Dickens and Christmas

by Dickens

  Although living in pinching poverty, in ‘a little cracked nutshell of a wooden house, which was, in truth, no better than a pimple on the prominent redbrick nose of Gruff and Tackleton’, Caleb pretends to his daughter they are living in a beautiful, comfortable home and, because she can’t see how shabby their possessions have become, she is happy to believe him. As Dickens commented:

  ‘I should have said that Caleb lived here, and his poor Blind Daughter somewhere else – in an enchanted home of Caleb’s furnishing, where scarcity and shabbiness were not, and trouble never entered. Caleb was no sorcerer, but … [the] Blind Girl never knew that ceilings were discoloured, walls blotched and bare of plaster here and there, high crevices unstopped and widening every day, beams mouldering and tending downward. The Blind Girl never knew that iron was rusting, wood rotting, paper peeling off; the size, and shape, and true proportion of the dwelling, withering away. The Blind Girl never knew that … sorrow and faintheartedness were in the house; that Caleb’s scanty hairs were turning greyer and more grey, before her sightless face.’

  Caleb is a toymaker and Bertha makes dolls and their dresses, themes to which Dickens returned in Our Mutual Friend. Caleb also pretends to his daughter that Tackleton is a kind man whose abusive comments are meant in jest; unfortunately this has led Bertha to be secretly, and unrequitedly, in love with the good man she believes Tackleton to be. As a loving parent, Caleb builds a protective world of happiness around his daughter, hoping she will never discover it is fabricated.

  Contrary to the loving opinion that Bertha has formed of him, Tackleton tries to kill happiness where he sees it, and this includes his desire to stamp upon the Peerybingles’ cheerful cricket:

  ‘… “why don’t you kill that Cricket? I would! I always do. I hate their noise.”

  “You kill your Crickets, eh?” said John.

  “Scrunch ’em, sir,” returned the other, setting his heel heavily on the floor.’

  John, wisely, does not kill his cricket, and in the final Chirp of the book, the cricket, ‘in fairy shape’, saves him from making a fatal mistake. The Cricket on the Hearth is not a redemption story in the same sense as A Christmas Carol or The Chimes, nor does it centre around Christmas. It was the first of Dickens’s ‘Christmas books’ to be given the name solely because it was marketed at Christmas time.

  The first copies of The Cricket on the Hearth were sold on 20 December 1845, and immediately theatres began working on pirated productions. Over a dozen plays based on the book were recorded that winter, even though Dickens had agreed to only one being produced. Theatres continually ignored any claims of copyright, eager to adapt the latest work by the author whose name had become synonymous with Christmas.

  On Christmas Day 1845, the Morning Chronicle published an article about The Cricket on the Hearth and on the general effect that Charles Dickens had had on the celebrating of the festive season:

  ‘Anybody who walked the streets yesterday, on one of the finest and most cheerful days of London weather, could not but remark what a hilarious air the town wore – how jolly and rosy people’s faces looked in the foggy sunshine – how wonderfully pink and happy the little boys’ countenances were who are come home for the holidays – and observe many other pleasant Christmas phenomena. To see the butchers’ and poulterers’ shops was quite a pleasure – the most obese geese, turkeys, and gigantic pantomime joints of beef hung in those hospitable warehouses – under the mistletoe boughs – reasoning with yourself, you asked why should those comestibles be fatter now at Christmas than at any other time? Fortnum and Mason’s, in Piccadilly, is always a beautiful and astonishing shop … Yesterday it was a perfect fairy-palace … the theatres break out into pantomimes; the booksellers’ windows glitter with gilt picture-books; and more charming to some well-regulated minds even than the Fortnum and Mason sugar-candy elysium, are Mr Nickisson’s library tables in Regent-street, blazing with a hundred new Christmas volumes, in beautiful bindings, with beautiful pictures…. But for three years past the great monopoliser has been MR DICKENS. He has been elected as chief literary master of the ceremonies for Christmas. It is he who best understands the kindness and joviality and withal the pathos of the season. Many thousand copies of the “Cricket on the Hearth” have been sold, and it is not a week old. You hear talk of it in every company … Going into the city on Tuesday, the writer of this beheld a bookseller’s boy with a bag of “Crickets” over his shoulder, standing stock-still by the Royal Exchange, and reading one, sub Jove. On the very same day at dinner everybody had read it; everybody was talking about it; and the very clergyman who said grace confessed that he had been whimpering over it all the morning … the general effect of the writing was of this heart-stirring, kindly character … it is a good Christmas book, illuminated with extra gas, crammed with extra bonbons, French plums and sweetnesses, like a certain Piccadilly palace before-mentioned … As a Christmas pageant which you witness in the armchair – your private box by the fireside – the piece is excellent, uncomparably brilliant, and dexterous.’

  The Morning Chronicle was also full of praise for Daniel Maclise’s illustrations for The Cricket on the Hearth, describing them as ‘one of the most brilliant specimens of the art which has appeared in the very best school of it’. The Northern Star and Leeds General Advertiser however was not happy with the lack of seasonal subject matter, although the critic goes on to claim that Dickens’s third Christmas book is his favourite so far:

  ‘The view we take of Mr Dickens’s three Christmas offerings … The first (the “Carol”), while exhibiting the crime and folly of grasping selfishness, at the same time teaches the great lesson, that the happiness of each individual is only to be ensured by each labouring to promote the happiness of all. This moral, illustrated by a story perfect in every sense, makes the “Carol” a model for Christmas stories; and, viewed as such, the “Carol” at present stands, and probably for ever will stand, unrivalled. The second (the “Chimes”), viewed politically, is the best of the author’s works. As an exposition of the wrongs and sufferings endured by the man, and a vindication of their rights and claims to justice, – so regarded the “Chimes” is superior to the “Carol”. Mr Dickens’s present production, considered as a Christmas story, will not bear comparison with the “Carol”; indeed it might have been published at Midsummer instead of Christmas, as it contains nothing relating to Christmas, excepting a slight description of wintry weather, the time of the story being laid in the month of January. Viewed politically, the present story is not to be placed in competition with the “Chimes”; indeed it is a totally different story. Mr Dickens, in his “Cricket on the Hearth”, has devoted himself wholly to the work of portraying home-scenes and home-feelings … nevertheless, [it] has beauties of its own to which neither the “Carol” nor the “Chimes” can lay claim … To Mr Dickens we return our heartfelt thanks for this new gift to his fellow creatures, assured as we are, that no one can become acquainted with its lessons of sympathy and goodness without becoming better and happier therefrom. We take our leave from this little book heartily recommending it to our readers, reminding each and all … that “To have a cricket on the hearth is the luckiest thing in all the world!”’

  With the publication of The Cricket on the Hearth, Dickens’s reputation as the saviour and promoter of Christmas cheer was well and truly established. Three Christmas books in as many years had cemented his celebrity. On 27 December 1845, The Examiner newspaper commented:

  ‘It is our strong belief that, in this largest and freest sense of benefit, very great public and private good has been done by the extraordinary popularity, the universal acceptance, of these Christmas Tales of Mr Dickens; much positive, earnest, and practical good. For they have carried to almost every fireside, with new enjoyment of the season, a new apprehension of its claims and duties … they have brought within reach of the charities what seemed too remote for them to meddle with … they have comforted the generous, rebuked the selfish, cured not a li
ttle folly…. Mere literary fame is a second-rate thing to this.’

  ‘Old Christmas’ by G. Linnaeus Banks

  Hurrah! for old Christmas, the hearty and jolly,

  Hurrah! for old Christmas the friend of us all,

  Who laughs at the frowns of grim-faced melancholy,

  And comes with a transport to great and to small.

  Up, up! let us drink to the jocund old fellow,

  Though wrinkled his brow, and his locks silver-grey,

  Yet his footstep is light, and his heart it is mellow

  As any that joins in our banquet to-day.

  Then pluck from the mistletoe, pluck from the holly,

  The red with the while in a chaplet appear.

  While we banish dull care, which to cherish is folly,

  And drink to old Christmas, the king of the year….

  Printed in Bentley’s Miscellany, 19 December 1846

  CHAPTER ELEVEN

  The Battle of Life

  ‘We are at liberty to recommend the “Battle of Life” to our holidaymaking readers as an interesting and effective drama.’

  (Bell’s Life in London, 27 December 1846)

  By 1846, the literary world was in a fever of commissioning Christmas stories. Magazines and newspapers actively sought out seasonal short stories and Dickens’s fellow authors quickly started to write their own. In December 1846, the year in which Dickens published his fourth Christmas story, The Battle of Life, the Preston Chronicle commented, ‘This Christmas-custom of telling merry tales has been revived of late years by one or two of our most popular writers of prose fiction. Mr Dickens, we believe, began it, and his example has been worthily followed by (among others) Mr Thackeray.’ After a good review of The Battle of Life, the paper went on to publish a long extract of Thackeray’s new Christmas book, Mrs Perkins’s Ball, which the journalist described as ‘charming’.

  Ironically, while everyone else was rushing to produce Christmas stories, Dickens struggled to write his fourth Christmas book. In the summer of 1846, the Dickens family were in Switzerland; Charles had wanted to return to Italy, but Catherine vetoed the idea, understandably jealous of an intense relationship that had grown between her husband and one of their friends, Madame Augusta de la Rue. Dickens found Switzerland enervating and distracting, because it was too orderly and silent. On 30 August he wrote to Forster that he was missing the ‘magic lantern’ of London:

  ‘For a week or a fortnight I can write prodigiously in a retired place (such as Broadstairs), and a day in London sets me up again and starts me. But the toil and labour of writing, day after day, without that magic lantern, is IMMENSE!! I don’t say this, at all in low spirits, for we are perfectly comfortable here, and I like the place very much indeed, and the people are even more friendly and fond of me than they were in Genoa. I only mention it as a curious fact, which I have never had an opportunity of finding out before. My figures seem disposed to stagnate without crowds about them. I wrote very little in Genoa (only The Chimes), and fancied myself conscious of some such influence there – but Lord! I had two miles of streets at least, lighted at night, to walk about in; and a great theatre to repair to, every night …’

  His writer’s block was made worse by the pressure of knowing he had to write The Battle of Life as well as Dombey and Son, the serialisation of which was due to begin on 1 October. He wrote again to Forster in September:

  ‘I really contemplated, at times, the total abandonment of the Christmas book this year, and the limitation of my labours to Dombey and Son … At length, thank Heaven, I nailed it all at once; and after going on comfortably up to yesterday, and working yesterday from half past nine to six, I was last night in such a state of enthusiasm about it that I think I was an inch or two taller.’

  To Thomas Noon Talfourd he commented:

  ‘I am horribly hard at work with my Christmas Book, which runs (rather inconveniently) in a Curricle just now, with “Dealings with the Firm of Dombey and Son”.’

  On 26 September, just a day after his letter to Talfourd, he wrote again to Forster, in a panic:

  ‘I am going to write you a most startling piece of intelligence. I fear there may be NO CHRISTMAS BOOK! I would give the world to be on the spot to tell you this. Indeed I once thought of starting for London tonight. I have written nearly a third of it. It promises to be pretty; quite a new idea in the story, I hope; but to manage it without the supernatural agency now impossible of introduction, and yet to move it naturally within the required space, or with any shorter limit than a Vicar of Wakefield, I find a difficulty to be so perplexing … that I am fearful of wearing myself out if I go on … If I had nothing but the Christmas book to do, I WOULD do it; but I get horrified and distressed beyond conception at the prospect of being jaded when I come back to the other, and making it a mere race against time. I have written the first part; I know the end and the upshot of the second; and the whole of the third (there are only three in all). I know the purport of each character, and the plain idea that each is to work out; and I have the principal effects sketched on paper. It cannot end quite happily, but will end cheerfully and pleasantly. But my soul sinks before the commencement of the second part – and longest – and the introduction of the under idea … I am now sure I could not have invented the Carol at the commencement of the Chuzzelwit, or gone to a new book from the Chimes. But this is certain. I am sick, giddy, and capriciously despondent. I have bad nights; am full of disquietude and anxiety, and am constantly haunted … I now resolve to make one effort more. I will go to Geneva tomorrow, and try … whether I can get in at all bravely, in the changed scene…’

  The aptly named The Battle of Life tore at Dickens’s peace of mind; he wrote to Forster four days after his previous letter:

  ‘I have still not made up my mind as to what I CAN do with the Christmas book … On the other hand I am dreadfully averse to abandoning it, and am so torn between the two things that I know not what to do.’

  A couple of days later, on 3 October, he wrote, ‘I hope and trust, now, the Christmas book will come in due course! I have had three very good days’ work at Geneva.’

  As always, Dickens sent Forster the novella in parts, as he wrote them. Sending his friend the final episode he wrote, in a crisis of confidence:

  ‘I really do not know what this story is worth. I am so floored: wanting sleep, and never having had my head free of it for this month past. I think there are some places in this last part which I may bring better together in the proof, and where a touch or two may be of service … What do you think of the concluding paragraph? Would you leave it for happiness? It is merely experimental.’

  On 20 October he wrote yet another anguished letter to Forster:

  ‘I dreamed all last week that the Battle of Life was a series of chambers impossible to be got to rights or got out of, through which I wandered drearily all night. On Saturday night I don’t think I slept an hour. I was perpetually roaming through the story, and endeavouring to dovetail the revolution here into the plot. The mental distress, quite horrible.’

  Despite the agonies of its creation, The Battle of Life was published on 19 December 1846 and was an immediate success. The Dickens family were spending the winter in Paris, but Dickens returned to London for eight days to publicise the book. He was also relieved to escape from a very cold Parisian winter:

  ‘Cold intense. The water in the bedroom jugs freezes into solid masses from top to bottom, bursts the jugs with reports like small cannon, and rolls out on the table and washstands hard as granite. I stick to the shower-bath, but have been most hopelessly out of sorts.’

  From Forster’s home, Dickens penned a note to Catherine, ‘Christmas Book published today – 23,000 copies already gone!!!’

  The Battle of Life tells the story of two sisters, Grace and Marion Jeddler, who Dickens describes as ‘very beautiful to look upon. Two better faces … never made a fireside bright and sacred’. Marion, the younger sister, is engaged to her childhood
sweetheart, Alfred Heathfield. As they are now adults and Alfred has finished his studies, the long-anticipated wedding is being planned. Then Marion disappears. It is rumoured she has eloped with Michael Warden, who is described as ‘a man of about thirty, or that time of life, negligently dressed, and somewhat haggard in the face, but well-made, well-attired, and well-looking, who sat in the armchair of state, with one hand in his breast, and the other in his dishevelled hair, pondering moodily.’ Michael is a brooding, Romantic hero – with a bad reputation. He had told people he was in love with Marion and wanted her to break her engagement and, because Michael leaves on the same day Marion disappears, the community mourns her as ‘lost’, meaning she is a ‘fallen woman’.

  In their sorrow, Grace and Alfred grow close and, in the third and final part of the story, Grace and Alfred are married and have a daughter, whom they have named Marion. After six years, the missing Marion returns – not as a fallen woman, but as a virtuous and selfless one. It transpires she had realised her sister was in love with Alfred. As Marion knew she was not truly in love with her fiancé, she decided to disappear and let Alfred and Grace discover real love together. Marion has spent the intervening years living with her aunt Martha and has no knowledge of where Michael Warden went to.

  At the same time that Marion and her aunt return to the village, the brokenhearted Michael also returns. He has been travelling the world, convinced Marion had married Alfred, as they were expected to do on the day he left. Michael has returned only to sell his house and sort out his financial affairs, after which he plans to ‘quit this place forever’. Instead, he discovers Marion is unmarried and in love with him. The story ends with the words: