Dickens and Christmas

by Dickens

  He arrived back in Paris on Christmas Eve after a very rough journey across the English Channel. Although Mamie, Katey and baby Edward were living with their parents in the Parisian flat already, when the school holidays began, all the Dickens boys arrived in Paris, making the tiny apartment even more of a tight squeeze. Charley arrived on Boxing Day. Dickens sent a jokey warning against having a large family to his friend Edmund Yates, whose wife had recently given birth to twin boys, ‘I had seven sons in the Banquet Hall of this apartment – which would not make a very large warm bath…’

  Over the pantomime season, Dickens became homesick for London, possibly caused by a bout of very bad Parisian weather. He wrote to Mark Lemon to ask what theatre shows he had been to and what the pantomime was like:

  ‘I miss you, my dear old boy, at the play, woefully, and miss the walk home, and the partings at the corner of Tavistock Square … We are up to our knees in mud here. Literally in vehement despair, I walked down the avenue outside the Barrière de l’Etoile here yesterday, and went straight on among the trees. I came back with the top-boots of mud on. Nothing will cleanse the streets. Numbers of men and women are forever scooping in them, and they are always one lake of yellow mud. All my trousers go to the tailor’s every day, and are ravelled out at the heels every night. Washing is awful.’

  The following day he wrote to Mary Boyle:

  ‘It is clear to me that climates are gradually assimilating over a great part of the world, and that in the most miserable time of our year, there is very little to choose between London and Paris – except that London is not so muddy. I have never seen dirtier or worse weather than we have had here ever since I returned [from England].’

  The whole family was cheered in their muddy home by the arrival, on time for Charley’s birthday and Twelfth Night, of a ‘noble cake’ sent by Angela Burdett-Coutts. Just as she had managed to do while they were living in Italy, she had secured safe passage for a highly decorated cake which had, somehow, survived the journey intact.

  Throughout 1856, Dickens worked closely with Wilkie Collins on a play that Wilkie had promised to have finished on time for the next Twelfth Night. This was a new style of Christmas theatrical for Dickens. Not only was it not an adaptation of a well-known play or fairy tale, it was also a tragedy. The play was called The Frozen Deep, and it was to cause shock waves in the Dickens family and amongst his fans.

  Dickens was also working on his new Christmas story, The Wreck of the Golden Mary which was advertised grandly in the November and December issues of Household Words:

  ‘Early in December will be published, price Threepence,

  or stamped Fourpence,

  THE WRECK OF THE GOLDEN MARY;

  Being the CAPTAIN’S ACCOUNT of the GREAT

  DELIVERANCE OF HER PEOPLE IN AN OPEN

  BOAT AT SEA: forming

  THE CHRISTMAS NUMBER

  Of HOUSEHOLD WORDS; and containing the amount

  of One regular Number and a Half.’

  The story caused great excitement. Dickens’s stories were habitually read aloud and it had become a Christmas Day tradition for families to sit together and listen as the latest story was read out. The Wreck of the Golden Mary is narrated by the captain, William George Ravender. It tells the story of the ship being wrecked by an iceberg as it tries to navigate to California at the height of the Gold Rush. The story is set in 1856, but relates an accident that happened five years earlier; the stories told by the sailors and passengers, as they are bobbed around in a lifeboat, allowed Dickens, once again, to commission a stable of writers to write the Christmas story collaboratively.

  The Wreck of the Golden Mary was superseded, however, by Dickens’s fervour for The Frozen Deep. Throughout the autumn and into the Christmas season, Dickens’s letters were full of stories about ‘the play’ and its rehearsals. Dickens’s friend, the artist Clarkson Stanfield, who was a very well respected Royal Academician, had agreed to paint the scenery and backdrop, and Dickens hired a policeman whose role on Twelfth Night was to stand at the front door and check people’s invitations. The evening was a triumph. A couple of years later, when reminiscing about the play, Dickens wrote to his friend Captain Cavendish Spencer Boyle:

  ‘It would be as easy to find a Pelican in London, as a decent StageCarpenter while the Pantomimes are on. All the good men in that wise are so engaged, that when I brought out the Frozen Deep at Christmas time, I was obliged (though the Pantomimes were above a week old, and in good working order), to make my own stagecarpenters out of my own private materials.’

  Dickens threw himself into his role of tragic hero Richard Wardour and used the experience to help formulate his ideas for A Tale of Two Cities, which focuses on the same theme as the play, that of two men being in love with the same woman and one of them sacrificing himself. On 19 January 1857, when the performances were over, Dickens wrote to his friend W F de Cerjat in Switzerland:

  ‘…workmen are now battering and smashing down my Theatre here, where we have just been acting a new plat of great merit, done in what I may call (modestly speaking of the getting-up, and not the acting), an unprecedented way. I believe that any thing so complete, has never been seen. We had an act at the North Pole, where the slightest and greatest thing the eye beheld, were equally taken from the books of the Polar Voyagers … It has been the talk of all London for these three weeks. And now it is a mere chaos of scaffolding, ladders, beams, canvass, paint pots, sawdust, artificial snow, gas pipes, and ghastliness. I have taken such pains with it for these ten weeks in all my leisure hours, that I feel, now, shipwrecked – as if I had never been without a Play on my hands, before.’

  CHAPTER FIFTEEN

  Empty Chairs

  On Christmas-eve, grandmamma is always in excellent spirits, and after employing all the children, during the day, in stoning the plums, and all that, insists, regularly every year, on uncle George coming down into the kitchen, taking off his coat, and stirring the pudding for half an hour or so, which uncle George good-humouredly does, to the vociferous delight of the children and servants. The evening concludes with a glorious game of blindman’s-buff, in an early stage of which grandpapa takes great care to be caught, in order that he may have an opportunity of displaying his dexterity.

  ‘On the following morning, the old couple, with as many of the children as the pew will hold, go to church in great state: leaving aunt George at home dusting decanters and filling casters, and uncle George carrying bottles into the dining-parlour, and calling for corkscrews, and getting into everybody’s way.’

  Charles Dickens, Christmas Festivities (1835)

  In the summer of 1857, buoyed by the success of their Twelfth Night play and longing to perform on stage again, Dickens and Wilkie Collins reprised The Frozen Deep at a public theatre in London. They staged the play as a charity or ‘benefit performance’, starring their friends and family members, to raise money for the bereaved family of their friend, the playwright Douglas Jerrold. It proved such a success, that they decided to take the play on tour to Manchester. Because they would be performing in a very large and public theatre, they needed to hire professional actresses to perform the roles previously played by Dickens’s daughters and sister-in-law. Through a theatrical friend, they were introduced to a family of actresses, Mrs Ternan and her daughters. Dickens hired the mother and two of her daughters for the tour. By the end of the summer, the 45-year-old Charles Dickens had fallen in love with the youngest actress, Ellen Ternan. She was 18 years old, the same age as his daughter Katey.

  It was a miserable Christmas in the Dickens household that December. Not only were the older children aware of what was happening to their mother and father’s marriage, but it was the first Christmas without Walter, who had gone to India, as a cadet in the East India Company. Charles wrote to a friend that his son ‘likes the country and the life, of all things, and is quite happy’, but Walter was only sixteen years old when he left his family. Catherine, who had not wanted him to go, mi
ssed him dreadfully.

  Dickens was influenced by Walter’s experiences to write, together with Wilkie Collins, a Christmas story entitled The Perils of Certain English Prisoners. The story is set in South America in 1744, but was very obviously inspired by the events of what was known at the time in England as ‘the Indian Mutiny’, which had taken place just a few months previously. Contemporary reviewers were divided, with the Hampshire Advertiser describing it as a ‘thrilling and exquisite narrative’ and the Morning Chronicle advertising the very first theatrical production based on it, while the Daily Telegraph reviewer was disappointed:

  ‘The tale in the Christmas number of Household Words might as well have been published at mid-summer for any reference it has to Christmas. It looks, too, as if the author was “up” to some transatlantic “dodges” to make his story sell well … it is not as a story suited to the season to be placed by the side of the Christmas Carol. Will Dickens ever again give the public such another story so well adapted to the Yule log, the jollity and the humanity of Christmas?’

  Around the country, the Christmas fervour was in full swing, with people trying to emulate the kind of seasonal cheer they had learnt about from the books of Charles Dickens. The London correspondent for the Suffolk and Essex Free Press, sent in his report of how the holiday was being celebrated in the capital:

  ‘Just on the eve of Christmas, there is little said or done in London, not connected with this most festive season. Politics are disregarded altogether. Housewives are looking to the condiments most in repute at such times; while the Lords of Creation amuse themselves with the Christmas number of the Illustrated London News, or Dickens’s Perils of Certain English Prisoners … London, left to itself for the time, makes gigantic preparations for the great event. Not to observe Christmas, is here looked upon as a sin … In a word – Christmas, 1857, will be like all others which have passed away, a season of festivity for rich and poor. People may say the season is not kept as it was formerly; but these are generally old and grumbling people …’

  Ironically, in the Dickens household, the Christmas season was very subdued, and the situation was only going to get worse. Within a few months, Charles had applied for a legal separation from a very unhappy Catherine and the family had been split in half. It was the end of the Dickens family Christmases. From now on, the younger children had to celebrate Christmas without their mother and Charley Dickens, who chose to live with Catherine. At the time Charles and Catherine Dickens separated, the law was entirely favourable to men. Mothers had no legal rights over their children at all; in the eyes of the law a child was the legal property of its father. When Charley chose to live with his mother, he was only 20 years old, a year under the age of majority; legally, he could have been forced to stay in his father’s house until his twenty-first birthday.

  Dickens strove very hard to keep the real reason for the breakdown of his marriage a deep secret, with the result that his legions of fans believed him when he wrote unpleasant articles claiming the fault was Catherine’s. He wanted people to believe Catherine was difficult and not a loving mother. He could not allow people to see that the Charles Dickens who was already being credited with ‘inventing’ Christmas, was not a benign Father Christmas-like figure always dispensing joy, but a man as deeply flawed as other human beings, with a very dark side to him. In December 1897, many years after her father’s death, Katey wrote a long letter to her friend, George Bernard Shaw, which she ended with the postscript:

  ‘If you could make the public understand that my father was not a joyous, jocose gentleman walking about the world with a plum pudding & a bowl of punch you would greatly oblige me.’

  Trying to ignore the chaos that his extramarital love affair had created, throughout 1858 Dickens threw himself into a reinvention of his image. His taste of adulation on the stage in The Frozen Deep had rekindled his youthful desire to be an actor and he began a new phase in his career. In 1858, he started what would become his world-famous public reading tours. He went all over the British Isles with his public readings, and eventually to America. He started the Christmas season early, with a reading of A Christmas Carol in Glasgow on 8 October, determined that giving the public what they wanted would save his public image.

  Now that Ellen was in his life, Dickens’s interest in all things theatrical was even more heightened. He wrote to Forster in astonishment about a pantomime he had seen:

  ‘I … went to the Strand Theatre: having taken a stall beforehand, for it is always crammed … to see the Maid and the Magpie burlesque there. There is the strangest thing in it that I have ever seen on the stage. The boy, Pippo, by Miss Wilton. While it is astonishingly impudent … it is so stupendously like a boy, and unlike a woman, that it is perfectly free from offence. I have never seen such a thing … I call her the cleverest girl I have ever seen on the stage in my time, and the most singularly original.’

  In all the years that the family had lived in London, Dickens had never owned his own home. In 1856 he had finally bought a house, Gad’s Hill Place in Kent, the county where he had spent his happiest times in childhood. The house is on the road between the towns of Rochester and Higham, and Dickens was very proud that Gad’s Hill was mentioned in Shakespeare’s Henriad trilogy. When he bought the house, he and Catherine had decided to use it as a summer home. Now his marriage was over, he decided to make it the family’s main residence.

  For the Dickens children, the Christmas of 1858 was a very strange time. Controversially, ‘Aunty Georgy’ had sided with her brother-in-law against her sister and had remained living with the family as housekeeper, assisted by Mamie. At Christmas, the children missed their mother, Charley and Walter. Christmas was made sadder still by the fact that Dickens and Georgina were being shunned by their Hogarth relatives, which meant that all the children living with him were unable to see that side of their family.

  For Dickens’s public, the Christmas of 1858 was enhanced by one of the most popular Christmas stories in Household Words, A House to Let. It was written by Dickens, Elizabeth Gaskell, Wilkie Collins and Adelaide Anne Procter. It is the story is of an elderly woman, named Sophonisba, who rents a house in London and becomes fascinated by the empty house across the road. The house is supposed to be derelict, but Sophonisba is sure she can detect signs of life inside it. The story is full of intrigue and mystery, until she discovers that a child has been hidden away in the house, unloved by his grandfather and robbed of his rightful inheritance. Sophonisba, who loves children and was unable to have her own, adopts the boy as her grandchild. There is little mention of Christmas in the story, but towards the end Sophibisba muses, ‘That very night, as I sat thinking of the poor child, and of another poor child who is never to be thought about enough at Christmastime, the idea came into my mind which I have lived to execute, and in the realisation of which I am the happiest of women this day.’ She had decided to buy the once-sinister house and turn it into a children’s hospital. This was a topical subject, as since 1852, Charles Dickens had been closely involved with the setting up of Great Ormond Street Hospital, London’s first hospital for children. In 1858, the year in which A House to Let was published, he had raised thousands of pounds so the hospital could be expanded.

  Although this story was more similar to Dickens’s earlier works than his most recent Christmas stories had been, the reviews were not all complimentary, perhaps because many of the newspaper editors were aware of the true nature of his marriage breakdown. The literary review of The Era wrote scathingly:

  ‘Mr. Dickens’s annual literary present for 1859 … has fewer of the faults and eccentricities of this deservedly popular writer than we have seen in any completed work of the same author for some considerable time. But though in saying it has fewer blemishes than some of its predecessors the praise is nearly a negative one, for we regret to add that the beauties, that should complete the sentence as an antithesis, are either not at all present or only in such limited number as to make the general absence
more manifest. As usual of late with Mr. Dickens’s Christmas tales … Surely Christmas might suggest something more relative and congenial than such slip-shod substitute as “A House to Let” …’

  The Marylebone Mercury was even more blunt:

  ‘Mr. Dickens is now at the head of eccentric literature. He endeavours after the success of Punch in the spirit of Thackeray, but fails at both.’ Although most of the reading public were unaware of the problems assailing the Dickens family, rumours were abounding in the worlds of literature and journalism. People took sides, with many wanting to believe that Catherine was entirely in the wrong, because they could not cope with the idea of their heroic idol falling so far. Others, however, felt sympathy for Catherine, including the poet Elizabeth Barrett-Browning, who wrote to a friend, ‘What is this sad story about Dickens and his wife? Incompatibility of temper after twenty-three years of married life? What a plea! … Poor woman! She must suffer bitterly – that is sure.’ The knowledge that people were talking about his marriage and speculating over the causes of the breakdown incensed and stressed Dickens. He retreated into a furious self-righteousness, refusing to discuss it and berating anyone who breathed a word about Ellen or the true causes of his decision to separate from Catherine. It was not only Catherine whom Dickens cut out of his life. After the separation, he seems to have suffered from a mental breakdown and instigated furious rows with many of his formerly closest friends, including William Thackeray and Mark Lemon. He also fell out with his publishers, when they refused to publish the unpleasant public letter he had written, about his decision to end the marriage. In a fit of fury, considering his publishers were siding with his estranged wife, he left Bradbury and Evans and went back to Chapman and Hall. This decision also had yet more personal repercussions, because Charley was engaged to Bessie Evans, his childhood sweetheart and the daughter of the man who was now Charles Dickens’s former publisher. The author did not go to his son’s wedding.