Dickens and Christmas

by Dickens

  ‘A horrible custom obtains in these parts of asking you to dinner somewhere at halfpast two, and to supper somewhere else about eight. I have run this gauntlet more than once, and its effect is that there is no day for any useful purpose, and that the length of the evening is multiplied by a hundred … The weather has been rather muggy and languid until yesterday, when there was the coldest wind blowing that I ever felt. In the night it froze very hard and to-day the sky is beautiful.’

  His readings began the following day, at the Tremont Temple, in the middle of a snowstorm. The New York Tribune wrote of the ‘line of carriages’ thronging the streets as over two thousand ticket holders swarmed towards the venue, ‘the gay, struggling, swarming multitude that was trying to get inside the doors, watched by the long-faced silent multitude that crowded round the doorways without tickets’.

  Dickens was on a high when he continued writing Mamie’s letter the day after his reading:

  ‘Most magnificent reception last night, and most signal and complete success. Nothing could be more triumphant. The people will hear of nothing else and talk of nothing else.’

  Two weeks later he wrote to Georgina, from New York:

  ‘The excitement of the readings continues unabated, the tickets for readings are sold as soon as they are ready, and the public pay treble prices to the speculators who buy them up. They are a wonderfully fine audience … Dolby continues to be the most unpopular man in America (mainly because he can’t get four thousand people into a room that holds two thousand), and is reviled in print daily.’

  In his book, Charles Dickens As I Knew Him, published in 1885, Dolby wrote a description of the start of the American reading tour:

  ‘The Readings selected were, the “Christmas Carol” and the “Trial from Pickwick”. The audience was of the most brilliant description, being composed of all the notables in Boston, literary and artistic, added to which New York had supplied its contingent from the same sources, and had further sent to Boston a staff of newspaper men to report, by telegraph, columns of description of the first Reading, so that, on Tuesday, December 3rd, not only had all the Boston papers a full account, but so had also the New York papers – a compliment that was highly appreciated by Mr Dickens … When everything was quiet, and the deafening cheers which had greeted his appearance had subsided, a terrible silence prevailed, and it seemed a relief to his hearers when he at last commenced the Reading. The effect of the first few words (without any prefatory remark): “A Christmas Carol in four staves. Stave one, Marley’s Ghost” … placed the reader and his audience on good terms with one another, the audience settling itself down in rapt attention for what was to follow; and by the time the first chapter was finished the success of the Readings, certainly as far as Boston was concerned, was an accomplished fact … in all my experiences with him, I never knew him to read the description of the Cratchit’s Christmas dinner with so much evident enjoyment to himself, and with so much relish to his audience. When at last the Reading of “The Carol” was finished, and the final words had been delivered, and “so, as Tiny Tim observed, God bless us every one,” a dead silence seemed to prevail – a sort of public sigh as it were – only to be broken by cheers and calls, the most enthusiastic and uproarious, causing Mr Dickens to break through his rule, and again presenting himself before his audience, to bow his acknowledgments.’

  Although it seems not every audience member was entranced. Dolby wrote about one very disappointed Dickens fan:

  ‘During the progress of this Reading [‘The Trial of Pickwick’], I was engaged in conversation with one of my staff as the foot of the stairs leading into the hall, when my attention was drawn to a gentleman coming down the stairs in a most excited state. Imagining him to be ill and wanting assistance, I said, “What’s the matter with you?” From the accent of his reply, I concluded that he was a “reg’lar down Easter.”

  “Say, who’s that man on the platform reading?”

  “Mr Charles Dickens,” I replied.

  “But that aint the real Charles Dickens, the man as wrote all them books I’ve been reading all these years.”

  “The same.”

  After a moment’s pause, as if for thought, he replied, “Wall [sic], all I’ve got to say about it then is, that he knows no more about Sam Weller ‘n a cow does of pleatin’ a shirt, at all events that ain’t my idea of Sam Weller, anyhow.”

  After the delivery of this speech he clapped his hat upon his head, and left the building in a state of high dudgeon.’

  Both he and Dickens were astounded by the number of fabricated stories printed in American newspapers, such as an alleged account of Dolby getting into a fight with ‘an Irishman’ and spending the night in a police cell. As Dickens wrote to Georgina, ‘As a general rule, you may lay it down that whatever you see about me in the papers is not true.’ In a buoyant mood, Dickens wrote to W.H. Wills from the Westminster Hotel in New York:

  ‘No news, except that this house was on fire last Sunday night (a matter scarcely worth mentioning in New York), and that we turned out and packed up. But the fire was happily got under. The meeting of all the inmates, in the most extraordinary dresses, and with their most precious possessions under their arms or imperfectly crammed into their pockets, was very ridiculous. Everybody talked to everybody else, and it was on the whole convivial. Everything unchanged. Everybody sleighing. Everybody coming to the Readings. There were at least ten thousand sleighs in the Park last Sunday. Your illustrious chief – in a red sleigh covered with furs, and drawn by a pair of fine horses covered with bells, and tearing up 14 miles of snow an hour – made an imposing appearance.’

  It was not, however, all as happy and carefree as he was making it sound. On 22 December, he wrote to Forster about the journey from New York back to Boston, ‘The railways are truly alarming. Much worse (because more worn I suppose) than when I was here before. We were beaten about yesterday, as if we had been aboard the Cuba.’ Still trying to cope with the emotional trauma of the Staplehurst Crash, Dickens was finding the need to travel around America by train very stressful. He was also dreading spending Christmas away from his family and the closer it got to Christmas Day, the more miserable he became, all of which was exacerbated by him catching a bad cold and feeling wretched. He was also infuriated to discover how many stage versions of his works were being performed in America, for which he was receiving no royalties. He wrote to Wilkie Collins, ‘They are doing Crickets, Oliver Twists, and all sorts of versions of me. Under these circumstances, they fence when they have to pay.’

  When Dickens and Dolby reached Boston just before Christmas, however, there was a wonderful surprise waiting for them, as he told Georgy in a letter on 22 December:

  ‘We found that Mrs. Fields had not only garnished the rooms with flowers, but also with holly (with real red berries) and festoons of moss dependent from looking-glasses and picture frames. She is one of the dearest little women in the world. The homely Christmas look of the place quite affected us. Yesterday we dined at her house, and there was a plum pudding, brought on blazing, and not to be surpassed in any house in England. There is a certain Captain Dolliver, belonging to the Boston Custom House, who came off in the little steamer that brought me ashore from the Cuba. He took it into his head that he would have a piece of English mistletoe brought out in this week’s Cunard, which should be laid upon my breakfasttable. And there it was this morning. In such affectionate touches as this, these New England people are especially amiable … I must leave-off, as I am going out for a walk in a bright sunlight and a complete break-up of the frost and snow. I am much better than I have been during the last week, but have a cold.’

  Dickens’s friendship with James and Annie Fields had already lasted for several years, but this trip to America made the friendship even closer. They cherished him and took care of him in a way that Dickens, always expected to take care of everyone else, needed very much. At the end of March, he wrote to Mamie that they were ‘the most devoted fr
iends, and never in the way and never out of it.’

  Knowing that Dickens and Dolby would be spending Christmas Day on a train, James and Annie Fields arranged a special early Christmas dinner. As Dolby remembered:

  ‘A most brilliant company had been invited to do honour to the occasion, and all the well-known features of an English Christmas dinner-table, in the shape of roast beef and turkey, were placed before us, even to the plum pudding, made in England, and sent over specially for this entertainment. All feeling of depression at being away from home at such a time was dissipated by the geniality of our host and hostess, and the guests invited to meet Mr Dickens; and there was universal regret when the hands of the clock pointed to the small hours in the morning, suggesting most painfully that the time for breaking up had arrived.’

  On Christmas Eve Dickens wrote to W.H. Wills from Boston, ‘Many many merry Christmases and Happy New Years to you and yours, and to all of us! We spend our Christmas Day this year on the Railway between this place and New York …My New York landlord makes me a drink melodiously called “a Rocky Mountain Sneezer”.’ The drink was composed of brandy, rum, and snow. Dolby recalled their Christmas Eve as being one of homesickness and introspection:

  ‘It must be confessed that at our late dinner that evening we were less conversational and more thoughtful than the depressing effects produced by the Chief’s influenza had made us for some days past. After dinner we sat round the fire and talked of nothing but home and the dear ones there, until the early hours in the morning, when we went to bed thoroughly worn out.’

  On the morning of 25 December, a group of Dickens’s friends, including James and Annie Fields, Henry Wadsworth Longfellow and Oliver Wendell Holmes, came to the train station in Boston to say goodbye and to wish Dickens and Dolby good luck on their journey. Dickens was already feeling so low that he found it very difficult not to cry and, as Dolby wrote, the kindly wishes ended in a perfect breakdown of heart and speech to him who had done so much to keep Christmas green in the hearts of Englishmen’. Dickens was morose and silent on the train journey, very unlike the man who was being toasted all over the world as the father of the Christmas story. His readers would barely have recognised him as the man who had created the Cratchits and the Fezziwigs. During their journey, the train passengers had to cross a river by steam ferry, which must have reminded Dickens of the river at Staplehurst, into which his and Ellen’s train had crashed. The steam ferry went past an American battleship whose captain had been told Charles Dickens would be on board the ferry. The captain had ordered the band to play God Save the Queen and for his men to raise the British flag and swags of holly as the ferry went past – but Dickens remained gracelessly unmoved by the honour, and Dolby recorded, ‘Our fellow passengers knew the meaning of this tasteful tribute and set up a ringing cheer with “three times three and a little one thrown in” which had the effect of rather increasing the depression from which we were both suffering.’

  Dickens was courted by theatre managers in New York, but he was reluctant to visit them, having declared himself unimpressed by the standard of acting in America – and allegedly shocked by how short the dancers’ skirts were. They were surprised by how important New Year’s Day was considered in New York, with everybody ‘either paying calls or receiving visitors (as in Paris)’, and at the level of drunkenness, as according to Dolby ‘even the teetotallers’ drank bourbon in New York on New Year’s Day.

  In advance of his visit, Dickens had written a series of short stories in a new style, but they were not for publication in All The Year Round. Instead they were written specially for the American children’s magazine Our Young Folks. Although Dickens had written stories narrated by children before, such as Pip in Great Expectations and David Copperfield, they were stories intended to be read by adults. These four new stories, known collectively as A Holiday Romance, were written from the viewpoint of children and written for children. The first story purports to come ‘from the pen of William Tinkling Esq (aged eight)’ and begins with the words, ‘This beginning-part is not made out of anybody’s head, you know. It’s real. You must believe this beginning-part more than what comes after, else you won’t understand how what comes after came to be written. You must believe it all; but you must believe this most, please.’ Two of the other child narrators are named as ‘Lieut-Col. Robin Redforth (aged nine)’ and ‘Miss Nettie Ashford (aged halfpast six)’, but the most famous of the stories in A Holiday Romance is the second story, known as The Magic Fishbone, allegedly ‘from the pen of Miss Alice Rainbird (aged seven)’. These stories were written in a similar style to that which Dickens used in a book he wrote for his own children, The Life of Our Lord which was kept firmly guarded in the Dickens family home and not allowed to be seen by anyone outside the family and not published until 1934, after all of that generation had died. The stories in A Holiday Romance were intended both to be read aloud and for children to read for themselves.

  The Magic Fishbone has become an enduring fairytale. It tells the story of a king and queen and their nineteen children; the heroine of the story is the intelligent and practical eldest child, Princess Alicia. ‘The king was, in his private profession, under government. The queen’s father had been a medical man out of town. They had nineteen children, and were always having more. Seventeen of these children took care of the baby; and Alicia, the eldest, took care of them all.’ The story begins with King Watkins The First in a melancholy mood because ‘quarterday was such a long way off, and several of the dear children were growing out of their clothes’. Quarterday was the day when the rent and other bills were due and the king – in the manner of John Dickens – could never afford to pay the rent. On the way to his office he meets a mysterious old woman, the Fairy Grandmarina, who tells him that after the family have eaten their salmon for dinner, he will notice that Princess Alicia ‘will leave a fishbone on her plate. Tell her to dry it, and to rub it, and to polish it till it shines like mother-of-pearl, and to take care of it as a present from me.’ This becomes the magic fishbone of the title, a talisman that the princess can use to get the family out of any bad situation. Princess Alicia understands much more than her father, and she confides in her best friend, a doll named The Duchess, who is all-knowing and wise. The king cannot understand why Alicia doesn’t use the magic powers immediately, and he becomes frustrated at how many times Alicia ignores the magic present, instead using her own common sense and practical skills to sort out problems. The story is written in the style of a pantomime and ends, of course, happily:

  ‘The Princess Alicia saw King Watkins the First, her father, standing in the doorway looking on, and he said, “What have you been doing, Alicia?”

  “Cooking and contriving, papa.”

  “What else have you been doing, Alicia?”

  “Keeping the children light-hearted, papa.”

  “Where is the magic fishbone, Alicia?”

  “In my pocket, papa.”

  “I thought you had lost it?”

  “O, no, papa!”

  “Or forgotten it?”

  “No, indeed, papa.”

  The king then sighed so heavily, and seemed so low-spirited, and sat down so miserably, leaning his head upon his hand, and his elbow upon the kitchen-table pushed away in the corner, that the seventeen princes and princesses crept softly out of the kitchen, and left him alone with the Princess Alicia and the angelic baby.

  “What is the matter, papa?”

  “I am dreadfully poor, my child.”

  “Have you no money at all, papa?”

  “None, my child.”

  “Is there no way of getting any, papa?”

  “No way,” said the king. “I have tried very hard, and I have tried all ways.”

  When she heard those last words, the Princess Alicia began to put her hand into the pocket where she kept the magic fishbone.

  “Papa,” said she, “when we have tried very hard, and tried all ways, we must have done our very, very best?”


  “No doubt, Alicia.”

  “When we have done our very, very best, papa, and that is not enough, then I think the right time must have come for asking help of others.” This was the very secret connected with the magic fishbone, which she had found out for herself from the good Fairy Grandmarina’s words, and which she had so often whispered to her beautiful and fashionable friend, the duchess.

  ‘So she took out of her pocket the magic fishbone, that had been dried and rubbed and polished till it shone like mother-of-pearl; and she gave it one little kiss, and wished it was quarterday. And immediately it WAS quarterday; and the king’s quarter’s salary came rattling down the chimney, and bounced into the middle of the floor.

  ‘But this was not half of what happened, – no, not a quarter; for immediately afterwards the good Fairy Grandmarina came riding in, in a carriage and four (peacocks), with Mr. Pickles’s boy up behind, dressed in silver and gold, with a cocked-hat, powdered-hair, pink silk stockings, a jewelled cane, and a nosegay. Down jumped Mr. Pickles’s boy, with his cocked-hat in his hand, and wonderfully polite (being entirely changed by enchantment), and handed Grandmarina out; and there she stood, in her rich shot-silk smelling of dried lavender, fanning herself with a sparkling fan….’

  Alicia marries Prince Certainpersonio, with the duchess as her bridesmaid, and the Fairy Grandmarina announces that ‘in future there would be eight quarterdays in every year, except in leap-year, when there would be ten’. She also adds that Princess Alicia and Prince Certainpersonio will have more daughters than sons, that all their hair will ‘curl naturally’ and ‘They will never have the measles, and will have recovered from the whooping-cough before being born.’

  It is easy to see how much of Dickens’s own life was encapsulated in The Magic Fishbone: a childhood longing for his father’s financial worries to be at an end, a fairy godmother to make all things right, and the way in which Dickens doted on his daughters more than on his sons. He was a very good father, highly unusual for his era in refusing to allow his children to receive any physical punishment, and in allowing his children to reason with him if they wanted something, but he was always much more indulgent towards his daughters than he was to his sons. That Christmas, his writing and his reading performances were providing seasonal cheer for thousands of Americans, who queued for hours to buy tickets to see him and queued at newspaper stands to buy A Holiday Romance, but the author was pining for his family and his lover in England.