Dickens and Christmas

by Lucinda Hawksley

  In Georgian England, when Dickens was a child, holly, ivy, pine needles and other greenery were used to decorate homes for Christmas, just as they had been used in pagan times. The Christian church had appropriated many earlier traditions and declared the plants to have religious significance, such as holly being symbolic of Christ’s crown of thorns. If a family could afford it, large swags of greenery would be used to decorate rooms, staircases and windows and to frame paintings and mirrors. Many households also displayed a wreath, but these were usually made of simple greenery; it was not yet the fashion to have the more elaborate decorations which would become popular in Victorian Britain. Mistletoe had long been a popular part of Christmas decorations and Regency cartoons depict couples underneath a ‘kissing bunch’ of mistletoe – although in very religious households, mistletoe was considered scandalous and banned. In Christmas Festivities, the first Christmas story written by Dickens, in 1835, the grandfather tells his grandchildren that he kissed their grandmother under mistletoe when he was still a boy. He also included a mistletoe scene in The Pickwick Papers (1837):

  ‘They all three repaired to the large kitchen, in which the family were by this time assembled, according to annual custom on Christmas Eve... From the centre of the ceiling of this kitchen, old Wardle had just suspended, with his own hands, a huge branch of mistletoe, and this same branch of mistletoe instantaneously gave rise to a scene of general and most delightful struggling and confusion; in the midst of which, Mr. Pickwick, with a gallantry that would have done honour to a descendant of Lady Tollimglower herself, took the old lady by the hand, led her beneath the mystic branch, and saluted her in all courtesy and decorum.’

  Another Christmas tradition which the young Dickens children would have enjoyed, was seeing a baker’s window displaying an elaborate Twelfth Cake. If they had been visiting London, they might have been taken to see the windows at Gunter’s on Berkeley Square. Gunter’s was known for its Italianborn confectioner William Jarrin, who became famed for his Twelfth Cakes (as well as for his ice cream).

  In 1820, Queen Charlotte was presented with a ‘very large and exceedingly rich’ twelfth cake, created to look like a crown, by a Mr G. Button of Fleet Street. In The Times, Mr Button described his gift as:

  ‘most beautifully and tastefully ornamented, with Justice standing on a rock, trampling venomous reptiles under her feet, in allusion to her Majesty’s late sufferings and trial. On each side of the rock were horns of plenty, richly overflowing with great abundance of delicious fruits.’

  Throughout the nineteenth century, the fashion for producing highly decorated cakes to celebrate Twelfth Night became increasingly popular and crowds would gather outside bakers’ windows to see the latest creations, all designed to show off a confectioner’s skill. Cakes would be laden with ropes and swags of sugar, almonds and marzipan decorations. The most elaborate of cakes would be layered – similarly to a wedding cake – with each layer being covered with symbols, animals or figures. Descriptions survive of cakes being decorated with troupes of dancers in beautiful costumes, wild animals such as tigers, bears or lions, domestic scenes or with figures from storybooks and the theatre, including characters from fairytales and Shakespeare, or the always popular Harlequin and Columbine.

  ‘The celebration of Twelfth-Day with the costly and elegant Twelfthcake has much declined within the last half-century. Formerly, in London, the confectioners’ shops on this day were entirely filled with Twelfth-cakes, ranging in price from several guineas to a few shillings; the shops were tastefully illuminated, and decorated with artistic models, transparencies, &c. We remember to have seen a huge Twelfth-cake in the form of a fortress, with sentinels and flags; the cake being so large as to fill two ovens in baking.

  ‘One of the most celebrated and attractive displays was that of Birch, the confectioner, No. 15, Cornhill, probably the oldest shop of its class in the metropolis. The business was established in the reign of King George I.’

  from Chambers, Robert, The Book of Days, a Miscellany of Popular Antiquities, 1862

  In the 1820s and 1830s, the author William Hone published a weekly pamphlet entitled, The Every-day Book, or a Guide to the Year. These pamphlets were designed to be bound together at the end of the year to form an almanac. His illustrator was George Cruikshank, who would later become one of Dickens’s illustrators and friends. In his Every-day Book for 1838, William Hone left a description of how London confectioners were presenting their twelfth cakes in the first years of the Victorian era:

  ‘… countless cakes of all prices and dimensions ... stand in rows and piles on the counters and sideboards and in the windows ... one, enormously superior to the rest in size, is the chief object of all curiosity; and all are decorated with all imaginable images of things animate and inanimate. Stars, castles, kings, cottages, dragons, trees, fish, palaces, cats, dogs, churches, lions, milkmaids, knights, serpents, and innumerable other forms in snow-white confectionary, painted with variegated colours.’

  This heralded a time when ostentatious decoration, rather than the taste of the cake itself, had started to become the most important element of a fashionable Twelfth Night party. In 1853, Dickens published a critical article about this fashion in his magazine Household Words. The article, entitled ‘Slang’, was written by George Augustus Sala, a prolific journalist, and artist, who had known Dickens since childhood; his mother had been an actress who starred in two of Dickens’s plays. It was his work for Dickens’s Household Words that helped Sala make his name as a journalist, and he went on to work for the Daily Telegraph and the Illustrated London News. He became renowned as a foreign correspondent, including writing about the American Civil War. In his 1853 article for Dickens, Sala complained about the fad for enormous cakes and the hyperbolic language that surrounded the confectioners’ advertisements:

  ‘… touching the use of the terms, ‘monster,’ ‘mammoth,’ ‘leviathan,’ how very trying have those misplaced words become! … every reunion of four-and-twenty fiddlers in a row was dubbed a monster concert; a loaf made with a double allowance of dough was a monster loaf; every confectioner’s new year’s raffle was a monster twelfth cake.’

  A Recipe for Twelfth Cake

  Take seven pounds of flour, make a cavity in the centre, set a sponge with a gill and a half of yeast and a little warm milk; then put round it one pound of fresh butter broke into small lumps, one pound and a quarter of sifted sugar, four pounds and a half of currants washed and picked, half an ounce of sifted cinnamon, a quarter of an ounce of pounded cloves, mace, and nutmeg mixed, sliced candied orange or lemon peel and citron.

  When the sponge is risen, mix all the ingredients together with a little warm milk; let the hoops be well papered and buttered, then fill them with the mixture and bake them, and when nearly cold ice them over with sugar prepared for that purpose as per receipt; or they may be plain.

  John Mollard, The Art of Cookery, 1803

  Hone’s guide for 1826 included help on hosting a decorous Twelfth Night party, notably without any elements of the ‘misrule’ for which the festival was renowned. In the Twelfth Night cards sold by bakers, popular characters included such names as Toby Tipple, Mrs Prittle-Prattle, Miss Frolic and Lord Flirtaway. Hone was not a fan of shop-bought character cards, complaining, ‘Twelfth-night characters sold by the pastrycooks, are either commonplace or gross – when genteel they are inane; when humorous, they are vulgar.’ His instructions for a home-made Twelfth Night party were:

  ‘First, buy your cake. Then, before your visitors arrive, buy your characters, each of which should have a pleasant verse beneath. Next look at your invitation list, and count the number of ladies you expect; and afterwards the number of gentlemen. Then, take as many female characters as you have invited ladies; fold them up, exactly of the same size, and number each on the back; taking care to make the King No. 1, and the Queen No. 2. The prepare and number the gentleman’s characters.

  “Cause tea and coffee to be handed to
your visitors as they drop in. When all are assembled and tea over, put as many ladies’ characters in a reticule as there are ladies present; next put the gentlemen’s characters in a hat. Then call on a gentleman to carry the reticule to the ladies as they sit, from which each lady is to draw one ticket, and to preserve it unopened. Select a lady to bear the hat to the gentlemen for the same purpose. There will be one ticket left in the reticule, and another in the hat, which the lady and gentleman who carried each is to interchange, as having fallen to each other.

  ‘Next, arrange your visitors according to their numbers; the King No. 1, the Queen No. 2, and so on. The king is then to recite the verse on his ticket; then the queen the verse on hers; and so the characters are to proceed in numerical order. This done, let the cake and refreshments go round, and hey! for merriment!’

  In his Book of Days, published in 1862, author Robert Chambers looked back on the Twelfth Night celebrations of his youth:

  ‘Twelfth Night cards represented ministers, maids of honour, and other attendants of a court, and the characters were to be supported throughout the night.... They were sold in small packets to pastrycooks, and led the way to a custom which annually grew to an extensive trade.’

  Throughout the nineteenth century, the celebrating of Twelfth Night changed and by the end of the century the holiday had dwindled in importance. It was always very popular in the Dickens household, however, and Charles Dickens insisted on it being celebrated in style. In 1892, his daughter Mamie was quoted in the Ladies Home Journal:

  ‘My father was ... in his element at the Twelfth Night parties ... He would have something droll to say to every one, and under his attentions the shyest child would brighten and become merry. No one was overlooked or forgotten by him; like the young Cratchits, he was ‘ubiquitous.’ Supper was followed by songs and recitations from the various members of the company, my father acting always as master of ceremonies, and calling upon first one child, then another for his or her contribution to the festivity. I can see now the anxious faces turned toward the beaming, laughing eyes of their host. How attentively he would listen, with his head thrown slightly back, and a little to one side, a happy smile on his lips. O, those merry, happy times, never to be forgotten by any of his own children, or by any of their guests. Those merry, happy times!’

  By the end of Dickens’s life, Twelfth Night had become a shadow of its former self, while Christmas had become increasingly elaborate. By the end of the century, the style of celebrating Christmas had evolved into something very different from that which would have been recognised by Dickens’s ancestors – and yet many of these changes were due to Charles Dickens himself.

  First, all the wild heads of the parish, conventing together, chuse them a grand captain (of mischief), whom they ennoble with the title of my Lord of Misrule, and him they crown with great solemnity, and adopt for their king. This king annointed chuseth for him twenty, forty, three score, or a hundred lusty guts, like to himself, to wait upon his lordly majesty, and to guard his noble person. Then, every one of these his men he investeth with his liveries of green, yellow, or some other wanton colour. And as though that were not gaudy enough, they bedeck themselves with scarfs, ribbons and laces, hanged all over with gold rings, precious stones, and other jewels; this done, they ties about either leg twenty or forty bells, with rich handkerchiefs in their hands, and sometimes laid across over their shoulders and necks, borrowed for the most part of their party of pretty Mopsies and loving Bessies for bussing them in the dark.

  From ‘Bringing in Christmas’, the Illustrated London News, 20 December 1845

  CHAPTER THREE

  ‘He’s Behind You!’ – The Theatre at Christmas

  ‘The floor was swept and watered, the lamps were trimmed, fuel was heaped upon the fire; and the warehouse was as snug, and warm, and dry, and bright a ball-room, as you would desire to see upon a winter’s night.

  ‘In came a fiddler with a music-book, and went up to the lofty desk, and made an orchestra of it, and tuned like fifty stomach-aches. In came Mrs Fezziwig, one vast substantial smile. In came the three Miss Fezziwigs, beaming and lovable. In came the six young followers whose hearts they broke.... There were more dances, and there were forfeits, and more dances, and there was cake, and there was negus, and there was a great piece of Cold Roast, and there was a great piece of Cold Boiled, and there were mince-pies, and plenty of beer. But the great effect of the evening came after the Roast and Boiled, when the fiddler (an artful dog, mind. The sort of man who knew his business better than you or I could have told it him.) struck up ‘Sir Roger de Coverley.’ Then old Fezziwig stood out to dance with Mrs Fezziwig. Top couple, too; with a good stiff piece of work cut out for them; three or four and twenty pair of partners; people who were not to be trifled with; people who would dance, and had no notion of walking.

  ‘But if they had been twice as many – ah, four times – old Fezziwig would have been a match for them, and so would Mrs Fezziwig. As to her, she was worthy to be his partner in every sense of the term. If that’s not high praise, tell me higher, and I’ll use it. A positive light appeared to issue from Fezziwig’s calves. They shone in every part of the dance like moons. You couldn’t have predicted, at any given time, what would have become of them next. And when old Fezziwig and Mrs Fezziwig had gone all through the dance; advance and retire, both hands to your partner, bow and curtsey, corkscrew, thread-the-needle, and back again to your place; Fezziwig cut — cut so deftly, that he appeared to wink with his legs, and came upon his feet again without a stagger.

  ‘When the clock struck eleven, this domestic ball broke up. Mr and Mrs Fezziwig took their stations, one on either side of the door, and shaking hands with every person individually as he or she went out, wished him or her a Merry Christmas.’

  Charles Dickens, A Christmas Carol, 1843

  Dickens left very few reminiscences of his own childhood Christmases, although he made a great effort to ensure his own children’s Christmases were memorable. Much of what we know about his early life comes from a biography written by his friend John Forster. The two men met in 1836, at a party given by the novelist William Harrison Ainsworth, and became friends instantly. Forster had intended to become a lawyer, but gave up his studies in order to be “a man of letters”. He wrote articles and poetry and made a living as a literary critic, but today, he is best remembered as Dickens’s first biographer. When Forster published The Life of Charles Dickens, in 18721874, he did so with the aid of his friend’s papers and unfinished autobiography, which Forster had been bequeathed. It is notable that Christmas is barely mentioned in the first chapters of the biography of the man whose name was to become synonymous with the season. One memory of an early Christmas appeared in Household Words, in December 1850. In the article ‘A Christmas Tree’, however, his overwhelming memory is a sense of fear, as he recalls toys he found sinister and confusing:

  ‘I look into my youngest Christmas recollections! All toys at first, I find. Up yonder, among the green holly and red berries, is the Tumbler with his hands in his pockets, who wouldn’t lie down, but whenever he was put upon the floor, persisted in rolling his fat body about, until he rolled himself still, and brought those lobster eyes of his to bear upon me—when I affected to laugh very much, but in my heart of hearts was extremely doubtful of him. Close beside him is that 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.... The cardboard lady in a blue-silk skirt, who was stood up against the candlestick to dance, and whom I see on the same branch, was milder, and was beautiful; but I can’t say as much for the larger cardboard man, who used to be hung against the wall and pulled by a string; there was a sinister expression in that nose of his; and when he got his legs round his neck (which he very often did), he was ghastly, and not a creature to be alone with.

  ‘When did that dreadful
Mask first look at me? Who put it on, and why was I so frightened that the sight of it is an era in my life?... Nothing reconciled me to it.... Nor was it any satisfaction to be shown the Mask, and see that it was made of paper, or to have it locked up and be assured that no one wore it. The mere recollection of that fixed face, the mere knowledge of its existence anywhere, was sufficient to awake me in the night all perspiration and horror, with, “O I know it’s coming! O the mask!”.’

  Another of Dickens’s childhood memories was published in Household Words on I January 1859, of being young enough to need to be carried downstairs to look in upon what he remembered as a rather cheerless New Year party.

  ‘I have a vivid remembrance of the sensation of being carried downstairs in a woman’s arms, and holding tight to her … a New Year’s Party revealed itself to me, as a very long row of ladies and gentlemen sitting against a wall, all drinking at once out of little glass cups with handles, like custard-cups. What can this Party have been! I am afraid it must have been a dull one, but I know it came off … There was no speech-making, no quick movement and change of action, no demonstration of any kind. They were all sitting in a long row against the wall – very like my first idea of the good people in Heaven, as I derived it from a wretched picture in a Prayer-book – and they had all their heads a little thrown back, and were all drinking at once.’

  In the same article, he recalled another new year at which he and his little sister (presumably Letitia) had somehow been made to keep a strange secret:

  ‘On what other early New Year’s Day can I possibly have been an innocent accomplice in the secreting – in the coal cellar too – of a man with a wooden leg! … I clearly remember that we stealthily conducted the man with the wooden leg – whom we knew intimately – into the coal cellar, and that, in getting him over the coals to hide him behind some partition there was beyond, his wooden leg bored itself in among the small coals, and his hat flew off, and he fell backward and lay prone: a spectacle of helplessness … I have not the least idea who ‘we’ were, except that I had a little sister for another innocent accomplice, and that there must have been a servant girl for principal: neither do I know whether the man with the wooden leg robbed the house, before or afterwards, or otherwise nefariously distinguished himself.... But I know that some awful reason compelled us to hush it all up, and that we ‘never told’. For many years, I had this association with a New Year’s Day entirely to myself, until at last, the anniversary being come round again, I said to the little sister, as she and I sat by chance among our children, ‘Do you remember the New Year’s Day of the man with the wooden leg?’ Whereupon, a thick black curtain which had overhung him from her infancy went up, and she saw just this much of the man, and not a jot more.’