Dickens and Christmas

by Dickens

  ‘If [Dickens] had appeared twenty years later, when the new Puritanism of the industrial age had run its course, the popular enjoyments of Christmas might have become refined merely by becoming rare. Art critics might be talking about the exquisite proportions of a plum-pudding as of an Etruscan pot; and cultured persons might be hanging stockings on their bed-posts as gravely as they hung Morris curtains on their walls. But coming when he did, Dickens could appeal to a living tradition and not to a lost art. He was able to save the thing from dying, instead of trying to raise it from the dead … “A Christmas Carol” is perhaps the most genial and fanciful of all his stories. “Hard Times “ is perhaps the most grim and realistic. But in both cases the moral beauty is perhaps greater than the artistic beauty; and both stand higher in any study of the man than of the writer … in both cases the author is fighting for the same cause. He is fighting an old miser named Scrooge, and a new miser named Gradgrind … Scrooge is a utilitarian and an individualist; that is, he is a miser in theory as well as in practise. He utters all the sophistries by which the age of machinery has tried to turn the virtue of charity into a vice. Indeed this is something of an understatement. Scrooge is not only as modern as Gradgrind but more modern than Gradgrind. He belongs not only to the hard times of the middle of the nineteenth century, but to the harder times of the beginning of the twentieth century; the yet harder times in which we live. Many amiable sociologists will say, as he said, “Let them die and decrease the surplus population.” The improved proposal is that they should die before they are born … The answer to anyone who talks about the surplus population is to ask him whether he is the surplus population; or if he is not, how he knows he is not. That is the answer which the Spirit of Christmas gives to Scrooge; and there is more than one fine element of irony involved in it. There is this very mordant moral truth, among others; that Scrooge is exactly the sort of man who would really talk of the superfluous poor as of something dim and distant; and yet he is also exactly the kind of man whom others might regard as sufficiently dim, not to say dingy, to be himself superfluous…. We have all seen the most sedentary of scholars proving on paper that none should survive save the victors of aggressive war and the physical struggle for life; we have all heard the idle rich explaining why the idle poor deserve to be left to die of hunger. In all this the spirit of Scrooge survives…’

  G.K. Chesterton in his Introduction to A Christmas Carol in 1922

  In January 1859, the celebration of Twelfth Night in the Dickens household was a muted and sad celebration in comparison to those the children had enjoyed before. Charley was not with them for his birthday as he was living with Catherine, which meant that, of course, the usual Twelfth Cake for Charley’s birthday did not arrive from Angela Burdett-Coutts. The philanthropist, who was known affectionately by the children as ‘Miss Toots’ and always considered a kind of fairy godmother, was furious with the way Catherine had been treated and a casualty of the cooling of her friendship with Charles Dickens was the charity Urania Cottage. Although Dickens and Burdett-Coutts did resume a friendship, they would never again be as close as they had been in the past and Burdett-Coutts remained a good friend to Catherine.

  For the last year of the decade, trying to ignore any negative publicity and trying to keep his public happy, Dickens made sure he was kept fully occupied by his writing and his reading tours. He also set up another magazine. Because he had left Bradbury and Evans, the publication of Household Words came to an end and the Christmas story for 1859 was published in All The Year Round (published by Chapman and Hall). The title of The Haunted House – whose fellow authors included Wilkie Collins, Hesba Stratton, George Augustus Sala, Adelaide Anne Proctor and Elizabeth Gaskell – promised sensation and melodrama. The book is composed of eight stories, of which Dickens wrote three and the others wrote one each. The Haunted House was the Dickens Christmas story reviewers had been waiting for. This was what his audience wanted: a story about ghosts set at Christmas time.

  The narrator, John, has been told to move temporarily to the countryside, for the sake of his health. Together with his sister Patty, he moves into a badly neglected eighteenth century manor house, which is allegedly haunted. After his servants complain of being terrorised by ghostly sounds, John and Patty decide to send away the servants, except for one man named Bottles, who is deaf. Then the siblings invite friends for the Christmas season and each is placed in a different room to see if they can withstand the ghosts:

  ‘The understanding was established, that any one who heard unusual noises in the night, and who wished to trace them, should knock at my door; lastly, that on Twelfth Night, the last night of holy Christmas, all our individual experiences since that then present hour of our coming together in the haunted house, should be brought to light for the good of all; and that we would hold our peace on the subject till then, unless on some remarkable provocation to break silence.’

  In Dickens’s chapter The Ghost in Master B’s Room the author wrote, ‘Ah me; ah me! no other ghost has haunted the boys’ room, my friends, since I have occupied it, than the ghost of my own childhood, the ghost of my own innocence, the ghost of my own airy belief.’ Just as the ghost of Jacob Marley had shown Scrooge the ghosts from his past, the events of the 1850s had made Dickens look back at the ghosts of his childhood and how far he had come. When Ellen told him stories of her impoverished childhood and adolescence, Dickens could understand, because he had lived through the same frightening times. With the start of a new decade, Dickens had to cope with the consequences of the public ending of his marriage, his desperate desire to prevent the public from learning about Ellen and his need to keep pleasing his readers. For the last decade of his life he struggled to keep up with the never-ending clamour for yet another Christmas story.

  ‘The burlesque … is preceded by one of the inevitable Dickens Christmas dramas, which is about as unlike the Christmas story and as depressing as these Dickens’ plays usually are. I wish dramatic authors would leave Dickens alone. It is a cruel thing to take the popular author and tear him to pieces; and this is now constantly done.’

  Illustrated Times December 1870

  CHAPTER SIXTEEN

  ‘Heaven at Last, For All of Us’

  ‘… after I have rested – don’t laugh – it is a grim reality – I shall have to turn my mind to …. the CHRISTMAS NUMBER!!! I feel as if I had murdered a Christmas number years ago (perhaps I did!) and its ghost perpetually haunted me.’

  Letter from Charles Dickens to Charles Fechter, 8 March 1868

  By the 1860s, the celebrating of Christmas had become a national obsession. Christmas trees could be seen in homes and public spaces all over the British Isles, Christmas cards were an expected part of the season and shops were enjoying the start of the new fashion for Christmas shopping. The invention of the Christmas cracker was also perfected in the 1860s. The idea had begun two decades earlier, when an enterprising young confectioner named Tom Smith took a trip to Paris. There, he had bought sugared almonds, or ‘bonbons’, wrapped up in twists of paper. He recreated the idea in London, where his customers flocked to buy them. Over the next few years, he developed his idea as a Christmas fashion, starting with the idea of putting little mottos inside the paper casing, so that when they were unwrapped, as well as finding the sugared almonds, the customer would have a surprise to read, usually something sentimental and loving. By the end of the 1840s, Smith had patented the idea and introduced a rod of stiff paper that gave a satisfying crackle when pulled apart; by the 1860s the ‘crack’ of the cracker had been perfected by the use of salpetre and the almonds had been replaced with little toys, or gifts for adults.

  Another Christmas craze reached Britain from Germany in the 1860s, when shops began to sell glass baubles to decorate Christmas trees; people had also started to copy the German tradition of placing the figure of an angel at the top of the tree. The traditions of sending food parcels from the country had now been refined into the luxurious Christmas hamp
ers and newspaper columns were filled with advertisements placed by businesses that sold them.

  Dickens began the new decade in London, writing to Georgina in Kent, ‘I don’t feel quite so well today…. I went to Drury Lane again last night … and did not get to bed until half past one!’ In the summer, he sold the lease of Tavistock House to new tenants and made Gad’s Hill Place his permanent home. In the coming years, he would rent houses in fashionable parts of the city for a couple of months, so his children could enjoy the ‘London Season’, but he was not an ideal tenant. Landlords who had been so excited to have such an eminent ‘name’ living in their house were shocked when he left by the damage that had been inflicted upon their home by the pack of Dickens family dogs.

  The oldest Dickens children had been entering adulthood when their parents separated. At the start of the new decade, Charley Dickens travelled to Hong Kong, to learn about the tea trade; Mamie became her father’s housekeeper (similarly to Esther Summerson in Bleak House); Katey Dickens married the Pre-Raphaelite artist Charles Allston Collins (the younger brother of Wilkie Collins); and Walter remained in India, although he managed to meet up with Charley during his travels in Asia, and prevailed upon his elder brother to pay off his debts. At the age of thirteen, Sydney Dickens left school and embarked on his chosen career, joining the Royal Navy as a cadet on the training ship HMS Britannia.

  It had become common for Charles Dickens to spend around half of each year thinking about, planning, editing and writing the Christmas edition of All The Year Round. In 1860, he commissioned a short story from Elizabeth Gaskell, but decided it was too long to fit, so instead he gave the pride of place to a story written by his new son-in-law Charlie Collins. At the same time as he was producing the Christmas edition of the magazine, Dickens was working on his new novel, Great Expectations.

  That winter, England suffered through the coldest Christmas that had been recorded for fifty years. It was so cold that Dickens’s beard froze while he was out walking. He wrote:

  ‘It was so intensely cold that in our warm dining-room on Christmas Day we could hardly sit at the table. In my study that morning, long after a great fire of coal and wood had been lighted, the thermometer was I don’t know where below freezing. The bath froze, and all the pipes froze, and remained in a stony state for five or six weeks. The water in the bedroom jugs froze, and was imperfectly removed with axes. My beard froze as I walked about, and I couldn’t detach my cravat and coat from it until I was thawed at the fire.’

  He escaped Kent for London where he stayed in his magazine office and wrote to Georgina, ‘It is certainly less cold here than at Gad’s Hill, and the pipes are not frozen – which is a great comfort.’ He celebrated the start of 1861 with Wilkie Collins, spending New Year’s Eve watching ‘Buckley’s Serenaders’ at St James’s Hall.

  ‘I pass my time here (I am staying here alone) in working, taking physic, and taking a Stall at a Theatre every night. On Boxing night, I was at Covent Garden. A dull pantomime was “worked” (as we say) better than I ever saw a heavy piece worked on a first night, until suddenly and without a moment’s warning, every scene on that immense stage fell over on its face and disclosed Chaos by Gaslight, behind! There never was such a business – about sixty people who were on the stage, being extinguished in the most remarkable manner. Not a soul was hurt. In the uproar, some moon-calf rescued a porter pot, six feet high (out of which the clown had been drinking when the accident happened), and stood it on the cushion of the lowest Proscenium Box P.S. [prompt side] beside a lady and gentleman who were dreadfully ashamed of it. The moment the House knew that nobody was injured, they directed their whole attention to this gigantic porter pot in its genteel position (the lady and gentleman trying to hide behind it) and roared with laughter. When a modest footman came from behind the Curtain to clear it, and took it up in his arms, like a Brobdingnagian Baby, we all laughed more than we had ever laughed in our lives. I don’t know why.

  ‘We have had a fire here, but our people put it out before the Parish Engine arrived, like a drivelling Perambulator – with the Beadle in it – like an Imbecile Baby. Popular opinionm disappointed in the fire having been put out, Snow-balled the Beadle. God bless it!’

  Charles Dickens, letter to Mary Boyle, 28 December 1860

  By 3 January he was back in Kent and writing a bonhomous letter to his friend Captain E.E. Morgan:

  ‘I am heartily obliged to you for your seasonable and welcome remembrance. It came to the office (when I was there) in the pleasantest manner, brought by two seafaring men, as if they had swum across with it. Never were such fine apples, or in such admirable preservation! And the Cigars came so opportunely, that I had just four and twenty of my Morgans – that’s the name I give them – left…. I hope you will have seen the Christmas No. of All The Year Round? Here and there, in the description of the sea-going Hero [Captain Jorgan], I have given a touch or two of remembrance of Somebody you know; very heartily desiring that thousands of people may have some faint reflection of the pleasure I have for many years derived from the contemplation of a most amiable nature and most remarkable man.’

  The Christmas stories were not immune to the plagiarism his Christmas books had suffered from and Dickens started 1861 by taking out an injunction to prevent an unauthorised performance of a play based on his and Wilkie Collins’s story A Message from the Sea. He tried to counteract the plagiarism by writing a letter to the Editor of The Times,

  ‘Sir,

  I shall feel greatly obliged to you if you will allow me to make known to theatrical managers, through your columns, that I believe it is in the power of any English writer of fiction legally to prevent any work of his from being dramatized or adapted for the stage without his consent, and that I have taken measures for the assertion of this right in my own case, and intend to try it with whomsoever may violate it.

  It happened but yesterday that I had, in conjunction with Mr Wilkie Collins, very unwillingly to assert this principle in defence of a joint production of ours against the proprietor of the Britannia Theatre. In a most frank and honest manner he immediately withdrew an announced piece on the night of its intended first representation, and when his audience were assembled. As I had no earlier opportunity of giving him notice of my intention to uphold the rights of authors, and as I inconvenienced a gentleman for whom I have a respect, with great reluctance, and should be exceedingly sorry to do the like in any other case, perhaps you will find space for this letter.

  Faithfully yours

  Charles Dickens’ (8 January 1861)

  In 1861, The Book of Household Management by Mrs Isabella Beeton contained what is believed to be the first recipe published in Britain for a Christmas Cake. This added an extra emphasis towards the shift to celebrate on Christmas Day instead of Twelfth Night.

  ‘Mrs Beeton’s recipe for Christmas Cake

  ‘Ingredients – 5 teacupfuls of flour, 1 teacupful of melted butter, 1 teacupful of cream, 1 teacupful of treacle, 1 teacupful of moist sugar, 2 eggs, ½ oz. of powdered ginger, ½ lb of raisins. 1 teaspoonful of carbonate of soda, 1 tablespoonful of vinegar.

  ‘Mode – Make the butter sufficiently warm to melt it, but do not allow it to oil; put the flour in to a basin: add to it the sugar, ginger and raisins, which should be stoned and cut into small pieces. When these dry ingredients are thoroughly mixed, stir in the butter, cream, treacle and well-whisked eggs, and beat the mixture for a few minutes. Dissolve the soda in the vinegar, add it to the dough, and be particular that these latter ingredients are well incorporated with the others; put the cake into a buttered mould or tin, place it in a moderate oven immediately, and bake it from 1¾ to 2¼ hours.

  ‘Time – 1¾ to 2¼ hours. Average cost, 1s 6d.’

  The Christmas cake added to an already groaning table of sweet Christmas foods, including plum pudding, which would soon become better known as Christmas pudding, and mince pies. In the past, the filling in the pies was made from minced meat, but by the ninet
eenth century, it was much more common for the “mincemeat” to be made of fruits, nuts, sugar and brandy. The change from savoury to sweet had begun in the eighteenth century, when sugar became much more plentiful, due to Britain’s connections with the slave trade. In the first half of the nineteenth century, the pies were sometimes made from a combination of meat and fruits, although the fashion was changing. Both Eliza Acton’s 1845 cookbook and Mrs Beeton’s 1861 Book of Household Management include recipes for mince pies which contain minced meat (in Acton’s recipe the pies are filled with ‘minced ox-tongue’), but both describe these as ‘traditional’ mince pies, while seeming to recommend instead the more modern versions of mincemeat which contain only fruit, brandy, spices and sugar (although still bound together with beef suet). Eliza Acton calls her meat-free recipe her ‘superlative mincemeat’, and Mrs Beeton’s is named ‘excellent mincemeat’.

  In June 1861, Dickens was already thinking about the next Christmas issue of his magazine, inviting Wilkie Collins, with whom he was co-writing regularly, to come and ‘arrange our Xmas No. please God, under the shade of the Oak Trees.’ A few weeks later he wrote a commissioning letter to Rev G.R. Gleig:

  It is our custom here at this time of year to invite all our contributors to write for the Extra Christmas No. … Any story would weave into the design; whether narrated in the first person, or the third; whether referring to time present, or time past; whether ghostly or otherwise. No reference to the Christmas season is in the least necessary, on the contrary, such reference is not desired.’

  In the late autumn, Dickens set off on a reading tour, of over fifty events, throughout the country, a tour blighted by the very recent loss of his reading tour manager, Arthur Smith, who died in October. Mamie went to join her father in Carlisle, on his way back home from working in Edinburgh. Dickens, who always missed his dogs when travelling, asked his daughter to bring her Pomeranian, Mrs Bouncer, to the hotel, writing ‘She shall be received with open arms.’