—were an inextricable expression of himself, then Judge Bruce’s decree had also vindicated the core of Dickens’s being. Absolutely, the author would have glowed.
“The pirates,” Dickens wrote to Forster in the aftermath, “are beaten flat. They are bruised, bloody, battered, smashed, squelched, and utterly undone.” Two days later he was ready to state that he might even profit from the whole affair. In a letter to Forster, Dickens suggested that he could actually steal something back from Lee and Hewitt and their cohorts, by simply copying the preposterous claims they had made in their various depositions: “The further affidavits put in by way of extenuation by the printing rascals are rather strong, and give one a pretty correct idea of what the men must be who hold on to the heels of literature.” He told Forster that he was giving serious thought to printing these amazing depositions into his own fiction, “without a word of comment, and sewing them up with Chuzzlewit.”
Furthermore, he was not through with Lee and Haddock, vowing that they would have to account personally for their slander against his good name. He told Forster, “I am determined that I will have an apology for their affidavits. The other men may pay their costs and get out of it, but I will stick to my friend the author.”
He also playfully confessed to Forster his lingering guilt concerning his old friend Thomas Noon Talfourd, who had needlessly gone to so much trouble in the matter:
“Oh! the agony of Talfourd at Knight Bruce’s not hearing him! He had sat up till three in the morning, he says, preparing his speech; and would have done all kinds of things with the affidavits. It certainly was a splendid subject.”
And while the petition of Lee and Haddock to have the injunction against them lifted had been dismissed, he pointed out that final disposition of his case against the pirates was still to come: “Talfourd is strongly disinclined to compromise with the printers on any terms. In which case it would be referred to the master to ascertain what profits had been made by the piracy, and to order the same to be paid to me. But wear and tear of law is my consideration.”
To be sure, weathering the many irritations and costs of a civil suit was difficult enough. Given Dickens’s early experience with the workings of the courts, however, it is hard to believe that he did not have some inkling of the blow that was coming next.
Despite Talfourd’s feelings, and as court records show, Dickens made an effort to settle the matter with Lee and Haddock, stating that “the plaintiff entertained no vindictive feelings towards the defendants, and authorized them to offer that if the defendants would pay the costs and apologise, no further litigation would follow.” However, Lee and Haddock were having none of that. “Mr. Anderson declined to enter into any arrangement,” the record states. “The plaintiff must take his remedy at law.”
In the end, however, the law could offer Dickens no remedy. Faced with Dickens’s pending claim of £1,000 to cover lost sales and legal expenses and its almost certain adjudication in his favor, Lee and Haddock promptly declared bankruptcy. And because they listed no assets (beyond, one supposes, their unsold inventory of A Christmas Ghost Story), the plaintiff was responsible to the court for their costs as well.
Dickens, who was already deep in debt, could scarcely afford more. He wrote to Talfourd, “I have dropped—dropped!—the action and the Chancery Suit against the Bankrupt Pirates,” for there was little hope of recovering anything, and he was not about to incur further expense.
As to the other four booksellers named as defendants, they “have come in and compounded, so that I lose nothing by them,” he said. But, “by Lee and Haddock (the vagabonds) I do lose, of course, all my expenses, costs and charges in those suits.”
He may have stopped the proceedings, but damage to Dickens’s pocketbook was already done. E. T. Jaques estimates the cost of such a case as at least £700, and while Dickens had only had to pursue one suit of the five filed against the booksellers, even the costs of preparing and filing the others—which were necessary to flush out which parties had actually published the offending volume—would have been significant.
It was an illustration of what befalls a man who sues a beggar, but as Jaques points out, at least Dickens was in fact able to salvage some material for future books. From this misadventure almost certainly would spring that wonderful scene in the chancery court of Bleak House, wherein eighteen lawyers, “Eighteen of Mr. Tangle’s learned friends, each armed with a little summary of eighteen hundred sheets, bob up like eighteen hammers in a pianoforte, make eighteen bows, and drop into their eighteen places of obscurity.”
In the end, though, it seems to have been another bitter disappointment for Dickens. Two years later, when the possibility of a similar court action arose, he wrote to Forster: “My feeling…is the feeling common, I suppose, to three-fourths of the reflecting part of the community…and that is, that it is better to suffer a great wrong than to have recourse to the much greater wrong of the law. I shall not easily forget the expense, and anxiety, and horrible injustice of the Carol case, wherein, in asserting the plainest right on earth, I was really treated as if I were the robber instead of the robbed. Given such…I know of nothing that could come, even of a successful action, which would be worth the mental trouble and disturbance it would cost.”
Glum words indeed. But when he was confronted with the first financial statement from his publishers regarding A Christmas Carol, Dickens probably wondered if any good would ever come from his little book.
13.
It is worth remembering that Dickens had hoped to earn as much as £1,000 from his “little Carol,” and in the first heady days of its life, such dreams must have seemed not only attainable but positively modest. As Forster put it, “There poured upon its author daily, all through that Christmas time, letters from complete strangers to him which I remember reading with a wonder of pleasure; not literary at all, but of the simplest domestic kind; of which the general burden was to tell him, amid many confidences, about their homes, how the Carol had come to be read aloud there, and was to be kept upon a little shelf by itself, and was to do them no end of good. Anything more to be said of it will not add much to this.”
And a pleasant story it would be if only good news flowed in the immediate wake of A Christmas Carol’s publication. The truth is, however, that along with all those delightful letters pouring in to thank Dickens for what he had created, there came a missive of an entirely different nature from Chapman and Hall.
“Such a night as I have passed,” Dickens wrote to Forster on the Saturday morning of February 10, after he had scanned the contents of that packet from the publishers. “I really believed I should never get up again, until I had passed through all the horrors of a fever.”
One can only imagine Forster’s reaction to such an opening, of course. What ailment, what terrible misfortune could have befallen his friend?
Dickens had come home the evening before, he told his agent, to find the statement of accounts regarding A Christmas Carol waiting, and this was the cause of his great distress.
It is not difficult to imagine the author, sinking into the chair at his desk, hoping that his first quick glance at the bottom line had been askew, a vision, the result perhaps, as Scrooge might have put it, “of an undigested bit of beef” or a crumb of cheese.
He would have placed the account sheet on the desk before him, adjusted his lamp, perhaps rubbed his face just to get the blood running before he checked again: Calm down now, Dickens, take it as it comes, first things first:
Proceeds from sales, tops on the list. “6,000, less approximately 103 gift, library, and press copies, sold 26 as 25 in cloth for 3s. 6d. each.” (The abbreviation for shillings is s., and the abbreviation for pence is d.) Yes, yes, he would have nodded, such gifts and discounts to booksellers were simply unavoidable, the cost of doing business…and thus the tally of gross proceeds, at £992 5s. Not bad, not bad at all.
There would have been a quick mental check of the math, of course, 6,000 at three and a half per, yes, a thousand pounds give or take. Though perhaps it had been a mistake to insist on that five-shilling cover price, after all.
On to the expenses next, possibly something there, some error, some explanation for the pounding of his heart, the bottomless feeling in his bowels:
“Printing, £74 2s.” Yes, about right.
“Paper, £89 2s.” Might have gotten away with less, but the look of the thing was all-important…
“Drawing and Engravings, £49 18s.” Laws, laws. Mr. Stiff, the hack with the Dickensian name who had designed, illustrated, and engraved A Christmas Ghost Story for that pack of thieves at Parley’s, might have been paid a pound for all his trouble. Then again, Leech’s work was of the first quality, was it not?
There were also charges for two steel plates at £1 4s., the printing plates themselves at £15 17s., and paper for the plates at £7 12s. All in order, it appeared.
But then the charges for coloring—Lord—£120. And the binding of the books, at £180…. Though what a handsome volume it was.
Incidentals and Advertising, at £168 7s. 8d. Down to the penny with their bloody “incidentals” were Chapman and Hall.
And, lastly, “Commission to Publishers,” 15 percent of receipts off the top, and totaling £148 16s.
All those expenses, then, and the total of them, £855 8d. And that final, dreadful, bottom line:
“Balance of accou
nt to Mr. Dickens’s credit: £137 4s.4d.” Egad. No matter how long he stared at it, the number would not change.
Dickens was shattered, and said as much to his agent: “I had set my heart and soul upon a Thousand, clear. What a wonderful thing it is, that such a great success should occasion me such intolerable anxiety and disappointment.”
Nor was Dickens satisfied with that down-to-the-pence accounting supplied by Chapman and Hall. He dashed off an angry note to Mitton, saying that he had not the least doubt that his publishers “have run the expense up, anyhow, purposely to bring me back and disgust me with charges. If you add up the different charges for the plates, you will find that they cost more than I get.”
Still roiling in a bath of anger and disappointment—on the one hand this tremendous accomplishment, and on the other hand next to nothing to show for it—Dickens told Forster, “My year’s bills, unpaid, are so terrific, that all the energy and determination I can possibly exert will be required to clear me.”
He reiterated his determination to go abroad, no matter what his financial condition, “if next June come and find me alive,” then lamented, “Good Heaven, if I had only taken heart a year ago!”
Of course, had he gone abroad the year before, there likely would have been no Carol, but Dickens skipped that point. “I was so utterly knocked down last night,” he told Forster, but his resolve was now steel. “I will be off to some seaside place as soon as a tenant [for his house] offers. I am not afraid, if I reduce my expenses; but if I do not, I shall be ruined past all mortal hope of redemption.”
The largest part of those expenses went toward the upkeep of that house, a thirteen-room manse on Devonshire Terrace, where Dickens had moved his family in 1839 when the money was rolling in from Pickwick and the rest. Located opposite the York Gate entrance to Regents Park (just around the corner from another famed set of literary lodgings, the 221B Baker Street flat of Conan Doyle’s Mr. Holmes), and including spacious gardens, the house had required an eleven-year lease of £800, plus an additional rent of £160 per year. Dickens had upgraded the doors of the home to mahogany, replaced its mantelpieces with Italian marble, and ordered the study soundproofed against the clamor of a household that, with the birth of his son Francis in January, now included five children.
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