Dickens and Christmas

by Lucinda Hawksley

  It prevents my writing at any length, as my faculties are absorbed in crust. I have a shadowy recollection that I owe Mrs Smithson a large sum of money, and that it preys upon my mind. Fred was to have told me the amount but he forgot it on his way home. I seem to remember too, that you paid for THE Raven – Good God! – if you could only hear him talk, and see him break the windows!

  You will be glad to hear – I can only hint at his perfections – that he disturbs the church service, and that his life is threatened by the Beadle. Maclise says he knows he can read and write. I quite believe it; and I go so far as to place implicit reliance on his powers of cyphering.... Since writing the above, I have looked at the Pie and I am very weak [his signature given as a feeble cross].’

  The festive season was a whirl of social engagements before leaving the country, leading Dickens to apologise to Angela Burdett-Coutts, “Every day this week I am engaged”. On Christmas Eve, Dickens and John Forster went to the Drury Lane Theatre to see a rehearsal of Macready’s latest production, The Merchant of Venice. On 27 December, Dickens went back again, to watch his friend in the role of Shylock on opening night. He reserved the rest of the week after Christmas to spend with his children, refusing invitations from friends.

  On 1 January 1842, Catherine and Charles had a farewell dinner given by John Forster. On the following day, they left London for Liverpool, where they would board their ship to America. They sailed on 4 January 1842, on board the SS Britannia – their departure date was two days before their eldest child’s fifth birthday and a month before their baby’s first birthday. Catherine, Charles and their maid Anne Brown spent Twelfth Night feeling seasick in terrible weather, or as Dickens recorded in American Notes:

  ‘It was not exactly comfortable below. It was decidedly close; and it was impossible to be unconscious of the presence of that extraordinary compound of strange smells, which is to be found nowhere but on board ship, and which is such a subtle perfume that it seems to enter at every pore of the skin, and whisper of the hold. Two passengers’ wives (one of them my own) lay already in silent agonies on the sofa; and one lady’s maid (my lady’s) was a mere bundle on the floor, execrating her destiny, and pounding her curlpapers among the stray boxes. Everything sloped the wrong way: which in itself was an aggravation scarcely to be borne. I had left the door open, a moment before, in the bosom of a gentle declivity, and, when I turned to shut it, it was on the summit of a lofty eminence. Now every plank and timber creaked, as if the ship were made of wicker-work; and now crackled, like an enormous fire of the driest possible twigs. There was nothing for it but bed; so I went to bed.

  ‘It was pretty much the same for the next two days, with a tolerably fair wind and dry weather. I read in bed (but to this hour I don’t know what) a good deal; and reeled on deck a little; drank cold brandy-and-water with an unspeakable disgust, and ate hard biscuit perseveringly: not ill, but going to be.’

  In New York, Charles Dickens was thrilled to meet Washington Irving, who hosted a dinner in honour of the English author. At the dinner, Dickens made a speech saying, ‘I do not go to bed two nights out of seven without taking Washington Irving under my arm upstairs to bed with me’. The two men got on very well and an ongoing friendship seemed to be ensured – until Irving read Dickens’s resulting travelogue American Notes (1842). Although he described Irving in the book as ‘my dear friend’ and ‘this charming writer’, Irving disliked the book and felt his country had been offended.

  Charles and Catherine returned to London at the end of June 1842, determined never to go away again without their children. Charley, Mamie, Katey and Walter had spent the six months being cared for by the servants, Uncle Fred and Catherine’s younger sister, fifteen-year-old Georgina Hogarth. By the time their parents returned, the children had grown so attached to Georgina, whom they called ‘Aunty Georgy’, that Charles and Catherine asked if she would like to move into their home permanently. It was common in nineteenth century Britain, where girls and women were expected to be carefully chaperoned at all times, for an unmarried sister to move in with a married sister’s family; although this was usually expected to be a temporary arrangement, until she married.

  A few weeks before Christmas, Dickens went travelling to Cornwall, with John Forster and the artists Daniel Maclise and Clarkson Stanfield. Dickens and Forster wrote and made notes about everything they saw, and Maclise and Stanfield drew and painted. One of the people they met on their journey was a Dr Miles Marley, and Dickens stored away the name. The doctor was reputedly proud of his unusual name; he could have had no idea how many people would be talking about a man named Marley by the end of the following year.

  As was usual on his travels, Dickens tried to see as much as he could of social and working conditions. In Cornwall, he was humbled by his visit to a tin mine, and remembered the landscapes and living conditions of those miners when he came to write the scene in A Christmas Carol when Scrooge is taken by the Ghost of Christmas Present to witness the conditions in which poor, working people live:

  ‘And now, without a word of warning from the Ghost, they stood upon a bleak and desert moor, where monstrous masses of rude stone were cast about, as though it were the burial-place of giants; and water spread itself wheresoever it listed, or would have done so, but for the frost that held it prisoner; and nothing grew but moss and furze, and coarse rank grass. Down in the west the setting sun had left a streak of fiery red, which glared upon the desolation for an instant, like a sullen eye, and frowning lower, lower, lower yet, was lost in the thick gloom of darkest night.

  “What place is this?” asked Scrooge.

  “A place where Miners live, who labour in the bowels of the earth,” returned the Spirit. “But they know me. See.”

  ‘A light shone from the window of a hut, and swiftly they advanced towards it. Passing through the wall of mud and stone, they found a cheerful company assembled round a glowing fire. An old, old man and woman, with their children and their children’s children, and another generation beyond that, all decked out gaily in their holiday attire. The old man, in a voice that seldom rose above the howling of the wind upon the barren waste, was singing them a Christmas song – it had been a very old song when he was a boy – and from time to time they all joined in the chorus. So surely as they raised their voices, the old man got quite blithe and loud; and so surely as they stopped, his vigour sank again.

  ‘The Spirit did not tarry here, but bade Scrooge hold his robe, and passing on above the moor, sped – whither. Not to sea. To sea. To Scrooge’s horror, looking back, he saw the last of the land, a frightful range of rocks, behind them; and his ears were deafened by the thundering of water, as it rolled and roared, and raged among the dreadful caverns it had worn, and fiercely tried to undermine the earth.

  ‘Built upon a dismal reef of sunken rocks, some league or so from shore, on which the waters chafed and dashed, the wild year through, there stood a solitary lighthouse. Great heaps of sea-weed clung to its base, and storm-birds – born of the wind one might suppose, as seaweed of the water – rose and fell about it, like the waves they skimmed.

  ‘But even here, two men who watched the light had made a fire, that through the loophole in the thick stone wall shed out a ray of brightness on the awful sea. Joining their horny hands over the rough table at which they sat, they wished each other Merry Christmas in their can of grog; and one of them: the elder, too, with his face all damaged and scarred with hard weather, as the figure-head of an old ship might be: struck up a sturdy song that was like a Gale in itself.’

  With all these images stored away in his imagination, Dickens was back in London at the start of November, in time to start preparing for a family Christmas. It was particularly jubilant this year, as Charles and Catherine tried to make up for the six months away from their children. In her memoirs, Mamie Dickens left the following description of Christmas preparations in the Dickens family:

  ‘In our childish days my father used to take us ever
y 24th day of December to a toy shop in Holborn where we were allowed to select our Christmas present and also any we wished to give to our little companions. Although I believe we were often an hour of more in the shop before our several tastes were satisfied, he never showed the least impatience, was always interested and desirous as we were that we should choose exactly what we liked best.’

  On Christmas Eve of 1842, Dickens also paid a visit to the theatre, to see Macready’s latest pantomime, Harlequin and William Tell, or, The Genius of the Ribstone Pippin. It seems likely it was Dickens who wrote a very favourable review of Macready’s pantomime for the Examiner of 31 Dec, stating that it was ‘the best we have had for years’. New Year’s Eve was spent at John Forster’s home, celebrating in what Dickens described as ‘a small style’, but they made up for this with a party planned for Twelfth Night. Charles Dickens wrote to several friends to make it clear the party was not just for children. To the illustrator Frank Stone, he wrote:

  ‘All manner of childish amusements are coming off here on Twelfth Night, in honor of my eldest son attaining the tremendous age of six years. It has occurred to me that a few older boys and girls (all of whom you know) might protract the festivities on their own account, and make a merry evening of it.’

  To Leigh Hunt, he wrote:

  ‘Next Friday – Twelfth Night – is the Anniversary of my Son and Heir’s birthday … I have asked some children of a larger growth (all of whom you know) to come and make merry on their own account.’

  On the last day of 1842, Dickens wrote to Cornelius Felton, a Harvard professor he had met in Boston, to wish him a happy new year and to describe the party he had planned for Charley’s birthday:

  ‘The actuary of the National Debt couldn’t calculate the number of children who are coming here on Twelfth Night … But the best of it, is, that Forster and I have purchased between us the entire stock in trade of a conjuror, the practice and display whereof is entrusted to me. And oh my dear eyes, Felton, if you could see me conjuring the company’s watches into impossible tea caddies, and causing pieces of money to fly, and burning pocket handkerchiefs without hurting ‘em, – and practising in my own room, without anybody to admire – you would never forget it as long as you live. In those tricks which require a confederate I am assisted (by reason of his impertubable good humour) by Stanfield, who always does his part exactly the wrong way: to the unspeakable delight of all beholders.’

  At the party, a special present was unwrapped. The Dickens children would remember for years to come their shining excitement at beholding their very own Magic Lantern, to a Victorian child this was the height of technological sophistication – a device that could project images onto a screen or wall and make it look as though it were glowing with light. It was the Victorian equivalent of a cinema screen. For the Dickens family, and for Charles Dickens in particular, this was to be their last Christmas without the extraordinary level of elevated celebrity that would be caused by the publication of A Christmas Carol.

  CHAPTER EIGHT

  ‘Bah! Humbug!’

  ‘“There are many things from which I might have derived good, by which I have not profited, I dare say,” returned the nephew. “Christmas among the rest. But I am sure I have always thought of Christmas time, when it has come round – apart from the veneration due to its sacred name and origin, if anything belonging to it can be apart from that – as a good time; a kind, forgiving, charitable, pleasant time: the only time I know of, in the long calendar of the year, when men and women seem by one consent to open their shut-up hearts freely, and to think of people below them as if they really were fellow-passengers to the grave, and not another race of creatures bound on other journeys. And therefore, uncle, though it has never put a scrap of gold or silver in my pocket, I believe that it has done me good, and will do me good; and I say, God bless it!”’

  Charles Dickens, A Christmas Carol (1843)

  Although Charles Dickens began the new year in a mood of great optimism, he had a difficult year ahead. For the first time his sales decreased, and his publishers, Chapman and Hall, began to lose confidence in him. Many of Dickens’s American readers had been angered by what they considered his rudeness about their country in American Notes, complaining that he had abused their hospitality. Although Dickens had written many favourable things in his travelogue, his wry jokes and outright criticisms – in particular of slavery, which was still legal in the USA at that date – made many of his former fans turn against him.

  In January 1843, the first episode of Martin Chuzzlewit, was published. It continued, in monthly instalments, until July 1844. The novel includes characters who travel to America, and once again Dickens berated the country for believing itself to be ‘civilised’ when it still permitted the atrocity of slavery. In Martin Chuzzlewit he wrote such lines as:

  ‘An American gentleman … stuck his hands deep into his pockets, and walked the deck with his nostrils dilated, as already inhaling the air of Freedom which carries death to all tyrants, and can never (under any circumstances worth mentioning) be breathed by slaves.’

  He also wrote scathingly about the fictional town of Eden, an ironic name for a place that could not be less like the biblical version of paradise. Eden was based on a town named Cairo, in Illinois. People in Illinois, and all over America, were incensed and Dickens’s once-golden reputation in America was rapidly becoming tarnished.

  An even bigger problem was that Martin Chuzzlewit also did not capture the interest of the usual number of Dickens’s readers at home. As there was no international copyright law, he received no money for books sold in America so home sales were important, he campaigned for an international copyright law for decades. Although there were those who loved it as much as his other novels, there were also a large number who just stopped reading it partway through. Dickens felt this keenly and when he and Catherine realised there would be a fifth baby in the household by the following January, he began to be frightened about money. No matter how famous he became, Dickens could never rid himself of the twin spectres of the Marshalsea and the blacking factory; he was terrified of his earning potential disappearing.

  During the blacking factory months, Dickens had become a wary street child. He had to learn whom to avoid and whom he could trust, which areas to skirt around the edge of, which streets never to walk along, and how to recognise danger. As an adult, Dickens often suffered from insomnia; when that happened, he would walk around London at night, often with his dogs as company. On these walks, he took inspiration for his stories, worked out plotlines, observed characters and came to a genuine understanding about the lives of London’s poorest communities. Throughout 1843, he grew increasingly concerned about the plight of impoverished children and the many sickening dangers that lay in wait for them. Children were forced to work in some of the nastiest jobs in the country, for which they were paid a fraction of what adults earned – if they were paid at all. They did jobs that were injurious to health, and which could often prove fatal, and they had scant laws protecting them. Of those laws that were in place, very few of the children even knew of their existence. Many children were forced into prostitution, as England’s archaic sexual consent laws, which had not been changed since the thirteenth century, permitted sex with a child at the age of twelve, which remained in place until a new law in 1875 raised the age to thirteen. This had helped to make England, and London in particular, a centre of paedophile prostitution.

  On his walks around the city, Dickens saw the misery in which increasing numbers of children were living. The Industrial Revolution had seen a massive increase in people migrating from the countryside to the cities but even while this urban sprawl was continuing to grow, technology was changing all the time and these changes meant a more mechanised workplace. This, in turn, meant the need for fewer human workers. Many of the families who had moved to London and were unable to find work were living in terrifying slums and eking out an existence through begging or stealing. Dickens had br
ought the plight of these children to his public in Oliver Twist yet nothing seemed to be changing in the lives of the country’s poorest children.

  During his months in America, Dickens had altered his religion, from being a member of the Church of England, to becoming a Unitarian. He had done so because he felt that the Unitarian church would be more proactive in helping the poor and desperate. A year on from his return from the United States, he was feeling despondent about whether such great changes would – or indeed could – ever happen. While he was writing Martin Chuzzlewit, and continuing to work on articles for magazines and newspapers, Dickens was thinking about the plight of the country’s children and what he could do to help. He had read the 1843 parliamentary report on child labourers in Britain’s factories, written by the pioneering doctor Thomas Southwood Smith. He had been ‘perfectly stricken down’ by reading it and wrote to Southwood Smith that he intended to write a pamphlet titled An Appeal to the People of England, on Behalf of the Poor Man’s Child, ‘with my name attached, of course’. He spent weeks thinking about how best to make the general public aware enough to bring about change.

  All through 1843, Dickens paid even more attention than usual to the injustice of British society, and felt sickened by the enormous gulf between the wealthy and the desperate. In May, he went to a fundraising dinner for the Charterhouse Square infirmary, a charity which took care of elderly, poverty-stricken men. Ironically, the majority of those who attended the dinner were very wealthy men, mostly bankers who made their fortunes in the City of London. Dickens wrote a contemptuous letter to his friend Douglas Jerrold describing his fellow diners as ‘sleek, slobbering, bowpaunched, overfed, apoplectic, snorting cattle’.