Dickens and Christmas

by Dickens

  This feeling that he should be making genuine physical changes to the society in which he lived had been growing all year. He was desperate to write something that would actually make a difference to the lives of the poor children he encountered every day, and the more he thought about his pamphlet report for the government, the less he felt it would have any effect at all – it would be read by a tiny minority and possibly ignored. Instead, he needed to write something that would make people pay attention, that would strike ‘a sledgehammer blow’ on behalf of ‘the poor man’s child’. He needed to produce something that would have ‘twenty thousand times the force’ of a government pamphlet.

  In October 1843, Dickens travelled to Manchester, where he had been invited to give a speech in support of the Athenaeum, a charity which provided educational opportunities for working men and women. He was also able to spend time with Fanny, who lived in Manchester. She and Henry Burnett now had two children. At the time of their uncle’s visit, Harry Burnett was nearly four and Charles Burnett was two and a half. Dickens was deeply moved by witnessing the difficulties Harry suffered due to his disability. Harry had been born with unspecified disabilities, and the family feared that he was not destined to live into adulthood. Seeing his little nephew struggle with his health made Dickens think about the realities of what life was like for impoverished disabled children, whose lives were even harder than those of their able-bodied siblings.

  In Manchester, Dickens walked around the city, just as he liked to do in London. Before this visit, he thought he had witnessed all the degradations of poverty in his home town, but he was horrified by the sight of families living in abject misery and poverty. He saw families living on the streets, all in danger of starving, and he was chilled at the breadth of poverty in post-Industrial Revolution Manchester. This was the time of the ‘Hungry Forties’, when Britain was experiencing an economic depression, when unemployment was growing exponentially, when two consecutive harvests failed and when the price of everyday foods was beyond the reach of many families. Within a couple of years, the situation would have grown even worse, with the Potato Famine, which began in 1845 and killed an estimated one million people in Ireland.

  Charles Dickens’s speech at the Athenaeum on 5 October was passionate in its call for reform. Fired by the social injustices he had witnessed, his words burned with the author’s fury and his feelings of powerlessness. He railed at the way in which the upper class of wealthy privileged men seemed determined never to share their riches with those who needed the most help:

  ‘… How often have we heard from a large class of men wise in their generation, who would really seem to be born and bred for no other purpose than to pass into currency counterfeit and mischievous scraps of wisdom, as it is the sole pursuit of some other criminals to utter base coin – how often have we heard from them, as an allconvincing argument, that “a little learning is a dangerous thing?” Why, a little hanging was considered a very dangerous thing, according to the same authorities, with this difference, that, because a little hanging was dangerous, we had a great deal of it; and, because a little learning was dangerous, we were to have none at all. Why, when I hear such cruel absurdities gravely reiterated, I do sometimes begin to doubt whether the parrots of society are not more pernicious to its interests than its birds of prey. I should be glad to hear such people’s estimate of the comparative danger of “a little learning” and a vast amount of ignorance; I should be glad to know which they consider the most prolific parent of misery and crime. Descending a little lower in the social scale, I should be glad to assist them in their calculations, by carrying them into certain gaols and nightly refuges I know of, where my own heart dies within me, when I see thousands of immortal creatures condemned, without alternative or choice, to tread, not what our great poet calls the “primrose path” to the everlasting bonfire, but one of jaded flints and stones, laid down by brutal ignorance, and held together, like the solid rocks, by years of this most wicked axiom …’

  His speech was reported in newspapers all over the British Isles.

  By the time Dickens travelled back to London from Manchester, he was burning with the desire to write something monumentally important, something that would campaign against the ‘ignorance and want’ that seemed to him to be so pervasive. The first known mention of A Christmas Carol can be found in a letter to the Scottish academic and magazine editor, Professor MacVey Napier. On 24 October 1843, Dickens wrote to him, ‘I plunged headlong into a little scheme I had held in abeyance during the interval which had elapsed between my first letter and your answer; set an artist at work upon it…’ The artist was Dickens’s great friend John Leech, who would become famous as one of the leading cartoonists for the satirical magazine Punch. For weeks, Dickens worked furiously on his ‘little scheme’, while continuing to write Martin Chuzzlewit. Chapman and Hall were less than enthusiastic about his idea for a Christmas novella. They agreed to publish it only if Dickens bore a large amount of the costs, not least for the very expensive hand-coloured illustrations on which he was insisting.

  All the while he was writing the story, Dickens’s financial woes were nagging at the back of his mind, as was the knowledge that the expense of another baby – and the attendant medical bills for Catherine – was imminent. He wrote to a friend:

  ‘Mrs. Dickens sends her love and best regards. We think of keeping the New Year, by having another child. I am constantly reversing the Kings in the Fairy Tales, and importuning the Gods not to trouble themselves: being quite satisfied with what I have. But they are so generous when they do take a fancy to one!’

  To add to his concerns, his parents had, once again, fallen into debt and, once again, expected him to pay their bills. At the end of September, Dickens had received from his father what he described to his friend Thomas Mitton as ‘a threatening letter’. Dickens wrote in pain to his friend, ‘I am amazed and confounded by the audacity of his ingratitude. He, and all of them, look upon me as something to be plucked and torn to pieces for their advantage … My soul sickens at the thought …’

  One of the people to whom Dickens confided his financial woes was his lawyer friend Charles Smithson in Yorkshire. The letter suggests Smithson had previously pointed out that Chapman and Hall’s contracts were not at all favourable to Dickens. The author responded, ‘The Oliver agreement was of my own making, and so was the Pickwick. It was a consequence of the astonishing rapidity of my success and the steady rise of my fame that the enormous profits of these books should flow into hands other than mine. It has always been so …’ Dickens also mentioned that another publishing company, Bradbury and Evans, was courting him, but that he was not interested in changing firms. He was soon to change his mind.

  All the time he was writing A Christmas Carol, Dickens’s letters show his constant preoccupation with the story. He wrote to George Cruikshank, ‘I am finishing a little Book for Christmas, and contemplate a Bolt, to do so in peace. As soon as I have done, I will let you know, and then I hope we shall take a glass of Grog together.’ And to Marion Ely, ‘I have been working from morning until night upon my little Christmas Book; and have really had no time to think of anything but that.’

  A Christmas Carol was finished on 2 December 1843. It had taken its author just six weeks to write. Despite being triumphant about finishing it, he was panicking about his finances, knowing his bank account was overdrawn, which was worryingly reminiscent of his father’s ineptitude with money. Dickens was also furious that Chapman and Hall were making so little effort to publicise the book. Bradbury and Evans were happy to point out his current publisher’s misdemeanours. Two days after finishing A Christmas Carol, he wrote a furious letter to his friend Thomas Mitton:

  ‘I have been obliged to write [Chapman and Hall] a most tremendous letter, and have told them not to answer it, or come near me, but simply to do what I have ordered them. Can you believe that with the exception of Blackwood’s, the Carol is not advertised in One of the Magazines! Bradb
ury would not believe it when I told him on Saturday last. And he says that nothing but a tremendous push can possibly atone for such fatal negligence … I have shewn the book to two or three Judges of very different views and constitutions. I have never seen men, personally and mentally opposed to each other, so unanimous in their predictions, or so hot in their approval.’

  Dickens sent Mitton a copy of his manuscript, and Mitton responded very warmly. Dickens’s reply shows how strong his own feelings were about the story:

  ‘I am extremely glad you feel the Carol. For I knew I meant a good thing. And when I see the effect of such a little whole as that, on those for whom I care, I have a strong sense of the immense effect I could produce with an entire book. I am quite certain of that … I am sure if will do me a great deal of good; and I hope it will sell, well.’

  In writing A Christmas Carol, Charles Dickens was encapsulating the zeitgeist. For some years, people had been feeling nostalgic for the ways in which Christmas used to be celebrated and the British Isles was ripe for a renaissance in the ways in which they viewed the Christmas season. As the Enlightenment of the eighteenth century had made way for the technological wizardry of the nineteenth, there was a renewed interest in the past – but as an historic fascination, rather than a desire to live within it. With every decade that passed, greater numbers of British people were becoming literate and educated, and the desire to know more about their country’s history was increasing. Stories of how the ancient Britons used to celebrate their pagan winter festival captured the imagination, and the fashion of dressing one’s home for Christmas with ever more elaborate decorations and greenery began to become even more popular.

  The year 1843, was to mark a turning point in how the British – and much of the wider world – celebrated Christmas. Not only was it the year in which A Christmas Carol was published; it was also the year in which the very first Christmas card was produced commercially. The name Henry Cole is little remembered today, but he was a true pioneer of the Victorian age. He was involved in the reformation of the postal service, was a pioneer of the railways and was one of the main instigators and creators – together with Prince Albert – of the Great Exhibition – full title ‘The Great Exhibition of the Works of Industry of All Nations’ – in 1851. Through that, he also helped with the creation of the South Kensington Museums and the Royal Albert Hall. He began his career as a civil servant at the Public Records Office, and went on to become the very first director of the South Kensington Museum, now known as the Victoria and Albert Museum, or the V&A.

  For the perennially busy Henry Cole, the Christmas tradition of sending long, handwritten letters was proving impossible alongside his already very crowded working schedule. He simply did not have the time to sit and write letters to everyone he wanted to keep in touch with. Thanks to Henry Cole’s efficiency in helping the reformer and campaigner Rowland Hill create the new and improved ‘Penny Post’ in 1840, increasing numbers of letters were arriving daily, all of which needed an answer. Overwhelmed by the demands of the season, Henry Cole came up with the idea of creating a card he could send instead of writing letters. He asked an artist friend, John Callcott Horsley, to draw a picture of the Cole family celebrating Christmas together.

  John Callcott Horsley, was a well-respected artist, who had trained at the Royal Academy and gained initial fame for his portraiture. He also became known for the frescoes he painted at the new Houses of Parliament (which had been rebuilt following a fire in 1834). His sister, Elizabeth, had married the great railway engineer, Isambard Kingdom Brunel. Today, he is remembered as the designer of his first Christmas card, but in his own time, he was best known – and satirised – not for the Christmas card, but for the zeal with which he campaigned against nudity. He was infuriated when the Royal Academy started permitting students to draw from naked female models. All of the Royal Academy’s students, at this time, were male and Horsley led a campaign to insist that, although male models could be sketched nude, all female models should be clothed. The campaign earned him the nickname of ‘Clothes Horsley’ and made him the subject of many cartoons.

  On 17 December 1843, two days before A Christmas Carol was published, Henry Cole recorded in his diary, ‘In the Evg Horsley came & brought his design for Christmas cards’. The design was based on a triptych, but it was not a religious scene. In the central section, is a sketch of three generations of Henry Cole’s family raising their glasses in a toast to Christmas. On the two side panels are images of almsgiving of food and warm clothing being given to the poor, one of the central tenets of an oldfashioned Christmas. The Cole family is depicted sitting on a trellised balcony, from which is draped a banner that reads ‘A Merry Christmas And A Happy New Year To You’. At the bottom of the card is printed ‘Published at Summerly’s Home Treasury Office, 12 Old Bond Street, London’. To Henry Cole’s friends, this would have been significant, as, in addition to his work as a civil servant in the Public Record Office, Cole wrote books under the pseudonym Felix Summerly.

  The cards were printed as lithographs by Joseph Cundell, and then hand tinted by the professional colourer William Mason. That Christmas, while much of the world was responding with an extraordinary fervour to the publication of A Christmas Carol, Henry Cole sent out his very first cards. He had commissioned the printer to produce one thousand copies, so, after he had taken all the cards he needed, he put up the remaining stock for sale, at the price of one shilling each. An advertisement from the Athenaeum magazine described ‘Felix Summerly’s’ card as ‘Just published. A Christmas Congratulation Card: or picture emblematical of Old English Festivity to Perpetuate kind recollections between Dear Friends.’

  The first Christmas card proved controversial. Henry Cole was the father of eight children, and the depiction of some of his children on the Christmas card caused a furore. In the foreground a woman carefully helps a child sip from a glass of red wine, while in the background another child’s face is obscured by the bottom of a wine glass and a little boy stands eagerly, apparently waiting for his drink. The Temperance Society was outraged, concerned that the card would cause an increase in drunkenness at Christmas time and lead to the moral corruption of children. The Temperance Society was also angered by the Cratchit family’s Christmas lunch in A Christmas Carol, as Bob Cratchit is described as having made:

  ‘some hot mixture in a jug with gin and lemons, and stirred it round and round and put it on the hob to simmer … Then all the Cratchit family drew round the hearth, in what Bob Cratchit called a circle, meaning half a one; and at Bob Cratchit’s elbow stood the family display of glass. Two tumblers, and a custard-cup without a handle. These held the hot stuff from the jug, however, as well as golden goblets would have done; and Bob served it out with beaming looks, while the chestnuts on the fire sputtered and cracked noisily.’

  In 1845, the Gloucester Journal included an account of a Temperance Society Christmas tea party at which the chairman’s speech was recorded:

  ‘He wanted to see people support temperance for virtue’s sake, not for fashion. If Prince Albert was a teetotaller, all the nobility would follow his example … The object of this society was to abolish drunkenness. With what sort of conscience could parents teach their children to drink! … He thought that if the 600 members of the House of Commons were to give up their wine, they would do more good than by all their laws.’

  Initially, Henry Cole’s idea was a commercial failure, because few people grasped the concept of a Christmas card, and a shilling was a very expensive price for a single card. Within a couple of years, however, the idea had grown in popularity, helped largely by the renewed fervour for Christmas, prompted by the popularity of A Christmas Carol. By the end of the decade, Henry Cole’s idea was well on its way to becoming as important a part of celebrating Christmas as Charles Dickens’s Christmas novella had become. By the 1860s, Christmas cards were being mass produced, with artists and printers from all over the country cashing in on Henry Cole’s idea, althou
gh very few early commercial Christmas cards featured religious pictures, most of the designs were of food, parties or saccharine illustrations of young children, usually depicted either naked in the role of a fairy or dressed in ‘Sunday best’ clothes. In 1883, The Times wrote that the new fashion for buying Christmas cards had:

  ‘created a new trade, and has opened up a new field of labour for artists, lithographers, engravers, printers, ink and pasteboard makers … All the year round brains are at work devising new designs and inventing novelties. The very cheap Christmas cards come from Germany where they can be produced at a much cheaper rate, but all the more artistic and more highly finished cards are the result of English workmanship.’

  The astonishing and immediate success of A Christmas Carol surprised even its author. One of its most fervent supporters was the novelist William Thackeray. In his heartfelt review in Fraser’s Magazine, Thackeray commented, ‘Who can listen to objections regarding such a book as this? It seems to me a national benefit, and to every man or woman who reads it a personal kindness.’ Dickens had foreseen that A Christmas Carol would be popular, but even he was not prepared for just how rapidly the book would sell. The first print run of 6,000 copies was published on 19 December 1843, and on Christmas Eve Dickens received a letter from Chapman and Hall to say the book was about to sell out ‘and that as the orders were coming in fast from town and country, it would soon be necessary to reprint’. The national fervour that grew out of the book’s publication was unprecedented – and this was despite its publishers having made so little effort to publicise the new title. As a consequence, Charles Dickens ended his contract with Chapman and Hall in 1844 and began working with Bradbury and Evans.