Dickens and Christmas

by Lucinda Hawksley

  ‘There never was such a goose. Bob said he didn’t believe there ever was such a goose cooked. Its tenderness and flavour, size and cheapness, were the themes of universal admiration. Eked out by apple-sauce and mashed potatoes, it was a sufficient dinner for the whole family; indeed, as Mrs Cratchit said with great delight (surveying one small atom of a bone upon the dish), they hadn’t ate it all at last. Yet every one had had enough, and the youngest Cratchits in particular, were steeped in sage and onion to the eyebrows. But now, the plates being changed by Miss Belinda, Mrs Cratchit left the room alone – too nervous to bear witnesses – to take the pudding up and bring it in.

  ‘Suppose it should not be done enough. Suppose it should break in turning out. Suppose somebody should have got over the wall of the backyard, and stolen it, while they were merry with the goose – a supposition at which the two young Cratchits became livid. All sorts of horrors were supposed.

  ‘Hallo. A great deal of steam. The pudding was out of the copper. A smell like a washing-day. That was the cloth. A smell like an eating-house and a pastrycook’s next door to each other, with a laundress’s next door to that. That was the pudding. In half a minute Mrs Cratchit entered – flushed, but smiling proudly – with the pudding, like a speckled cannonball, so hard and firm, blazing in half of half-a-quartern of ignited brandy, and bedight with Christmas holly stuck into the top.

  ‘Oh, a wonderful pudding. Bob Cratchit said, and calmly too, that he regarded it as the greatest success achieved by Mrs Cratchit since their marriage. Mrs Cratchit said that now the weight was off her mind, she would confess she had had her doubts about the quantity of flour. Everybody had something to say about it, but nobody said or thought it was at all a small pudding for a large family. It would have been flat heresy to do so. Any Cratchit would have blushed to hint at such a thing.’

  Charles Dickens A Christmas Carol (1843)

  On 17 December, Dickens sent advance copies of A Christmas Carol to several friends, and they rushed to write their appreciation to him. In response to a letter from Charles Mackay, Dickens wrote:

  ‘Believe me that your pleasure in the Carol, so earnestly and spontaneously expressed, gives me real gratification of heart. It has delighted me very much … I was very affected by the little Book myself; in various ways, as I wrote it … I shall not forget your note, easily.’

  To other friends he apologised for being unable to send a copy of the book on the day it came out, as copies were selling so fast he had been unable to find any. Three days after publication day he penned a letter to Reverend William Harkness, ‘I have run short of copies of the Carol, owing to the demand, or I would have sent you this before.’ At New Year he wrote to the poet Thomas Hood, ‘A thousand thanks for your kind and charming notice of the Carol.’

  Dickens’s excitement at his book’s success, comes across in an exuberant letter sent to Daniel Maclise on Christmas Day, reminding the artist he was invited to dinner:

  ‘Recreant of the Castle. The banquet hour on this eventful day, is when the turret chimes denote Half Past Five. If, in accordance with a Sacred Custom, you dine with the Bozonian Knight be punctual. If with Royalty, be hungry and be jovial …’

  A Christmas Carol changed Charles Dickens’s life forever. From that year onwards, Christmas became the busiest – and, by the end of his life, the most stressful – time of his year.

  On Boxing Day 1843, while Dickens was still on a high, he and Catherine took their family to a party to celebrate the birthday of thirteen-year-old Nina Macready. Charles Dickens and John Forster performed a spectacular magic show, at which the adult guests were as impressed as the children. Among those guests was Jane Carlyle (wife of the historian and writer Thomas Carlyle), who wrote to a friend that it was:

  ‘… the very most agreeable party that ever I was at in London … Dickens and Forster above all exerted themselves till the perspiration was pouring down and they seemed drunk with their efforts! Only think of that excellent Dickens playing the conjuror for one whole hour – the best conjuror I ever saw – (and I have paid money to see several) – and Forster acting as his servant. This part of the entertainment concluded with a plum pudding made out of raw flour, raw eggs – all the usual raw ingredients – boiled in a gentleman’s hat – and tumbled out reeking – all in one minute before the eyes of the astonished children and astonished grown people! That trick – and his other of changing ladies’ pocket handkerchiefs into comfits – and a box of bran into a box full of – a live guinea pig! would enable him to make a handsome subsistence, let the bookseller trade go as it please-!

  Catherine Dickens was just weeks away from giving birth to her fifth child, but her children were able to join in the boisterous dancing. Amongst their dancing partners was William Thackeray, the father of Mamie and Katey Dickens’s good friends, Anny and Minny. At this date, William Thackeray was a very rare thing in Victorian Britain – a single father bringing up his two daughters admirably (with the help of servants).

  One person who missed the party was Nina’s father, William Charles Macready, who was touring America with his theatrical company. On 3 January Dickens wrote to him,

  ‘Oh that you had been in Clarence Terrace on Nina’s birthday! Good God how we missed you, talked of you, drank your health, and wondered what you were doing! ... Forster and I conjured bravely – that a hot plum pudding was produced from an empty saucepan, held over a blazing fire, kindled in Stanfield’s hat, without damage to the lining – that a box of bran was changed into a live Guinea Pig, which ran between my God child’s [Henry Macready] feet, and was then the cause of such a shrill uproar and clapping of hands that you might have heard it (and I daresay did) in America – that three half crowns being taken from Major Burns and put into a tumbler-glass before his eyes did then and there give jingling answers unto questions asked of them by me, and knew where you were, and what you were doing; to the unspeakable admiration of the whole assembly. ... we are going to do it again, next Saturday, with the addition of Demoniacal dresses from a Masquerade Shop … I have sent you ... a little book I published on the 17th of December, and which has been a most prodigious success – the greatest, I think, I have ever achieved. It pleases me to think that it will bring you Home for an hour or two. And I long to hear that you have read it, on some quiet morning.’

  On the day after the party Dickens wrote to Angela Burdett-Coutts (who was Charley’s godmother):

  ‘If every Christmas that comes to you, only makes you, or finds you, one half as happy and merry as I wish you to be, you will be the happiest and merriest person in all the world … Charley is in great force, and with his sisters, desire his hearty love. They all went, with us, last night to a juvenile party at Mrs Macready’s, and came out very strong – especially Charley who called divers [sic] small boys by their Christian names (after the manner of a Young Nobleman on the Stage) and indulged in numerous phases of genteel dissipation. I have made a tremendous hit with a conjuring apparatus, which includes some of Doëbler’s best tricks, and was more popular last evening after cooking a plum pudding in a hat, and producing a pocket handkerchief from a Wine Bottle, than ever I have been in my life....

  [postscript] You will be glad to hear, I know, that my Carol is a prodigious success.’

  On the same day, the Belfast Commercial Chronicle included a lavish article about A Christmas Carol which is described as ‘A tale to make the reader laugh and cry – open his hands, and open his heart to charity even towards the uncharitable, – wrought up with a thousand minute and tender touches of the true ‘Boz’ workmanship … Smellfungus himself would be puzzled how to cut up this jovial, genial piece of Christmas fare otherwise than lovingly.’ Smellfungus was a hyper-criticial character from Laurence Sterne’s novel A Sentimental Journey Through France and Italy (1768) and readers of the time would have been familiar with the reference.

  On 2 January 1844, Dickens wrote to Cornelius Felton at Harvard:

  ‘Now, if instantly on receipt
of this, you will send a free and independent citizen down to the Cunard Wharf at Boston, you will find that Captain Hewitt of the Britannia Steam Ship (my ship [the one he and Catherine had travelled to America in]) has a small parcel for Professor Felton of Cambridge; and in that parcel you will find a Christmas Carol in Prose. Being a Ghost Story of Christmas by Charles Dickens. Over which Christmas Carol, Charles Dickens wept, and laughed, and wept again, and excited himself in a most extraordinary manner, in the composition; and thinking whereof, he walked about the black streets of London, fifteen and twenty miles, many a night when all the sober folks had gone to bed … Its success is most prodigious. And by every post, all manner of strangers write all manner of letters to him about their homes and hearths, and how this very same Carol is read aloud there, and kept on a very little shelf by itself. Indeed it is the greatest success as I am told that this Ruffian and Rascal has ever achieved … Such dinings, such dancings, such conjurings, such blindmans-buffings, such theatre-goings, such kissings-out of old years and kissings-in of new ones, never took place in these parts before. To keep the Chuzzlewit going, and do this little book, the Carol, in the odd times between two parts of it, was, as you may suppose, pretty tight work. But when it was done, I broke out like a Madman. And if you could have seen me at a children’s party at Macreadys the other night, going down a Country dance something longer than the Library at Cambridge with Mrs. M. you would have thought I was a country Gentleman of independent property, residing on a tip-top farm, with the wind blowing straight in my face every day.’

  That year the family’s Twelfth Night party was even more exciting than normal, as Dickens and Forster had so enjoyed being conjurers that they decided to do the show again, but with even more theatricality. Dickens sent his younger brother, Fred, on an errand, noting on 4 January:

  ‘I want to hire for Twelfth Night, a Magician’s Dress – that is to say a black cloak with hieroglyphics on it – some kind of doublet to wear underneath – a grave black beard – and a high black sugar-loaf hat – and a wand with a snake on it, or some such thing. Forster wants a similar set of garments in fiery red.’

  Within a short time of A Christmas Carol being published, Dickens discovered that it was being plagiarised. At a printing office on Drury Lane, the author bought an illegal copy of his own work – for which he was receiving no royalties – printed by Richard Egan Lee and John Haddock. Dickens brought a legal injunction against them and, within a few days, on 18 January, wrote to Forster with jubilation, ‘The pirates are beaten flat. They are bruised, bloody, battered, smashed, squelched, and utterly undone.’ This was only the beginning of the plagiarism and pirating of his most famous work. No matter how much he, his publishers, and his friends in the legal profession, such as Thomas Noon Talfourd, attempted to prevent his work being printed illegally, it was a losing battle. In February 1844, at least three theatrical productions of A Christmas Carol were recorded as being performed in London alone. The story had captured the heart of the nation. The little novella, in which Chapman and Hall had placed so little faith, was famous all over the country. To Dickens, this was the beginning of what would become an industry of Christmas. By the end of his career, he would come to dread the festive season for its overwhelming workload, but at the start of 1844, he was simply overwhelmed with excitement.

  ‘On Christmas Day we all had our glasses filled, and then my father, raising his, would say: “Here’s to us all. God bless us!” a toast which was rapidly and willingly drunk. His conversation, as may be imagined, was often extremely humorous, and I have seen the servants, who were waiting at table, convulsed often with laughter at his droll remarks and stories. Now, as I recall these gatherings, my sight grows blurred with the tears that rise to my eyes. But I love to remember them, and to see, if only in memory, my father at his own table, surrounded by his own family and friends—a beautiful Christmas spirit.’

  Mamie Dickens, My Father As I Recall Him

  CHAPTER NINE

  ‘A New Heart for a New Year, Always’

  ‘ … the bells of the churches ring incessantly; not in peals, or any known form of sound, but in a horrible, irregular, jerking, dingle, dingle, dingle: with a sudden stop at every fifteenth dingle or so, which is maddening. This performance is usually achieved by a boy up in the steeple, who takes hold of the clapper, or a little rope attached to it, and tries to dingle louder than every other boy similarly employed. The noise is supposed to be particularly obnoxious to Evil Spirits; but looking up into the steeples, and seeing (and hearing) these young Christians thus engaged, one might very naturally mistake them for the Enemy.’

  Charles Dickens, Pictures from Italy (1846)

  Dickens began 1844 on a high, but within a few weeks he was exhausted and depressed. On 15 January, Catherine gave birth to their fifth child, a son named Francis Jeffrey Dickens, known as Frank. The medical expenses for her and the new baby came at a time when Dickens was already in debt and this was compounded by his parents’ continual overspending and expecting their son to pay their bills. At the same time, Dickens was fighting a tide of plagiarism of his earlier books and trying to finish writing Martin Chuzzlewit, whose sales figures were still causing him stress. Soon he and Catherine were both suffering from depression.

  Dickens was always happier in summer than winter, so he made the decision to move his family to a warmer climate. He chose Italy, partly because he was a fan of the Romantic poet, Lord Byron, and he longed to be inspired by the same place that had inspired him, and because the cost of living in Italy was much lower than living in London.

  In July 1844, with the family home at Devonshire Terrace rented out, the Dickens family were packed into a large carriage, which Dickens had commissioned specially for the journey. There were eleven people in the carriage; Charles, Catherine and their five children, Georgina Hogarth, Catherine’s maid Anne Brown, the family’s cook and Timber, a Havana Spaniel. Timber was a very well-travelled dog, having been given to Catherine and Charles in America. Also travelling with them was their invaluable courier Louis Roche (a courier took the role of a modern-day tour guide). He could speak the languages they needed to help them travel through France and Switzerland into Italy, he sorted out all the paperwork, bought any necessary tickets and ensured that every border crossing was easy and every travel problem was smoothed over.

  It must have been a tremendous sight to witness the family party setting off from London for their two-week journey through France and Switzerland to Italy. They left London on 2 July and arrived in Albaro, just outside Genoa on 16 July. Today, Albaro is a part of Genoa, but when the Dickens family lived there, it was a separate village outside the city. Their first home was a pretty pale-terracotta-coloured villa which Dickens had been told was called Villa di Bella Vista, but which the locals all called Villa di Bagnerello, after its owner, Signor Bagnerello, a ‘drunken butcher’. Although it was a very pretty house with a stunning view of the Mediterranean and ample space for the family, Dickens was disappointed. It was not as grand as he had hoped and he nicknamed it ‘the Pink Jail’. He began searching for a new family home. He planned to live in Italy for a least a year, and he wanted to do so in style.

  By Christmas, the family was happily installed in a home that satisfied every one of Charles Dickens’s Italian dreams. He described their new home, the Palazzo Peschiere, in his second travelogue Pictures from Italy (1846):

  ‘There is not in Italy, they say (and I believe them), a lovelier residence than the Palazzo Peschiere, or Palace of the Fishponds, whither we removed as soon as our three months’ tenancy of the Pink Jail at Albaro had ceased and determined.

  ‘It stands on a height within the walls of Genoa, but aloof from the town: surrounded by beautiful gardens of its own, adorned with statues, vases, fountains, marble basins, terraces, walks of orangetrees and lemon-trees, groves of roses and camellias. All its apartments are beautiful in their proportions and decorations; but the great hall, some fifty feet in height, with thre
e large windows at the end, overlooking the whole town of Genoa, the harbour, and the neighbouring sea, affords one of the most fascinating and delightful prospects in the world. Any house more cheerful and habitable than the great rooms are, within, it would be difficult to conceive; and certainly nothing more delicious than the scene without, in sunshine or in moonlight, could be imagined. It is more like an enchanted place in an Eastern story than a grave and sober lodging.

  ‘How you may wander on, from room to room, and never tire of the wild fancies on the walls and ceilings, as bright in their fresh colouring as if they had been painted yesterday; or how one floor, or even the great hall which opens on eight other rooms, is a spacious promenade; or how there are corridors and bed-chambers above, which we never use and rarely visit, and scarcely know the way through; or how there is a view of a perfectly different character on each of the four sides of the building; matters little. But that prospect from the hall is like a vision to me. I go back to it, in fancy, as I have done in calm reality a hundred times a day; and stand there, looking out, with the sweet scents from the garden rising up about me, in a perfect dream of happiness.’