‘It would be ungracious and unjust to the memory of the great literary master-spirit of Christmas, if we did not warmly commend the idea of Mr. Charles Dickens in issuing in one volume the “Nine Christmas Numbers of All The Year Round.” Those most delightful little blue brochures for which our teeth used to water as the December days drew on, and in which, though not all was Dickens, all was singularly, and almost magically, “Dickensised,” have ceased now for ever; but this volume will be a most welcome guest at many a fireside this Christmastide – welcome even while it renews the memory of a great loss and sorrow.’
Many newspapers and magazines offered Dickens souvenirs in their Christmas issues, such as The Graphic which included Luke Fildes’s drawing The Empty Chair, which depictedWeb Order Reference: UBR01757205 Order Date: 14 Jul 17 02:58 PM Dickens’s study at Gad’s Hill Place the day after he died. All over the country theatres staged performances of Dickens’s novels and stories, with A Christmas Carol proving the most popular. The legacy of Dickens’s Christmas Books remained stronger than that of his Christmas stories. In 1906, when a spectacular dolls house was being created for Queen Mary, a miniature set of Dickens’s five Christmas books was commissioned. The tiny versions of the books are just five centimetres high, but they contain faithful reproductions of the original text and are bound in tooled leather with gilded edges to the pages. On 1 January 1871, Lloyd’s Weekly Newspaper gave a summary of the previous year:
‘The reminiscences of Dickens are welcome to all. Dickens is inseparably connected with Christmas. His inimitable “Christmas Carol” unites him with the merry season; and it is our belief that very few spent their Christmas-day without giving a tender, regretful thought to the kindly heart that has ceased to beat – to the great name that has become of the past since the opening of the disastrous year — 1870.’
Amid all the newspapers’ commentary on Dickens is a short paragraph in the Hackney and Kingsland Gazette, published on Christmas Eve 1870:
The inscription engraved on the tomb of Charles Dickens in Westminster Abbey has lately been exposed to the view of the public. It consists only of the few plain and simple words which he desired in his will to mark his grave:– “Charles Dickens, born February 7, 1812; died the 9th of June, 1870.”.’
‘One morning – it was the last day of the year, I remember – while we were at breakfast at “Gad’s Hill,” my father suggested that we should celebrate the evening by a charade to be acted in pantomime. The suggestion was received with acclamation, and amid shouts and laughing we were then and there, guests and members of the family, allotted our respective parts. My father went about collecting “stage properties,” rehearsals were “called” at least four times during the morning, and in all our excitement no thought was given to that necessary part of a charade, the audience, whose business it is to guess the pantomime. At luncheon someone asked suddenly: “But what about an audience?” “Why, bless my soul,” said my father, “I’d forgotten all about that.” Invitations were quickly dispatched to our neighbours, and additional preparations made for supper. In due time the audience came, and the charade was acted so successfully that the evening stands out in my memory as one of the merriest and happiest of the many merry and happy evenings in our dear old home. My father was so extremely funny in his part that the rest of us found it almost impossible to maintain sufficient control over ourselves to enable the charade to proceed as it was planned to do. It wound up with a country dance, which had been invented that morning and practised quite a dozen times through the day, and which was concluded at just a few moments before midnight. Then leading us all, characters and audience, out into the wide hall, and throwing wide open the door, my father, watch in hand, stood waiting to hear the bells ring in the New Year. All was hush and silence after the laughter and merriment! Suddenly the peal of bells sounded, and turning he said: “A happy New Year to us all! God bless us.” Kisses, good wishes and shaking of hands brought us again back to the fun and gaiety of a few moments earlier. Supper was served, the hot mulled wine drunk in toasts, and the maddest and wildest of “Sir Roger de Coverlys” ended our evening and began our New Year.’
Mamie Dickens, My Father As I Recall Him
Bibliography
ACKROYD, Peter, Dickens, Sinclair-Stevenson, 1990.
ALLEN, Michael, Charles Dickens’ Childhood, Macmillan, 1988.
ARMSTRONG, Neil, Christmas in Nineteenth-Century England, MUP, 2010.
CHAMBERS, Robert, The Book of Days, a Miscellany of Popular Antiquities, 1862.
COX, Helen, Mr. and Mrs. Charles Dickens Entertain at Home, Elsevier, 2014.
CROSSLEY, Alice and SALMON, Richard (eds), Thackeray in Time: History, Memory, and Modernity, Routledge, 2016.
DICKENS, Catherine (psuedonym Lady Maria Clutterbuck), What Shall We Have for Dinner?, Bradbury & Evans, 1852 [fascimile copy at Charles Dickens Museum].
DICKENS, Charles, Christmas Books, Chapman and Hall (undated).
DICKENS, Charles, Christmas Stories from ‘Household Words’ and ‘All The Year Round’, Chapman and Hall (undated).
DICKENS, Mamie, My Father As I Recall Him, Roxburghe Press, 1897.
DOLBY, George, Charles Dickens as I Knew Him, T. Fisher Unwin, 1885.
FORSTER, John, The Life of Charles Dickens: The Illustrated Edition, Sterling Signature, 2011.
GREAVES, John, Dickens at Doughty Street, Elm Tree Books, 1975.
GREY, Elizabeth, Countess of Kent, A True Gentlewoman’s Delight: Wherein is contained all manner of cookery: together with preserving, conserving, drying and candying. Very necessary for all ladies and gentlewomen, W.I.Gent, 1653.
HAHN, Daniel, The Oxford Companion to Children’s Literature, OUP, 2015.
HAWKSLEY, Lucinda, Katey: The Life and Loves of Dickens’s Artist Daughter, Doubleday, 2006.
HIBBERT, Christopher, The Making of Charles Dickens, Longmans, 1967.
JOHNES, Martin, Christmas and the British: A Modern History, Bloomsbury, 2016.
JOHNSON, Edgar, Charles Dickens, His Tragedy and Triumph, Viking, 1977.
KAPLAN, Fred, Dickens: A Biography, Sceptre, 1988.
LAMB, Hubert H., Climate, History and the Modern World, Routledge, 1995.
LEACH, Helen, Browne, Mary & Inglis, Raelene, The Twelve Cakes of Christmas, Otago, 2011.
LANGTON, Robert, The Childhood and Youth of Charles Dickens, F.R. Hist. Soc., 1883.
PAGE, Norman, A Dickens Chronology, Springer, 1988.
Philological Society of London, The European Magazine and London Review, Vol 77, 1820.
SCHLICKE, Paul (ed.), The Oxford Companion to Charles Dickens, OUP, 2011.
SLATER, Michael, Charles Dickens, Yale, 2009.
WATERS, Catherine, Dickens and the Politics of the Family, CUP, 1997.
WEIGHTMAN, Gavin and HUMPHRIES, Steve, Christmas Past, Sidgwick and Jackson, 1987.
Henry Cole’s diaries accessed via the V&A website.
William Thackeray’s Christmas Books accessed via Online Literature.
Charles Dickens’s first home. Charles Dickens was born in this house on 7 February 1812. The family was renting a home in Portsmouth because Charles’s father, John Dickens, worked as a payroll clerk for the navy, at Portsmouth Docks.
Marshalsea Prison. In 1824, John Dickens was arrested for debt and taken to the Marshalsea Debtors’ Prison in Southwark, South London. His wife, Elizabeth, and all their younger children also had to move into the prison. Charles Dickens had to work and live by himself.
First Edition of A Christmas Carol, 1843. When A Christmas Carol was published in 1843, it became an instant sensation; this is what first edition looked like. The first 6,000 copies of A Christmas Carol sold out in less than a week.
Sketches of Charles and Fanny Dickens from 1842. This portrait of Dickens dates from the year before he wrote A Christmas Carol. A small portrait of his older sister Fanny can be seen in the bottom left; she was immortalised as Ebenezer Scrooge’s much-loved younger sister, Little Fan.
The First Edition Title Page of A Christmas Carol, 1843. Dickens wrote A Christmas Carol as a protest against child poverty. He said he wanted it to strike ‘a sledgehammer blow’ on behalf of ‘the poor man’s child’.
Scrooge’s Third Visitor by John Leech, 1843. The image of the Ghost of Christmas Present, described as a ‘jolly Giant’, was inspired by ancient British traditions: that of the pagan Green Man and the old-style Father Christmas who appeared in mummers’ dances.
Marley’s Ghost by John Leech, 1843. When the ghost of Jacob Marley appeared to warn his former business partner Ebenezer Scrooge to mend his ways, Dickens was hoping his readers would realise that they also needed to help those poorer than themselves.
The Last of the Spirits by John Leech, 1843. The illustrator for A Christmas Carol was Dickens’s great friend John Leech, who would become famous as one of the leading cartoonists for the satirical magazine Punch.
A depiction of a Christmas Choir practice. From the 1840s onwards, the celebrating of Christmas started to become much more fashionable and ‘old traditions’ were revived. Singing carols, both in church and as travelling choirs, was very popular.
A Victorian family around a Christmas tree. In the nineteenth century, Christmas trees were lit by candles, which was a serious fire risk. In wealthier households, servants would stand beside the tree with buckets of sand or water, ready to fight any fires.
Decorating the Christmas tree. After a picture of the royal family’s Christmas tree appeared in the Illustrated London News in 1848, decorated trees became very fashionable. By the last decades of the nineteenth century, the practice had become an essential part of Christmas.
An early Christmas card. The first Christmas cards seldom featured the kind of images that people would consider traditional today. Images of rosy-cheeked children were much more common than religious scenes or images of Christmas decorations.
A mid-Victorian Christmas card. Despite the prudish strictures of Victorian fashions, a large proportion of nineteenth century Christmas cards featured illustrations of naked children, or of scantily dressed children depicted as fairies or other mythical figures.
Charles Dickens at the age of 49. This portrait of Charles Dickens was painted in 1861, a year in which Britain suffered one of the coldest winters on record. Dickens wrote to a friend that at Christmas it was so cold that his beard froze.
Bringing in the Christmas pudding. The earliest Christmas puddings were usually made with meat stock or broth, and were often served as a starter. The idea of a sweet Christmas pudding became fixed in the Victorian age, when it became the essential final ingredient of the Christmas meal.
Charles Dickens towards the end of his life. By the end of his life, Charles Dickens had started to find Christmas exhausting. It had become, for him, the busiest time in his working year and he had to start creating his Christmas work schedule months in advance of December.
‘Merry Old Santa Claus’, by Thomas Nast from the 1 January, 1881 edition of Harper’s Weekly. The young Charles Dickens would not have expected a visit from Father Christmas or Santa Claus. The image of a jolly, round old man who brings presents to children on Christmas Eve did not become popular in Britain until the second half of the nineteenth century.
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