Dickens and Christmas

by Dickens

  He wrote to Mamie, with evident homesickness, asking her to tell him everything about how Christmas had been at Gad’s Hill Place, and saying how grateful he had been to receive a letter from Georgina:

  ‘I got your aunt’s last letter at Boston yesterday, Christmas Day morning, when I was starting at eleven o’clock to come back to this place. I wanted it very much, for I had a frightful cold (English colds are nothing to those of this country), and was exceedingly depressed and miserable. Not that I had any reason but illness for being so, since the Bostonians had been quite astounding in their demonstrations. I never saw anything like them on Christmas Eve. But it is a bad country to be unwell and travelling in; you are one of say a hundred people in a heated car, with a great stove in it, and all the little windows closed, and the hurrying and banging about are indescribable. The atmosphere is detestable and the motion often all but intolerable. However, we got our dinner here at eight o’clock, and plucked up a little, and I made some hot gin punch to drink a merry Christmas to all at home in. But it must be confessed that we were both very dull. I have been in bed all day until two o’clock, and here I am now (at three o’clock) a little better. But I am not fit to read, and I must read tonight.’

  He managed to perform the reading, but a doctor was called to attend to him. To his friend Mrs Charles Eliot Norton, he wrote, ‘Your kind note and pretty mark of remembrance brightened a very dull Christmas Day on the Railroad, and did me quite as much good as the Doctor.’

  By the new year, Dickens had started to feel happier. He was thrilled that his readings of ‘Doctor Marigold’ had ‘made really a tremendous hit’, as had his readings from Nicholas Nickleby and ‘Boots at the Holly Tree Inn’. The most popular reading, of course, was always A Christmas Carol. There is a well-known, although possibly apocryphal, story about a Scrooge-like conversion that happened after one of Dickens’s readings. It was reported that a wealthy factory owner from Chicago had travelled specially to Boston to hear Dickens speak and was so affected by the reading of A Christmas Carol, that he realised he was far too much like Ebenezer Scrooge and needed to change the way he worked. According to the story, he returned to Chicago and promised his workers that they would always have Christmas Day as a holiday and gave a turkey to every family that worked for him. Whether or not the story is true, it has become part of Dickensian folklore and emphasises the way in which Charles Dickens was identified so strongly with the spirit of Christmas.

  This tour was not only about spreading Christmas cheer, it was a gruelling five-month trip, that lasted until April 1868, and its main purpose was to make money. It did so abundantly and both Dickens and Dolby felt that the author had gone some way towards recouping some of the fortune that a lack of international copyright law had deemed would benefit publishing houses, but not the man who wrote the novels that sold so well all over the United States of America. Dickens wrote to Forster:

  ‘… our last New York night bringing £500 English into the house, after making more than the necessary deduction for the present price of gold! The manager is always going about with an immense bundle that looks like a sofa-cushion, but is in reality paper-money, and it had risen to the proportions of a sofa on the morning he left for Philadelphia.’

  Despite the adulation he was receiving and the money he was making, Dickens was perpetually homesick. He wrote to Wilkie Collins in January, ‘I … am always counting the days that lie between me and home’ and on the same day to Georgina Hogarth he complained about the frequency with which he and his party had suffered from food poisoning and:

  ‘… severity of the weather, and the heat of the intolerable furnaces, [they] dry the hair and break the nails of strangers… There is not a complete nail in the whole British suite, and my hair cracks again when I brush it. (I am losing my hair with great rapidity, and what I don’t lose is getting very grey.)’

  Dickens felt ill and depressed for much of his five months in America. When he sailed home in April 1868, he was only 56 years old, but he looked much, much older. He was much cheered by the narrow escape he and Dolby had from the American tax inspectors, who were chasing Dolby for their portion of Dickens’s earnings over the past few months. Neither Dickens nor Dolby was disposed to pay tax in a country where many hundreds of thousands of pirated copies of Dickens’s novels had made publishers wealthy but from which Dickens had not received a single cent. The sight of the tax inspectors on the harbour after their ship had already set sail cheered Dickens’s soul.

  After his return, Dickens spent a clandestine couple of weeks with Ellen before returning to his family in Kent. He arrived home to the news that Charley was in serious financial trouble; his business had failed, he was bankrupt and badly in debt, and he had five young children and a wife to support. This coincided with Wills having been injured in a hunting accident, so Dickens found a solution to both problems by hiring Charley to work on All The Year Round. That summer, Dickens was back in Paris where a French version of his and Wilkie’s Christmas story, No Thoroughfare, entitled L’Abîme, was due to open, starring Charles Fechter.

  By Christmas, Dickens was ready to celebrate in style with his family, but there was yet another of his children missing from the party. At the end of September, sixteen-year old Plorn had sailed off to Australia to join his brother Alfred. It is unknown why Dickens was so keen to send five of his seven sons overseas, and to such far-flung destinations as India and Australia. He wrote about crying as though his heart would break after saying goodbye to young Plorn, whom he described as his ‘youngest and best-loved son’, yet he had arranged for Plorn to leave and he knew, as he said goodbye, that he might never see him, or Alfred, again. A couple of years earlier, Dickens had been considering arranging a reading tour of Australia, but he had already decided against that before buying Plorn a ticket to sail to the other side of the world.

  Another loss to the family was the death of Uncle Fred. The fun-loving and much-loved uncle of the Dickens children’s childhood, who had taken care of them when Charles and Catherine spent their six months in North America, had become an alcoholic gambling addict, constantly in debt, in disgrace and in very poor health. He died in Darlington, County Durham, at the home of a retired pub landlord, Jonathan Ross Feetum. Dickens wrote to James and Annie Fields in America at the end of October, a few days after hearing of his brother’s death:

  ‘I … have been so busy and so fatigued that my hands have been quite full. Here are Dolby and I again leading the kind of life that you know so well. We stop next week (except in London) for the month of November, on account of the elections, and then go on again, with a short holiday at Christmas … My reason for abandoning the Christmas No. was that I became weary of having my own writing swamped by that of other people.’

  To another friend he explained, ‘With the exception of a few days at Christmas, this has to go on through 103 Readings, at the rate of 4 a week!’ Mamie often helped her father with his reading tour preparations. On Christmas Eve 1868, he was due to give a reading in London and he wrote to ask for her help:

  ‘It occurs to me that my table at St. James’ Hall might be appropriately ornamented with a little holly next Tuesday. If the two front legs were entwined with it, for instance, and a border of it ran round the top of the fringe in front, with a little sprig by way of bouquet at each corner, it would present a seasonable appearance. If you think of this and will have the materials ready in a little basket, I will call for you at the office and take you up to the hall where the table will be ready for you.’

  Christmas of 1868 was spent at Gad’s Hill Place, with Dickens making the most of everything he had missed the year before. George Dolby sent him a turkey and mistletoe for Christmas and the family was entranced by the arrival of a Newfoundland puppy, whom Dickens named Bumble, after the beadle in Oliver Twist, because, as he explained to John Forster, he had noticed in the puppy ‘a peculiarly pompous and overbearing manner he had of appearing to mount guard over the yard when he was an abs
olute infant’. George Dolby also left his recollections of Bumble. ‘Although well trained and obedient in every respect, he had a bad habit of returning from a long walk of eluding, if he could, his master’s attention, and, when about two miles from home, would race there as fast as he could; whether to get his own dinner, and that of the other dogs as well, never could be ascertained.’

  Much to the disappointment of his public, Dickens had decided against writing a new Christmas story for 1868. To appease the public the Special Christmas Number of All The Year Round was a compilation of his Christmas Stories.

  The following winter saw a great deal of snow and Dickens’s letters from the end of 1869 show that he was revelling in a traditional white Christmas. On the day after Boxing Day, he sent several letters, including penning a quick note to his friend Charles Kent in which he explained, ‘The postman is waiting at the gate to tramp through the snow to Rochester, and is (unlawfully) drinking a glass of gin while I write this; consequently “this” is brief.’ To Macready he wrote happily of having so many of his children, as well as his grandchild, Mary Angela, with him for Christmas:

  ‘We send … all conceivable good Christmas and New Year greetings. They come out of a deal of snow, but are warm enough to thaw every flake of it…. It needs no Christmas time, my dearest Macready, to bring the thought of you and of our long and close friendship round to my heart, for it is always there. God bless and preserve you!’

  These letters are a poignant confirmation that Charles Dickens’s very last Christmas was one of the happiest and most traditional that he had known for several years.

  In the final months of his life, he was working on a new novel, partly inspired by the story of a real-life murder he had become fascinated by in America. He had heard about the 1850 murder of Dr George Parkman by Professor John Webster, and when he was in Boston, he had visited Harvard University, where Webster had been a professor of chemistry and where he had attempted to dispose of his victim’s body. The Mystery of Edwin Drood was destined to remain the greatest mystery story ever written, as Dickens died while writing it. In common with Great Expectations, Dickens’s last novel is brooding and gothic. It begins with a scene in an opium den, peopled by drug addicts. The Christmas spirit in The Mystery of Edwin Drood is also one of brooding mystery, rather than of happiness. The characters seem singularly lacking in Christmas cheer and, when the novel’s heroine Rosa Bud asks her guardian, the lawyer Mr Grewgious, if they can have a business meeting on Christmas Day, he is happy to oblige, saying to her:

  ‘“As a particularly Angular man, I do not fit smoothly into the social circle, and consequently I have no other engagement at Christmastime than to partake, on the twenty-fifth, of a boiled turkey and celery sauce with a – with a particularly Angular clerk I have the good fortune to possess, whose father, being a Norfolk farmer, sends him up (the turkey up), as a present to me, from the neighbourhood of Norwich. I should be quite proud of your wishing to see me, my dear. As a professional Receiver of rents, so very few people do wish to see me, that the novelty would be bracing.”’

  It is on Christmas Eve that Edwin Drood disappears and on Christmas Day that his disappearance is discovered – and assumed to be murder. As Dickens died without finishing the novel and left no clear notes behind as to his intentions, it is unknown whether he intended Edwin to be the victim of murder, or whether the hero would have returned later in the novel to reveal some of the many secrets hinted at throughout the early chapters. If Dickens did intend Edwin to be killed, it would have been ironic that the man credited with ‘inventing’ the way in which Christmas was celebrated in Victorian Britain, should have ended his life’s work with a Christmas murder mystery.

  ‘Christmas Eve in Cloisterham. A few strange faces in the streets; a few other faces, half strange and half familiar, once the faces of Cloisterham children, now the faces of men and women who come back from the outer world at long intervals to find the city wonderfully shrunken in size, as if it had not washed by any means well in the meanwhile. To these, the striking of the Cathedral clock, and the cawing of the rooks from the Cathedral tower, are like voices of their nursery time…. Seasonable tokens are about. Red berries shine here and there in the lattices of Minor Canon Corner; Mr. and Mrs. Tope are daintily sticking sprigs of holly into the carvings and sconces of the Cathedral stalls, as if they were sticking them into the coat-button-holes of the Dean and Chapter…. Public amusements are not wanting. The Wax-Work which made so deep an impression on the reflective mind of the Emperor of China is to be seen by particular desire during Christmas Week only, on the premises of the bankrupt livery-stable-keeper up the lane; and a new grand comic Christmas pantomime is to be produced at the Theatre: the latter heralded by the portrait of Signor Jacksonini the clown, saying ‘How do you do tomorrow?’ quite as large as life, and almost as miserably.’

  Charles Dickens, The Mystery of Edwin Drood (1870)

  Charles Dickens gave a series of Christmas readings at the end of 1869, but his family were very worried about his health. His children noticed that his speech was becoming slurred and that he was having particular trouble pronouncing the word Pickwick. They begged him to stop the reading tours, because they caused him such exertion – especially when he read Bill Sikes’s murder of Nancy from Oliver Twist – that they were worried he would die from the stress. He agreed and arranged a farewell tour for the spring. Mamie Dickens wrote about her father’s final public reading on 15 March 1870 and that the programme included a reading from A Christmas Carol. So many people turned up without tickets that huge crowds had to be turned away from the door.

  Dickens died on the fifth anniversary of the Staplehurst Crash. He was 58 years old. His death, on 9 June 1870, was considered a national disaster. Many stories were told of the public’s reaction to his death. His son, Henry Fielding Dickens, was told by a friend that he had been in a tobacconist’s shop when a ‘working man’ came in, threw his money on the counter and reportedly said, ‘Charles Dickens is dead, we have lost our best friend.’ The poet Theodore Watts-Dunton famously recalled walking along Drury Lane in London and hearing a young market girl say, when she heard Charles Dickens had died, ‘Then will Father Christmas die too?’ For many, Dickens was the man who represented the very spirit of Christmas. His fans had no idea how much of a hardworking trial the festive season had come to represent to the author in the last years of his life; for them, he was as integral a part of Christmas as the Christmas Tree and John Leech’s now-iconic drawing of the Ghost of Christmas Present had become.

  During Christmas of 1870, the newspapers mourned Dickens anew. The Daily Telegraph professed itself disappointed with the latest Christmas publications and suggested that their readers return to Dickens’s works instead of reading any new stories. It also recommended a volume newly published by Charley Dickens, now the editor of All The Year Round:

  ‘It would be ungracious and unjust to the memory of the great literary master-spirit of Christmas, if we did not warmly commend the idea of Mr. Charles Dickens in issuing in one volume the “Nine Christmas Numbers of All The Year Round.” Those most delightful little blue brochures for which our teeth used to water as the December days drew on, and in which, though not all was Dickens, all was singularly, and almost magically, “Dickensised,” have ceased now for ever; but this volume will be a most welcome guest at many a fireside this Christmastide – welcome even while it renews the memory of a great loss and sorrow.’

  Many newspapers and magazines offered Dickens souvenirs in their Christmas issues, such as The Graphic which included Luke Fildes’s drawing The Empty Chair, which depictedWeb Order Reference: UBR01757205 Order Date: 14 Jul 17 02:58 PM Dickens’s study at Gad’s Hill Place the day after he died. All over the country theatres staged performances of Dickens’s novels and stories, with A Christmas Carol proving the most popular. The legacy of Dickens’s Christmas Books remained stronger than that of his Christmas stories. In 1906, when a spectacular dolls house was being c
reated for Queen Mary, a miniature set of Dickens’s five Christmas books was commissioned. The tiny versions of the books are just five centimetres high, but they contain faithful reproductions of the original text and are bound in tooled leather with gilded edges to the pages. On 1 January 1871, Lloyd’s Weekly Newspaper gave a summary of the previous year:

  ‘The reminiscences of Dickens are welcome to all. Dickens is inseparably connected with Christmas. His inimitable “Christmas Carol” unites him with the merry season; and it is our belief that very few spent their Christmas-day without giving a tender, regretful thought to the kindly heart that has ceased to beat – to the great name that has become of the past since the opening of the disastrous year — 1870.’

  Amid all the newspapers’ commentary on Dickens is a short paragraph in the Hackney and Kingsland Gazette, published on Christmas Eve 1870:

  The inscription engraved on the tomb of Charles Dickens in Westminster Abbey has lately been exposed to the view of the public. It consists only of the few plain and simple words which he desired in his will to mark his grave:– “Charles Dickens, born February 7, 1812; died the 9th of June, 1870.”.’

  ‘One morning – it was the last day of the year, I remember – while we were at breakfast at “Gad’s Hill,” my father suggested that we should celebrate the evening by a charade to be acted in pantomime. The suggestion was received with acclamation, and amid shouts and laughing we were then and there, guests and members of the family, allotted our respective parts. My father went about collecting “stage properties,” rehearsals were “called” at least four times during the morning, and in all our excitement no thought was given to that necessary part of a charade, the audience, whose business it is to guess the pantomime. At luncheon someone asked suddenly: “But what about an audience?” “Why, bless my soul,” said my father, “I’d forgotten all about that.” Invitations were quickly dispatched to our neighbours, and additional preparations made for supper. In due time the audience came, and the charade was acted so successfully that the evening stands out in my memory as one of the merriest and happiest of the many merry and happy evenings in our dear old home. My father was so extremely funny in his part that the rest of us found it almost impossible to maintain sufficient control over ourselves to enable the charade to proceed as it was planned to do. It wound up with a country dance, which had been invented that morning and practised quite a dozen times through the day, and which was concluded at just a few moments before midnight. Then leading us all, characters and audience, out into the wide hall, and throwing wide open the door, my father, watch in hand, stood waiting to hear the bells ring in the New Year. All was hush and silence after the laughter and merriment! Suddenly the peal of bells sounded, and turning he said: “A happy New Year to us all! God bless us.” Kisses, good wishes and shaking of hands brought us again back to the fun and gaiety of a few moments earlier. Supper was served, the hot mulled wine drunk in toasts, and the maddest and wildest of “Sir Roger de Coverlys” ended our evening and began our New Year.’