by Dickens
Mamie Dickens, My Father As I Recall Him
Bibliography
ACKROYD, Peter, Dickens, Sinclair-Stevenson, 1990.
ALLEN, Michael, Charles Dickens’ Childhood, Macmillan, 1988.
ARMSTRONG, Neil, Christmas in Nineteenth-Century England, MUP, 2010.
CHAMBERS, Robert, The Book of Days, a Miscellany of Popular Antiquities, 1862.
COX, Helen, Mr. and Mrs. Charles Dickens Entertain at Home, Elsevier, 2014.
CROSSLEY, Alice and SALMON, Richard (eds), Thackeray in Time: History, Memory, and Modernity, Routledge, 2016.
DICKENS, Catherine (psuedonym Lady Maria Clutterbuck), What Shall We Have for Dinner?, Bradbury & Evans, 1852 [fascimile copy at Charles Dickens Museum].
DICKENS, Charles, Christmas Books, Chapman and Hall (undated).
DICKENS, Charles, Christmas Stories from ‘Household Words’ and ‘All The Year Round’, Chapman and Hall (undated).
DICKENS, Mamie, My Father As I Recall Him, Roxburghe Press, 1897.
DOLBY, George, Charles Dickens as I Knew Him, T. Fisher Unwin, 1885.
FORSTER, John, The Life of Charles Dickens: The Illustrated Edition, Sterling Signature, 2011.
GREAVES, John, Dickens at Doughty Street, Elm Tree Books, 1975.
GREY, Elizabeth, Countess of Kent, A True Gentlewoman’s Delight: Wherein is contained all manner of cookery: together with preserving, conserving, drying and candying. Very necessary for all ladies and gentlewomen, W.I.Gent, 1653.
HAHN, Daniel, The Oxford Companion to Children’s Literature, OUP, 2015.
HAWKSLEY, Lucinda, Katey: The Life and Loves of Dickens’s Artist Daughter, Doubleday, 2006.
HIBBERT, Christopher, The Making of Charles Dickens, Longmans, 1967.
JOHNES, Martin, Christmas and the British: A Modern History, Bloomsbury, 2016.
JOHNSON, Edgar, Charles Dickens, His Tragedy and Triumph, Viking, 1977.
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Charles Dickens’s first home. Charles Dickens was born in this house on 7 February 1812. The family was renting a home in Portsmouth because Charles’s father, John Dickens, worked as a payroll clerk for the navy, at Portsmouth Docks.
Marshalsea Prison. In 1824, John Dickens was arrested for debt and taken to the Marshalsea Debtors’ Prison in Southwark, South London. His wife, Elizabeth, and all their younger children also had to move into the prison. Charles Dickens had to work and live by himself.
First Edition of A Christmas Carol, 1843. When A Christmas Carol was published in 1843, it became an instant sensation; this is what first edition looked like. The first 6,000 copies of A Christmas Carol sold out in less than a week.
Sketches of Charles and Fanny Dickens from 1842. This portrait of Dickens dates from the year before he wrote A Christmas Carol. A small portrait of his older sister Fanny can be seen in the bottom left; she was immortalised as Ebenezer Scrooge’s much-loved younger sister, Little Fan.
The First Edition Title Page of A Christmas Carol, 1843. Dickens wrote A Christmas Carol as a protest against child poverty. He said he wanted it to strike ‘a sledgehammer blow’ on behalf of ‘the poor man’s child’.
Scrooge’s Third Visitor by John Leech, 1843. The image of the Ghost of Christmas Present, described as a ‘jolly Giant’, was inspired by ancient British traditions: that of the pagan Green Man and the old-style Father Christmas who appeared in mummers’ dances.
Marley’s Ghost by John Leech, 1843. When the ghost of Jacob Marley appeared to warn his former business partner Ebenezer Scrooge to mend his ways, Dickens was hoping his readers would realise that they also needed to help those poorer than themselves.
The Last of the Spirits by John Leech, 1843. The illustrator for A Christmas Carol was Dickens’s great friend John Leech, who would become famous as one of the leading cartoonists for the satirical magazine Punch.
A depiction of a Christmas Choir practice. From the 1840s onwards, the celebrating of Christmas started to become much more fashionable and ‘old traditions’ were revived. Singing carols, both in church and as travelling choirs, was very popular.
A Victorian family around a Christmas tree. In the nineteenth century, Christmas trees were lit by candles, which was a serious fire risk. In wealthier households, servants would stand beside the tree with buckets of sand or water, ready to fight any fires.
Decorating the Christmas tree. After a picture of the royal family’s Christmas tree appeared in the Illustrated London News in 1848, decorated trees became very fashionable. By the last decades of the nineteenth century, the practice had become an essential part of Christmas.
An early Christmas card. The first Christmas cards seldom featured the kind of images that people would consider traditional today. Images of rosy-cheeked children were much more common than religious scenes or images of Christmas decorations.
A mid-Victorian Christmas card. Despite the prudish strictures of Victorian fashions, a large proportion of nineteenth century Christmas cards featured illustrations of naked children, or of scantily dressed children depicted as fairies or other mythical figures.
Charles Dickens at the age of 49. This portrait of Charles Dickens was painted in 1861, a year in which Britain suffered one of the coldest winters on record. Dickens wrote to a friend that at Christmas it was so cold that his beard froze.
Bringing in the Christmas pudding. The earliest Christmas puddings were usually made with meat stock or broth, and were often served as a starter. The idea of a sweet Christmas pudding became fixed in the Victorian age, when it became the essential final ingredient of the Christmas meal.
Charles Dickens towards the end of his life. By the end of his life, Charles Dickens had started to find Christmas exhausting. It had become, for him, the busiest time in his working year and he had to start creating his Christmas work schedule months in advance of December.
‘Merry Old Santa Claus’, by Thomas Nast from the 1 January, 1881 edition of Harper’s Weekly. The young Charles Dickens would not have expected a visit from Father Christmas or Santa Claus. The image of a jolly, round old man who brings presents to children on Christmas Eve did not become popular in Britain until the second half of the nineteenth century.