Dickens and Christmas
Page 14
‘Michael Warden never went away again, and never sold his house, but opened it afresh, maintained a golden means of hospitality, and had a wife, the pride and honour of that countryside, whose name was Marion.’
In common with The Cricket on the Hearth, Dickens’s fourth Christmas story is not a Christmas-themed book. There is a brief mention of Christmas when Dickens wants to explain how time has passed, ‘The wounded trees had long ago made Christmas logs, and blazed and roared away’ and again when Alfred returns from his studies, which happens at Christmas:
‘The day arrived. A raging winter day, that shook the old house, sometimes, as if it shivered in the blast … All his old friends should congregate about him. He should not miss a face that he had known and liked. No! They should every one be there!
‘So, guests were bidden, and musicians were engaged, and tables spread, and floors prepared for active feet, and bountiful provision made, of every hospitable kind. Because it was the Christmas season, and his eyes were all unused to English holly and its sturdy green, the dancing-room was garlanded and hung with it; and the red berries gleamed an English welcome to him, peeping from among the leaves.’
The rest of the story makes no reference to the season. To publish books at Christmas time made excellent business sense, but Dickens had no desire to write about Christmas in every story.
One of the main reasons Dickens returned to London from Paris was to see the authorised stage version of The Battle of Life, which he had given his friend Arthur Smith permission to stage at the Lyceum Theatre. Giving his blessing to an authorised version still didn’t prevent pirated versions of his book from being performed all over the country. He arrived back in Paris just in time to celebrate Christmas, thrilled with his new book’s success. Between Christmas and New Year, he wrote an emotional letter to Forster, who had been so supportive of his Christmas books:
‘Amen, amen. Many merry Christmases, many happy new years, unbroken friendship, great accumulation of cheerful recollections, affection on earth, and heaven at last, for all of us.’
CHAPTER TWELVE
The Haunted Man
‘The Christmas music he had heard before, began to play. He listened to it at first, as he had listened in the churchyard; but presently – it playing still, and being borne towards him on the night air, in a low, sweet, melancholy strain – he rose, and stood stretching his hands about him, as if there were some friend approaching within his reach, on whom his desolate touch might rest, yet do no harm. As he did this, his face became less fixed and wondering; a gentle trembling came upon him; and at last his eyes filled with tears, and he put his hands before them, and bowed down his head.’
Charles Dickens, The Haunted Man, and the Ghost’s Bargain (1848)
Throughout the 1840s, the fashion for celebrating Christmas continued to expand, boosted by Dickens and his fellow authors’ publications, by sentimental Christmas poetry published in newspapers and magazines, and by the activities of the royal household’s Christmases being described in the newspapers. Spawned by the astounding success of A Christmas Carol, the season of Christmas was even bigger business than before, and people on the poorer end of the financial scale started saving for Christmas by joining clubs; these allowed people to make regular payments on account, which could then be redeemed at Christmas, spreading the cost of a Christmas meal over several weeks or months. Many newspapers published a report in December of 1846:
‘Experienced salesmen at Leadenhall-market state that the demand for Christmas geese has this year exceeded that of any previous season, and that the establishment of clubs has, within the last few days, brought upwards of 20,000 geese into the market. In some parts of the metropolis, “plum pudding clubs” have been established.’
The lessons expressed in A Christmas Carol were beginning to affect the lives of the Victorian public. On 19 December 1846, three years since A Christmas Carol’s publication day, the Hereford Times reported:
‘We notice that at Ross and other towns, Saturday next, as it intervenes between Christmas-day and Sunday, will be observed as a holiday; and a declaration to that effect is now being generally subscribed by the respectable tradesmen of this city, who have agreed to suspend business on that day.’
The Liverpool Mail reported:
‘In Manchester, and many other towns of the kingdom, it is intended to suspend business on the Saturday following Christmas Day, (which falls on Friday) in order that parties visiting their friends may have the opportunity of absenting themselves from the toils and cares of this work-a day world, from Thursday night till Monday morning.’
No one, it seems, wanted to be compared to Bob Cratchit’s employer.
Starting new Christmas traditions, and revamping old traditions, was becoming very fashionable as people rushed to embrace the new spirit of the season. As the fashion for celebrating Twelfth Night was dwindling, so too was the need for bakers to create elaborate Twelfth Cakes, so many had started to produce Christmas cakes instead. Newspapers in Manchester reported on a ‘Monster Christmas Cake’ that had caused a stir of excitement in the town. It had been sold in sections, and every purchaser hoped they would have bought a part that contained a hidden ring. On 1 January 1847, the Manchester Times reported:
‘Four purchasers of parts of this cake have each acknowledged to be the lucky discoverers of a ring. The other eleven rings are yet to be found, as there were fifteen in before it was cut. If there be no magic in the rings, there will be mirth in finding them.’
‘Of the “high days of the Calendar”, Christmas was always the one which held the chief place in England, where it was celebrated in a manner so different from what was customary in other countries, as to excite the astonishment of foreigners. As soon as the Christmas holidays had arrived, work and care were universally thrown aside; and, instead of devotional practice, by which other countries commemorated the sacred occasion, England rang from one end to the other with mirth and joviality. Christmas Carols were trailed in every street; masquerades and plays took possession of houses and churches indifferently; a lord of misrule, whose reign lasted from All Hallow Eve till the day after the Feast of Pentecost, was elected in every noble household to preside over the sports and fooleries of the inmates, while each member prepared himself either to enact some strange character, or to devise some new stroke of mirth. The towns, on those occasions, assumed a sylvan appearance; the houses were dressed with branches of ivy and holly; the churches were converted into leafy tabernacles; and standards bedecked with evergreens were set up in the streets, while the young of both sexes danced around them.’
From ‘Bringing in Christmas’, the Illustrated London News, 20 December 1845
In the autumn of 1847, Dickens decided not to write a Christmas book. He was still struggling with Dombey and Son, and he had no desire to relive the stress of the previous year. By the time Christmas arrived, he had also embarked on a new venture – but, this time, it was not a literary one. He began a joint philanthropic venture with Angela Burdett-Coutts, the heiress to her grandfather Thomas Coutts’s banking fortune. While Burdett-Coutts provided the necessary finances, Charles Dickens did the majority of the planning and practical work and in November 1847, they opened Urania Cottage, a home and refuge for ‘fallen women’. Dickens and Burdett-Coutts believed passionately that women’s prisons were full of innocent victims, both philanthropists were of the opinion that society and its double-standards forced women to turn to crime, usually thieving and prostitution, in order to feed themselves and their children. Urania Cottage offered a type of halfway house for women wanting to start a new life.
Perhaps relieved by the lessening of his workload by not producing a new Christmas book, Dickens was in a very jovial mood, writing to Angela Burdett-Coutts on Christmas Eve, ‘A thousand thanks for the noble turkey. I thought it was an infant, sent here by mistake, when it was brought in. It looked so like a fine baby.’ Gifts of food predominate in Dickens’s Christmas letters; it was the
custom to send food rather than the more elaborate Christmas gifts that people expected by the start of the twentieth century. People living in the countryside often packed up special Christmas food parcels to send to relatives and friends living in towns.
Dickens also sent similar gifts of food or drink to friends, such as the ‘bottle of sweet wine of rare perfection, made from the Muscatelle Grape. Drunk with ice, or ice pudding, you will find it most delicious – with a generous and fragrant smack of the bright sun in it, that I have very seldom tasted’ which he sent to John Forster in 1852, the ‘half a dozen of an old liqueur brandy not easy to get’ that he sent to Thomas Beard in 1859, and the ‘big turkey and ham’ that was sent to his editor and friend William Henry Wills in 1860. In the same year, Dickens wrote to the poet (and stockbroker) Samuel Collinson, ‘I beg to thank you cordially for the superb Pork Pie which graces the sideboard here to-day. Let me send you in return all the good wishes of the blessed season and time of year’ and in 1863 Joseph Ellis was being thanked for ‘the Paté. It arrived in the finest condition, and was received with rapture by a crowded house.’ In 1866, he arranged with the landlord of his local pub, the Sir John Falstaff Inn, to send a Christmas gift to Mrs Marsh, the wife of Dickens’s groom, ‘2 dozen pints of bottled stout’ and at the start of 1870, Dickens wrote to Percy Fitzgerald and his wife thanking them for their gift of ‘some delicious birds’.
The non-edible presents that Dickens wrote to thank people for were usually very simple gifts, for example a cigar case from his friend Mary Boyle. It was also common for friends and family members to give one other homemade gifts, such as pen wipers and handkerchiefs. In 1854, Dickens wrote to Angela Burdett-Coutts, who had thanked him and his family for their gift, to which Dickens responded, ‘I am glad you like the baskets. May they help to make you tidy!’ A couple of years later Burdett-Coutts sent Dickens a present of ‘letter weights’. The over-commercialisation and expensive gift-buying now associated with Christmas had not yet happened. The royal family might have been renowned for giving each other expensive gifts, such as the jewels that Queen Victoria grew accustomed to her husband tying to her Christmas tree, but this was not common practice. The changes happened quite steadily throughout the nineteenth century until, by the 1880s, the pastime of ‘Christmas shopping’ had become well established for around six weeks before Christmas. It had also become fashionable for shops to create special ‘Christmas windows’. In 1881, the Lady’s Pictorial magazine described how shops decorated themselves for the festive season:
‘Christmas cards in almost every window, in the companionship of the attractions of the toy-seller, the wares of the draper, the irresistible temptations of the milliner, and of their more legitimate comrades in the show-cases of the stationer – from everywhere have these pretty little tokens of goodwill and kindly thoughts been peering out and seeking the attention of the passer-by.’
In 1885, a traveller to America compared its Christmas preparations with those in Britain:
‘The presentation of ‘boxes’ and souvenirs is the same in America as in England … everybody expects to give and receive. A month before the event the fancy stores are crowded all day long with old and young in search of suitable souvenirs, and every object is purchased, from the costliest gems to the tawdriest babiole that may get into the market. If the weather should be fine, the principal streets are thronged with ladies shopping in sleighs … laden with parcels of painted toys, instruments of mock music and septuagenarian dread, from a penny trumpet to a sheepskin drum.’ (Howard Paul Christmas in America, 1885)
After taking a break from Christmas writing in 1847, Dickens was planning a new idea for the following year, but the start of 1848 was not a propitious one. After Christmas, Charles and Catherine Dickens were in Scotland and they had planned to travel home via York, where they would meet up with Charles’s younger brother, Alfred. He was a talented and inventive engineer, who advised the government on sanitary reform and was working in the railways. Alfred had expected to spend New Year’s Eve of 1847 with his brother and sister-in-law, but they did not arrive and on New Year’s Day, Charles wrote apologetically to explain that while they were on a train to Glasgow, poor Catherine had suffered a very public miscarriage.
Charles and Catherine were back in London on time to celebrate their traditional Twelfth Night party for Charley’s birthday; Dickens wrote to Frank Stone on 4 January 1848, ‘There will be some children of both small and large growth, here on Thursday (Twelfth Night) and some dancing of Sir Roger de Coverley. Kate hopes you’ll come, and so so [do?] I.’ Catherine was unable to join in the festivities and energetic dancing; as Dickens wrote to Angela Burdett-Coutts, ‘I am sorry to say, [Catherine] is in her own room, and likely to be there for two or three days.’
It was the beginning of a difficult and sad year, in which Fanny Burnett’s health, and that of her son Harry, deteriorated rapidly. That summer, Charles was frantic with worry about Fanny as well as worrying about Catherine, who was pregnant again and not well. On 5 July, Charles wrote to Forster, after a visit to his sister, that he was very alarmed by a sudden change in Fanny’s health, even though just two nights earlier she had been planning for ‘after Christmas’. Fanny died on 2 September and her brother was devastated. He sank into depression. He was also being plagued by constant calls to pay off his brother Fred’s debts and was furious that Fred was planning to marry despite being in such straits.
On 5 December, the family gathered together for the marriage of Dickens’s youngest sibling, Augustus, to Harriett Lovell. Charles was pleased about the wedding, but less happy when Fred’s marriage took place in between Christmas and New Year. Fred’s new wife was the 18-year-old Anna Weller. Charles distrusted Anna and was concerned that neither she nor his brother were serious about the marriage. Ten years later, the couple separated, after infidelity on both sides. In the ensuing court case, Anna was granted alimony, which Fred was unable to pay. He fled the country to avoid payment, and when he returned some months later, was sent to debtors’ prison, the very fate Charles Dickens had always feared and tried so hard to prevent. Augustus’s marriage also failed when he ran away to America with his pregnant mistress, Bertha Phillips, abandoning Harriett in London.
It was already being considered traditional for Dickens to give readings from A Christmas Carol, but after 1848, every time he gave a reading, he was reminded that the ‘little Fan’ of Scrooge’s schooldays, based on his own sister Fanny, was lost to him and soon it was apparent that the original Tiny Tim would not survive. Throughout that Christmas of 1848, while Catherine and Charles were awaiting the birth of their eighth child, Fanny’s son, Henry Dickens Burnett, was dying. On 19 January 1849, Catherine gave birth to a son, whom they named Henry Fielding Dickens. His was a very difficult and painful birth, during which Catherine was given a new wonder-drug, chloroform. Henry Burnett died ten days after the birth of his cousin. He was buried beside his mother at Highgate Cemetery. Dickens’s letters suggest that he threw himself into his work that Christmas, chasing invoices that should have been paid and ensuring Urania Cottage was running smoothly, trying not to think about the fact that despite having paid numerous eminent doctors, he had been unable to save his sister or her child.
Unaware of the misery the author was experiencing, for Dickens’s readers the Christmas of 1848 was enhanced by his final Christmas Book. Today, The Haunted Man and the Ghost’s Bargain is one of his least-remembered works, yet on the day it was published it sold around 18,000 copies. It saw a return to the Christmas-themed redemption story, which had been so popular in A Christmas Carol. The idea for the story had been growing in Dickens’s imagination for some time, but he had put the idea aside to write The Battle of Life. From Switzerland, on 30 August 1846, Dickens had written to Forster, ‘I have been dimly conceiving a very ghostly and wild idea, which I supposed I must now reserve for the next Christmas book. Nous verrons. It will mature in the streets of Paris by night, as well as in London.’
The ‘haunted man’ of the book’s title is Mr Redlaw, a chemistry teacher, haunted by sorrow over the death of his sister. At the start of his gothic story, Dickens describes where Redlaw lives and works:
‘… his inner chamber, part library and part laboratory … so solitary and vault-like, – an old, retired part of an ancient endowment for students, once a brave edifice, planted in an open place, but now the obsolete whim of forgotten architects; smoke-age-and-weatherdarkened, squeezed on every side by the overgrowing of the great city, and choked, like an old well, with stones and bricks … where no sun had straggled for a hundred years, but where, in compensation for the sun’s neglect, the snow would lie for weeks when it lay nowhere else, and the black east wind would spin like a huge humming-top, when in all other places it was silent and still.’
When his servants, the Swidger family, bring him food and start to decorate the room with greenery for Christmas, Redlaw is despondent and wonders why they bother, saying, ‘“Another Christmas come, another year gone!” … with a gloomy sigh.’