Dickens and Christmas

by Lucinda Hawksley

  As a child, Charles Dickens’s burning ambition was to become an actor. He had fond memories of being taken to the theatre as a child, and as soon as he started his first adult job (at the age of fifteen), he used any spare money to buy cheap theatre tickets. He wanted to write plays and star in them and he had dreams of travelling around the country as an actor-manager, following in the footsteps of one of his heroes, William Shakespeare. This was partly inspired by childhood Christmases, as the Georgian Christmas season was not complete without a visit to the pantomime. In the year of Dickens’ birth, The London Courier and Gazette named the two top pantomimes for that season as Harlequin and the Red Dwarf, or the Adamant Rock at the Covent Garden Theatre; and Harlequin and Humpo by Mr T. Dibdin, at the Drury Lane Theatre. Harlequin and the Red Dwarf, or the Adamant Rock was based on the tales from Arabian Nights, one of his favourite books.

  References to themes or stories from The Arabian Nights can be found throughout Dickens’s writing. As such, he may well have been enthralled by Harlequin and the Red Dwarf, or the Adamant Rock, had he been old enough to attend, although this particular performance, from 1812, received an unfavourable review from one indignant critic, angry because the live staghunting scene, was, in his view, disappointing:

  ‘His [the stag’s] performance of the forest scene totally failed, and he disappointed the spectators fully as much as his great forerunner, the elephant, last season. The dogs (said to belong to a certain Baronet and a new County Member) were entirely at fault, and walked about the stage with the most perfect unconcern. We hope that the Managers will take warning from the repeated marks of disapprobation which this exhibition received on Saturday night, and abandon the hideous absurdity of introducing brutes on the stage for whom nature has done nothing even to render them diverting in such a situation.’

  The theatre appears frequently in Charles Dickens’s novels. Those childhood trips to the pantomime probably inspired him to write in Nicholas Nickleby (1839):

  ‘Miss Snevellicci’s papa, who had been in the profession ever since he had first played the ten-year-old imps in the Christmas pantomimes; who could sing a little, dance a little, fence a little, act a little, and do everything a little, but not much; who had been sometimes in the ballet, and sometimes in the chorus, at every theatre in London; who was always selected in virtue of his figure to play the military visitors and the speechless noblemen; who always wore a smart dress, and came on arm-in-arm with a smart lady in short petticoats, – and always did it too with such an air that people in the pit had been several times known to cry out “Bravo!” under the impression that he was somebody.’

  In the winter of 1837 to 1838, Dickens was commissioned to edit the memoirs of one of his heroes, the famous clown Joseph Grimaldi (1778-1837). Although Dickens ended up writing much of the book, he was initially commissioned to work as the editor, not the author, of the notes made on the memoirs by the previous author Mr Egerton Wilks. By this date. Dickens had already begun to make his name with Sketches by Boz (1836) and The Pickwick Papers (1837), but this was not good enough for a fan of Grimaldi’s, who disliked the biography and claimed that the author was too young ever to have been able to see Grimaldi perform. Dickens counteracted these comments by writing a letter to be published in the magazine he was editing, Bentley’s Miscellany (the magazine in which Oliver Twist was serialised). The letter, which was never published, reveals a rare memory of Dickens’s childhood Christmases:

  ‘I understand that a gentleman unknown is going about this town privately informing all ladies and gentlemen of discontented natures that, on a comparison of dates ... he has made the profound discovery that I can never have seen Grimaldi whose life I have edited, and that the book must therefore of necessity be bad. Now, sir, although I was brought up from remote country parts in the dark ages of 1819 and 1820 to behold the splendor [sic] of Christmas pantomimes and the humour of Joe [Grimaldi], in whose honor [sic] I am informed I clapped my hands with great precocity, and although I even saw him act in the remote times of 1823, yet as I had not then aspired to the dignity of a tail-coat, though forced by a relentless parent into my first pair of boots.’

  In 1819, while the Dickens children were watching Grimaldi’s pantomime at the Covent Garden Theatre, the nearby Drury Lane Theatre produced its historic production of Jack and the Beanstalk. Although the story had been a play for many years, it was this 1819 performance that is considered the very first true ‘pantomime’ in the modern sense. Although the word had been in use for many years, it was this particular production that introduced many of the traditions that now define the genre, including being the first pantomime to feature a ‘principal boy’; the male hero being played by a female actress in alluring ‘male’ attire has now become a tradition in every pantomime. The Theatrical Journal published a glowing review:

  Pantomime has now superseded Tragedy, Comedy, Opera, and Farce; and for this time Grimaldi is a hero … Covent Garden has, as usual, produced a superb pantomime; and Drury Lane has laboured hard to outstrip its renowned competitor.’ (27 December 1819)

  The Grimaldi performance that the Dickens children would have seen in 1820, was the pantomime Harlequin and Friar Bacon by Bonnor and O’Keefe. Several newspapers published the same review:

  ‘The delight of children of all ages, and the triumph of wands, motley jackets, light feet, and party-coloured faces, Pantomime, commenced on Tuesday night. Covent-garden has had an old celebrity in this work of genius ... We let the prospectus speak for itself.’

  An illustration of Grimaldi in his clown make-up and costume was painted by George Cruikshank in 1820. It depicts him with wild but smiling eyes, an unruly wig and eyebrows and his face spread thickly with red and white greasepaint.

  The following year, the pantomime was Harlequin and Mother Bunch, or The Yellow Dwarf, in which, as the Evening Mail commented, ‘Grimaldi kept the house in a roar by his drollery and humour.’ Just two years later, Grimaldi made headline news again, when the Hampshire Advertiser informed their readers in a simple sentence which became the notice of Grimaldi’s retirement from the stage:

  ‘Grimaldi is so seriously unwell as to be unable to appear in the Christmas pantomime at Covent Garden, which will, we understand, be produced this season without a clown. This deficiency the management intend to supply by a celebrated pulchinello from Paris.’ (29 December 1823).

  In the ghosted Memoirs of Joseph Grimaldi, Dickens wrote

  ‘The delights – the ten thousand million delights of a pantomime – come streaming upon us now – even of the pantomime which came lumbering down in Richardson’s wagons at fairtime to the dull lumbering little town in which we had the honour to be brought up.... We feel again all the pride of standing in a body on the platform, the observed of all observers in the crowd below ... we catch a glimpse (too brief, alas!) of the lady with a green parasol in her hand, on the outside stage of the next show but one, who supports herself on one foot, on the back of a majestic horse ... and our hearts throb with emotion, as we deliver our cardboard check into the very hands of the Harlequin himself, who, all glittering with spangles, and dazzling with many colours, deigns to give us a word of encouragement and commendation as we pass into the booth! ... What mattered it that the stage was three yards wide, and four deep? We never saw it. We had no eyes, ears or corporeal senses, but for the pantomime.’ Charles Dickens was inspired by these visits to the theatre, and, when he was nine years old, he wrote a play: Miznar, Sultan of India. The author left little indication of what it was about, except that it was inspired by the tale of “The Enchantress” from James Kenneth Ridley’s book Tales of the Genii (1764), which was, in turn, based on The Arabian Nights.

  By the time of the family’s visits to see Grimaldi perform, they been living in Kent for several years. In 1852, Dickens published The Child’s Story, an article in which he reminisced about a carefree existence of roaming around the countryside, playing games at the seaside and lazing along the banks of the Riv
er Medway:

  ‘they were not always learning; they had the merriest games that ever were played. They rowed upon the river in summer, and skated upon the ice in Winter. – They had holidays, too, and Twelfth cakes, and parties, where they danced till midnight.’

  These carefree days came to an end at around the same time that Grimaldi was being supplanted by a ‘pulchinello from Paris’. In 1822, John Dickens’s place of work was relocated from the Navy offices at Chatham Dockyard to the Navy offices at Somerset House, in central London. By this date, the family consisted of Fanny (aged twelve), Charles (aged ten), Letitia (aged six), Fred (aged two) and baby Alfred, who was born in March 1822. Two other siblings – a boy named Alfred Allen and a girl named Harriet – had died as babies. John Dickens found the costs of supporting a growing family, as well as to the medical costs and funerals of two infants, crippling. He was in debt when he left Kent and the costs of moving to such an expensive city as London made the problem even worse. Soon his debts began spiralling out of control.

  When his family moved to London, Charles remained in Chatham, boarding at the home of his schoolmaster, William Giles. In the 1880s, the schoolmaster’s sister was interviewed and she described the young Charles Dickens as ‘quite at home at all sorts of parties, junkettings, and birth-day celebrations, and ... he took great delight in Fifth of November festivities around the bon-fire.’ In just a few months, however, Charles’s happy career at William Giles’s school, on the idyllic sounding Clover Lane, was at an end. John Dickens could no longer afford his son’s school fees, so Charles left Kent in a stage coach, sitting inside it alongside a heap of “damp straw in which he was packed and forwarded like game, carriage-paid”. He wrote of the journey many years later, ‘There was no other inside passenger, and I consumed my sandwiches in solitude and dreariness, and it rained hard all the way, and I thought life sloppier than I expected to find it.’

  His new life in a strange city was made doubly painful by the loss of his older sister, Fanny, who had been accepted as a boarder at the Royal Academy of Music, in Tenterden Street, Mayfair, a very fashionable part of town. The rest of the family was living in straitened circumstances at 16, Bayham Street, in Camden Town, North London. Dickens saw Camden Town through the eyes of unhappiness and poverty and in his mind, it was the meanest place he could think of. In A Christmas Carol, he places the poverty stricken home of the Cratchit family in Camden Town, it being the cruellest place he could imagine. John Forster evoked the misery of Dickens’s recollections of that time in his biography:

  ‘Bayham Street was about the poorest part of the London suburbs then, and the house was a mean small tenement, with a wretched little back-garden abutting on a squalid court. Here was no place for new acquaintances to him: not a boy was near with whom he might hope to become in any way familiar. A washerwoman lived next door, and a Bow Street officer lived over the way. Many, many times has he spoken to me of this, and how he seemed at once to fall into a solitary condition apart from all other boys of his own age, and to sink into a neglected state at home which had always been quite unaccountable to him. “As I thought,” he said on one occasion very bitterly, “in the little back garret in Bayham Street, of all I had lost in losing Chatham, what would I have given, if I had had anything to give, to have been sent back to any other school, to have been taught something anywhere!.”’

  Charles Dickens spent much 1823 running errands for his parents and visiting his disabled uncle, Thomas Barrow (Elizabeth Dickens’s brother), whose leg had to be amputated after a bad break. Dickens had vivid memories of spending time being his uncle’s ‘little companion and nurse’ at his lodgings in Gerrard Street, Soho (now the centre of London’s Chinatown).

  All through this time, a looming fear hung over the Dickens children, who knew that things were very bad at home. A couple of months before Christmas, the family made a surprising move from Bayham Street to 4, North Gower Street, just off the Euston Road. This was a more salubrious address, and the reason for renting the house was so that Elizabeth Dickens could set up a school. Charles remembered the day on which a large brass plate was attached to the front door engraved with the words ‘Mrs Dickens’s Establishment’. He recalled how he and his younger siblings took flyers announcing the new school to houses all around the area, but no pupils ever applied to the school and the family’s finances grew even worse. By the end of 1823, the family were living in increasingly desperate circumstances. In his unfinished autobiography, Dickens commented, ‘I know that we got on very badly with the butcher and baker; that very often we had not too much for dinner.’ At the Christmas of 1823, while John Dickens struggled to afford the rent, there would have been little in the way of heating and comfort, let alone festive food or presents. John and Elizabeth Dickens were convinced Fanny’s musical talent would enable her to earn a good living and be able to save the family’s finances in the future, but eleven-year-old Charles needed to start work and bring in money immediately. He was found a job at Warren’s Blacking Factory, but his meagre wages were not enough to pays his father’s creditors. John Dickens was arrested for debt and, as he was being led away by the arresting officers, he spoke to his eldest son. Charles Dickens never forgot the words his father said to him, and many years later wrote, ‘I really believed at the time, that they had broken my heart.’ John was taken to the Marshalsea Debtors’ Prison in Southwark, South London.

  Warren’s Blacking Factory, where Dickens worked six days a week, was on the Strand, on the north bank of the River Thames. Before the building of London’s Embankment and the sewers, the Thames was a stinking filthy river, into which much of the city’s sewage and rubbish was emptied. While Fanny was becoming one of the Academy’s star pupils, winning prizes for her singing and piano playing, her brother was working ten-hour days at the factory. He was also living alone in a lodging house he hated in the misery of Camden Town. Not long after her husband’s imprisonment, Elizabeth had accepted the inevitable and she and the younger Dickens children had moved into the Marshalsea to share John’s cell. Realising how unhappy Charles was, his parents managed to use their contacts to find him new lodgings in Lant Street, Southwark, just a short walk from the prison. Throughout these months, Charles walked alone in the dark to and from work, the prison and his lodgings, learning to survive in some of the most dangerous streets in London. These experiences helped to form some of his most famous fictional characters, and particularly inspired the unloved and uncared for children in A Christmas Carol.

  By the time Christmas of 1824 arrived, the Dickens family had been through a whirlwind year of change, descending into prison, poverty, child labour and the depths of despair, before being lifted out of prison and the factory, back into their own home and a return to their previous lives. It was the death of John Dickens’s mother which enabled the family to be freed from prison. She left both her sons a small legacy and John’s enabled him to pay off his debts and go back to his former job. By the end of the year, in a miraculous turnaround, Charles was once more a respectable schoolboy, living with his family, enrolled at Wellington House Academy in Hampstead, North London, trying – in vain – to forget about the blacking factory and his lodging house.

  That Christmas was a marked contrast to the year before. For once, the family was living without fear of the bailiff and the rent collector. Their feelings might have echoed those expressed in The Sunday Times that Boxing Day:

  ‘Whatever may be said of the dissipation of Christmas, we think its recurrence is attended with many excellent effects. In a commercial country like England, where the merchant during the entire year is glued to his desk, and wholly intent on his selfish schemes, his feelings are apt to be frozen over by the palsying power of interest. In counting over his gains, he forgets that others, connected with him, and his equals in rank, and character, may claim a right to share his coffers or his society; and hence the impulse of avarice too often disserves the links in the chain of the family bond, and which go far to injure
the strength and durability of the greater chain of society. But when all the members of the family once assemble under the same roof – to commemorate the Nativity of Him who came to destroy all fictitious distinctions, and to partake anew of that festive mirth which delighted their early years, there is a mingling of affection, and a re-union of sympathy, the effect of which is to render men better when they emerge anew into the troubled waters of busy life.’

  CHAPTER FOUR

  Love at Christmas

  ‘In reading [A Christmas Carol], one becomes Scrooge himself: feels with him the terrible power his ghostly visitants have over him, the softening influence of the various scenes through which he passes, the very pangs that are caused by the ghosts’ rebukes. One feels too, how very natural and delightful it is when he is ultimately reclaimed.’