Les Standiford
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7.
Forster is the principal source for Dickens’s dealings with Chapman and Hall. As an adviser to both the publishing house and the author, Forster fulfilled the role of editor and agent simultaneously, and at a time long before either position had even been formalized in the industry. Despite the delicacy of such a position, both Dickens’s letters and Forster’s reminiscences suggest that he was able to carry off the dual assignment without alienating either side.
8.
The facsimile of Dickens’s manuscript of A Christmas Carol published by the Pierpont Morgan Library offers the next best experience to holding the original copy in one’s hands. Dickens gave his manuscript to his attorney Mitton shortly after he finished it, and Mitton sold it shortly after Dickens’s death. J. Pierpont Morgan acquired the manuscript in London in 1902 and brought it back to his library, where it has remained since, along with the original manuscript of Milton’s Paradise Lost, Thoreau’s journals, and much more. Commentators have noted that Dickens’s handwriting in this manuscript is smaller and more careful when compared to earlier works, with the greater number of corrections also attesting to the care with which the story was produced.
Among the many pleasures of Michael Patrick Hearn’s exhaustive companion, The Annotated Christmas Carol, is his description of Dickens’s relationship with illustrator Leech and the impact of the latter’s work on the finished book. The quantity and breadth of Hearn’s research on Dickens’s slender volume constitute the most significant work on the novel to date.
9.
A version of “The Story of the Goblins Who Stole a Sexton” is included, along with an adroit introduction to several other Dickens pieces, in Michael Slater, ed., A Christmas Carol and Other Christmas Writings.
The summary of A Christmas Carol is based upon Ackroyd’s edition of The Christmas Books, vol. 1 (London: Mandarin, 1991) as well as the Facsimile Edition from the Morgan Library (1993).
10.
History of Christmas: Everything that a reader might wish to know about the historical antecedents of the Christmas holiday is to be found in University of Massachusetts historian Nissenbaum’s The Battle for Christmas.
An interesting discussion of Puritan influences on holiday celebration in the early United States is found in Leigh Eric Schmidt, Consumer Rites: The Buying and Selling of American Holidays (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1995).
The definitive edition of Pepys’s diary is an eleven-volume set compiled by Robert Latham and William Matthews (London: Bell & Hyman, 1970–83). Highlights are collected by Latham in The Diary of Samuel Pepys: A Selection (New York: Penguin, 2003).
The reconstruction of the mummers’ play is by Roderick Marshall, quoted by noted actor Simon Callow in Dickens’ Christmas.
Besides Callow’s lively account, other works linking Dickens and his literary forebears with the season include The Lives and Times of Ebenezer Scrooge by Paul Davis, and Christmas and Charles Dickens by David Parker.
Dickens’s essay “A Christmas Tree” is included in the collection compiled by Michael Slater, mentioned earlier.
The discussion of the financial pressures that impinged on Dickens is extrapolated primarily from the letters of the author and the commentary of Forster.
11.
The lines are from Wordsworth’s “My Heart Leaps Up,” published in 1807, reprinted in The Norton Anthology of English Literature, vol. 2 (New York: Norton, 1968).
Hearn (The Annotated Christmas Carol) provides an exhaustive summary of the contemporary press and magazine response at the time of publication and after.
Mrs. Carlyle’s letter of December 28, 1844, is to her cousin Jeannie Welsh, and is found in The Collected Letters of Thomas and Jane Welsh Carlyle, vol. 17 (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1970–93).
12.
By way of contrast to the five-shilling ($1.25) cover price of the novel, a first edition of A Christmas Carol today might fetch anywhere from $10,000 to $40,000, depending upon its condition.
For an informative and provocative commentary on the history of copyright law, see Harry Hillman Chartrand, “Copyright C.P.U.: Creators, Proprietors & Users,” in Journal of Arts Management, Law & Society 30, no. 3 (Fall 2000).
The story of Dickens’s ill-fated suit against Lee & Haddock is told in engaging style by E. T. Jaques, “Solicitor of the Supreme Court,” in his Charles Dickens in Chancery.
Ancillary to Jaques’s account is an annotated time line of the case by S. J. Rust in “At the Dickens House: Legal Documents Relating to the Piracy of A Christmas Carol,” The Dickensian, 41–44. Rust appends a note from Talfourd to Mitton lamenting the outcome of their victory: “I hope…that some means may be found to deliver our friend [Dickens] from the penalty which will await on success—the payment of his own cost of an action against Bankrupt Robbers.”
13.
The balance sheet from Chapman and Hall that Dickens so woefully pored over is extrapolated from Patten, Charles Dickens and His Publishers.
The Letters and Forster’s Life provide the basis for the state of Dickens’s mind in the aftermath of the publication of A Christmas Carol.
14.
The definitive account of the history of the myriad adaptations of Dickens is found in Philip Bolton, Dickens Dramatized.
Also of note in this regard is Fred Guida, A Christmas Carol and Its Adaptations.
John Irving’s observations on Dickens’s modus operandi are more fully drawn in his essay “The King of the Novel” (in Trying to Save Peggy Sneed, 1996).
15.
For the discussion of the impact of Christmas on Dickens and of Dickens’s impact on the holiday, the author is indebted to a number of sources previously named. An incisive and accurate treatment of the subject is found in Christine Lalumia, “Scrooge and Albert: Christmas in the 1840s.”
Without Michelle Persell’s “Dickensian Disciple,” this writer may well have gone a lifetime without an appreciation of the works of Benjamin Farjeon, Jewish writer of Christmas.
16.
Davis’s is a most readable study of the influence of A Christmas Carol on contemporary culture: The Lives and Times of Ebenezer Scrooge (Yale University Press, 1990).
In his introduction to the first volume of The Christmas Books, Ackroyd points out that while Dickens intended to profit from these seasonable fables, he was anything but cynical about the enterprise. In fact, for the social themes embedded in The Chimes he suffered vituperative criticism from some who found him a revolutionary in a romantic’s clothing, too fond of the “felon” and the “rick-burner.”
Patten (1978) is the source of the information regarding the unsold copies of The Haunted Mansion.
Over time, Dickens’s Christmas books not only moved away from any reference to the season but also became less tied to specific social issues and more concerned with the general nature of man. As he put it in his Preface to the first Cheap Edition published in 1852, his purpose in the stories was less “great elaboration of detail” (which he believed could not be achieved within such narrow confines) than it was the construction of “a whimsical kind of masque which the good humor of the season justified, to awaken some loving and forbearing thoughts, never out of season in a Christian land.”
17.
In his Dickens and Popular Entertainment, Paul Schlicke quotes one of Dickens’s advisers who estimates that the author earned as much as £45,000 from the readings he gave between April of 1858 and his death in 1870. And Forster suggests that in those later years, it was by his readings as much as by his books that the world came to know him. As any number of commentators have pointed out, however, he threw his energies into the performances to such a degree that they as much as anything can be said to have killed him.
Dickens began his readings by assuring audiences that it was quite all right to “give vent to any feeling of emotion.” Cheers or sobs would not disturb him in the slightest, he said. For the typical two-hour performance, everyone sh
ould “make themselves as much as possible like a group of friends, listening to a tale told by a winter fire.” It is testament, says Schlicke, that Dickens saw himself first and foremost as a popular entertainer.
Jane Smiley’s observations on the pleasure of reading one’s works aloud are contained within her fine short study, Charles Dickens. Smiley’s work is particularly valuable for the insight she brings as an accomplished novelist in her own right. Of Dickens’s later years she says, “A novelist’s late, eccentric life is analogous to his late eccentric novels. His ties to the mainstream have loosened. His primary job is no longer to be representative, as when he was a young writer looking for a publisher and an audience; it is to be still interesting.”
Perhaps the most intriguing view of Dickens’s later life comes though the lens of Claire Tomalin in her study of Ellen Ternan and her relationship with the author, The Invisible Woman. Tomalin (1991) is the source for the alternative version of Dickens’s passing.
18.
The anecdote of the costermonger’s lament on Dickens’s death is a favorite of biographers. Watts-Dunton, a contemporary of Tennyson and Swinburne, opened his 1898 poem with a reference to the legend, then closed with a reassurance to Londoners: “City he loved, take courage…Dickens returns on Christmas Day.” (“Dickens Returns on Christmas Day,” in The Coming of Love and Other Poems [London and New York: Lane, 1898].)
Robert Louis Stevenson’s comments on Dickens’s Christmas books are from an undated letter written at Bournemouth, where he was living while working on Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde (1886). According to a New York Times story of February 5, 1922 (“Stevenson Cried Over Dickens Tale”), the seven-page letter was purchased at auction by William Randolph Hearst, for $1,150. Sold at the same auction was a stuffed raven named Grip that had once belonged to Dickens, for $210.
As proof that in some quarters no good impulse or deed goes uncriticized, Simon Callow passes along accounts of mass feedings of the poor conducted by the Salvation Army in late-nineteenth-century New York, where as many as 25,000 received Christmas dinner. The Saturday Evening Post found such charity offensive and laid the blame on Dickens, for, in the opinion of the editors, “A great Christmas dinner, in the minds of many, cancels the charity obligations of the entire year.” Callow also quotes Lord Chesterton in response to suggestions that the practice be stopped: “Doubtless he [Dickens] would have regarded the charity as folly, but he would also have regarded the forcible removal of it as theft.”
SELECTED BIBLIOGRAPHY
Primary sources
Dickens, Charles. A Christmas Carol: A Facsimile Edition of the Autograph Manuscript in the Pierpont Morgan Library. New Haven: Pierpont Morgan Library/Yale University Press, 1993.
Fielding, K. J. The Speeches of Charles Dickens. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1960.
House, Madeline, and Graham Storey. The Letters of Charles Dickens, Pilgrim Edition. 12 vols. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1965–2002.
Other editions
Dickens, Charles. American Notes for General Circulation. New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1985.
______. The Christmas Books, vol. 1, edited by Peter Ackroyd. London: Mandarin, 1991.
______. A Christmas Carol and Other Christmas Writings, edited by Michael Slater. New York: Penguin, 2002.
______. Martin Chuzzlewit. New York: Penguin, 1986.
Biographies
Of the many biographies of Dickens’s life, three distinguish themselves: Forster’s for being the first and coming from a friend and lifelong associate; Ackroyd’s for its comprehensiveness; and Smiley’s for its incisiveness.
Ackroyd, Peter. Dickens. New York: HarperCollins, 1990.
Forster, John. The Life of Charles Dickens. 3 vols. London: Chapman and Hall, 1872–74.
Smiley, Jane. Charles Dickens. New York: Viking, 2002.
Tomalin, Claire. The Invisible Woman: The Story of Nelly Ternan and Charles Dickens. New York: Knopf, 1991.
Encyclopedia (sketches of all things pertaining to Dickens, A–Z)
Oxford Reader’s Companion to Dickens, edited by Paul Schlicke. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1999.
Dickens adaptations and editions
Bolton, Philip H. Dickens Dramatized. Boston: G. K. Hall, 1987.
Feather, John. A History of British Publishing. New York: Routledge, 1991.
Patten, Robert C. Charles Dickens and His Publishers. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1978.
Dickens and A Christmas Carol and the Christmas season
Callow, Simon. Dickens’ Christmas: A Victorian Celebration. New York: Abrams, 2003.
Davis, Paul. The Lives and Times of Ebenezer Scrooge. New Haven: Yale University Press, 1990.
Guida, Fred. A Christmas Carol and Its Adaptations. Jefferson, NC: McFarland, 1999.
Hearn, Michael Patrick. The Annotated Christmas Carol. New York: W. W. Norton, 2004.
Nissenbaum, Stephen. The Battle for Christmas. New York: Knopf, 1997.
Parker, David. Christmas and Charles Dickens. New York: AMS, 2005.
And other valuable sources
Baker, William, and Kenneth Womack, eds. A Companion to the Victorian Novel. Westport, CT: Greenwood Press, 2002.
The Dickensian. Journal of the Dickens Fellowship. 1902–present.
Fielding, K. J. Charles Dickens: A Critical Introduction. London: Longmans, Green, 1958.
Glavin, John. After Dickens: Reading, Adaptation, and Performance. Cambridge, England: Cambridge University Press, 1999.
Hutton, Ronald. Stations of the Sun: A History of the Ritual Year in Britain. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1996.
Irving, John. “The King of the Novel,” in Trying to Save Peggy Sneed. New York: Little Brown/Arcade, 1996.
Jaques, E. T. Charles Dickens in Chancery. London: Longmans, Green, 1914.
Knight, Charles. The Popular History of England, vol. 8: From the Peace with the United States, 1815, to the Final Extinction of the Corn-Laws, 1849. London: Warne, 1890.
Lalumia, Christine. “Scrooge and Albert: Christmas in the 1840s.” History Today, December 2001: 23 et seq.
Persell, Michelle. “Dickensian Disciple: Anglo-Jewish Identity in the Christmas Tales of Benjamin Farjeon.” Philological Quarterly 73.4 (1994): 451 et seq.
Phillips, Walter C. Dickens, Reade and Collins: Sensation Novelists. New York: Columbia University Press, 1919.
Rogers, Byron. “The Man Who Invented Christmas.” Sunday Telegraph (London), December 18, 1988: 16.
Schlicke, Paul. Dickens and Popular Entertainment. London: Unwin Hyman, 1988.
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
Very special thanks are due to several individuals who helped make this book possible: If I could not find what I was looking for, Addis Beesting, Educational Reference Librarian at Florida International University, could, and in a trice; James W. Hall, my ever-patient friend and literary compass, encouraged me and—as usual—helped me stay on track; bless Rachel Klayman, my editor, for carrying the flag for this book at Crown, and Lucinda Bartley, also at Crown, for her close eye and many helpful suggestions, and Kim Witherspoon, at Inkwell Management, for helping me collect my thoughts and battle plan. And, as always, many thanks to my wife, Kimberly, for her support and understanding—these days I am coming to dinner when it is called.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
LES STANDIFORD is the author of ten novels, as well as the critically acclaimed Last Train to Paradise, Meet You in Hell, and Washington Burning. Recipient of the Frank O’Connor Award for Short Fiction, he is director of the Creative Writing Program at Florida International University in Miami, where he lives with his wife and three children. Visit his website at www.les-standiford.com.
OTHER NONFICTION BY LES STANDIFORD
WASHINGTON BURNING
How a Frenchman’s Vision for Our Nation’s Capital
Survived Congress, the Founding Fathers, and the Invading British Army
MEET YOU IN HELL
Andrew Carnegie, Henry Clay Frick, and the Bitter
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Partnership That Transformed America
LAST TRAIN TO PARADISE
Henry Flagler and the Spectacular Rise and Fall of the Railroad That Crossed an Ocean
MIAMI
City of Dreams
Copyright © 2008 by Les Standiford
All rights reserved.
Published in the United States by Crown Publishers, an imprint of the Crown Publishing Group, a division of Random House, Inc., New York.
www.crownpublishing.com
CROWN and the Crown colophon are registered trademarks of Random House, Inc.
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Standiford, Les.
The man who invented Christmas : how Charles Dickens’s A Christmas Carol rescued his career and revived our holiday spirits / Les Standiford.—1st ed.
Includes bibliographical references.
1. Dickens, Charles, 1812–1870. Christmas carol. 2. Christmas stories, English—History and criticism. 3. Christmas—England—History—19th century. 4. Christmas in literature. I. Title.
PR4572.C69S73 2008
823'.8—dc22 2008014978
eISBN: 978-0-307-44973-3
v3.0