Les Standiford

by The Man Who Invented Christmas: Charles Dickens's

  What Dickens did hear in the form of the first public pronouncement upon his book came in the Morning Chronicle on December 19. Charles Mackay began his review in that paper by declaring, “Mr. Dickens here has produced a most appropriate Christmas offering and one which, if properly made use of, may yet we hope, lead to some more valuable result…than mere amusement.”

  Mackay, a subeditor at the paper, went on to say, “It is impossible to read this little volume through, however hastily, without perceiving that its composition was prompted by a spirit of wide and wholesome philanthropy—a spirit to which selfishness in enjoyment is an inconceivable idea—a spirit that knows where happiness can exist, and ought to exist, and will not be happy itself till it has done something toward promoting its growth here. If such spirits could be multiplied, as the copies of this little book we doubt not will be…what a happy Christmas indeed should we yet have this 1843!” Mackay closed his review by assuring readers, “We heartily recommend this little volume as an amusing companion, and a wholesome monitor, to all who would enjoy in truth and in spirit ‘A merry Christmas and a happy New Year.’”

  On the twenty-second, the reviewer for the Sun urged the book upon its readers, and added, “[D]o not suppose because it is a ghost-story that it is a mere frivolous exercise of the fancy.” And the Atlas cautioned its readers not to mistake the book for some trivial piece of seasonal fluff. Anyone “who perhaps took it up in the expectation of finding some careless trifle thrown off for the occasion…like the contribution to an annual, will find himself agreeably mistaken. A glance at the first page or two will convince him that only Boz in his happier vein could have penned it.”

  On December 23 the Athenaeum pronounced that A Christmas Carol was “[a] tale to make the reader laugh and cry—open his hands, and open his heart to charity even towards the uncharitable—wrought up with a thousand minute and tender touches of the true ‘Boz’ workmanship—is indeed—a dainty dish to set before a King.” The reviewer describes the story as “capitally caroled in prose by Mr. Dickens and will call out, we hope a chorus of ‘Amens’…from the Land’s End to John o’Groat’s house.”

  Fellow essayist and friend Leigh Hunt opined on that same day in the Examiner that the slender volume would soon be in “everyone’s hands,” praising its vivid and hearty style and predicting that “thousands on thousands of readers” would find it the excuse to raise a chorus of praise to Christmas.

  Meanwhile, along with such glowing reports, what Dickens heard principally over those first halcyon days of his “little project” was the jingling of coins into booksellers’ tills. In four short days, every one of the 6,000 copies that Dickens had printed were sold.

  Such an unqualified commercial and critical reception of the book was enough to send its author into a paroxysm of joy and a celebration of the season unlike any before: As he wrote his American friend Felton, “Such dinings, such dancings, such conjurings, such blind man’s huffings, such theatre-goings, such kissings-out of old years and kissings-in of new ones, never took place in these parts before.” In the space of only hours, many of the cares that had oppressed him for nearly two years seemed to evaporate.

  Jane Carlyle, wife of the noted satirist and herself among the most attractive and lively members of the London literary set, wrote a letter to a friend the day after she attended a children’s Christmas party where the rejuvenated Dickens was also a guest, suggesting something of the effect his success had produced in him:

  “It was the very most agreeable party that ever I was at in London,” she gushed. “Dickens and Forster above all exerted themselves till the perspiration was pouring down and they seemed drunk with their efforts. Only think of that Dickens playing the conjuror for one whole hour—the best conjuror I ever saw.”

  Mrs. Carlyle described how Dickens, with Forster serving as his assistant, boiled a plum pudding in someone’s top hat, transformed ladies’ handkerchiefs into candies, and a boxful of bran into a squealing guinea pig. It was all done quite professionally, Mrs. Carlyle thought, enough so that Dickens might think of taking up that line of endeavor should the book trade ever let him down.

  “Dickens did all but go down on his knees to make me—waltz with him,” she added, “but I thought I did my part well enough in talking the maddest nonsense with him, Forster, Thackeray and Maclise—without attempting the Impossible.”

  Mrs. Carlyle’s account suggests that what had begun as a children’s party ended by approaching the level of a Roman Saturnalia: “In fact the thing was rising into something not unlike the rape of the Sabines!” she said, “when somebody looked [at] her watch and exclaimed ‘twelve o’clock!’ Whereupon we all rushed to the cloak-room—and there and in the lobby and up to the last moment the mirth raged on—Dickens took home Thackeray and Forster with him and his wife ‘to finish the night there’ and a royal night they would have of it I fancy!”

  Indeed, Dickens now seemed to embody the very spirit of generosity he had written about in A Christmas Carol. He wrote at once to Mackay at the Morning Chronicle to express his gratitude for that first glowing review, saying, “Believe me that your pleasure in the Carol, so earnestly and spontaneously expressed, gives me real gratification of heart. It has delighted me very much…your praise is manly and generous; and well worth having. Thank you heartily.”

  With every copy of A Christmas Carol sold, his doubts about his ability diminished; and the same critics who had dismissed him for his recent dreary stories were now stumbling over themselves to praise his uplifting message. If Dickens had ever believed the old maxim that he was only as good as his next book, then suddenly he was very good indeed. Chapman and Hall rushed through a second printing, and then, before the passing of the New Year, ordered up a third.

  Inevitably, not all the reviews were entirely favorable. While the Dublin Review grumbled that the book might have strayed a bit too far from the holy antecedents that gave the season its true meaning, nonetheless, the editors admitted, “It is long since we read prose or poetry which pleased us more.” The Morning Post weighed in with certain reservations as well, noting that the book “has all Mr. Dickens’s mannerisms, and is so far (to us) displeasing and absurd; but it has touches of genius too, mixed up with its huge extravagance, and a few of those little happy strokes of simple pathos,” attributes that, the editors rather astutely noted, were also those that accounted for “his great popularity.”

  But for the most part, the reviews were glowing enough to fulfill any writer’s most ardent fantasies. Bell’s Weekly Messenger said that Dickens had, in A Christmas Carol, “converted an incredible fiction into one of the strongest exhibitions of religious and moral truth, and into one of the most picturesque poetical allegories which we possess in our language.”

  The Magazine of Domestic Economy and Family Review chimed in, declaring, “If ever a writer deserved public honours for the service he has rendered to his kind, that man is Charles Dickens and the Christmas Carol should be read and reverenced in all to come as a glorious manual of Christian duties.”

  The Sunday Times proclaimed the book “an exquisite gem in its way…. Generally the tone of the story is sweet and subdued, but occasionally it soars, and becomes altogether sublime.” And even the presumptuous Thackeray had to throw up his hands when searching for something negative to say. “I do not mean that the Christmas Carol is quite as brilliant or self-evident as the sun at noonday,” he began, “but it is so spread over England by this time that no skeptic, no Frasers’s Magazine [where his review was being run]—no, not even the gold-like and ancient Quarterly itself…could review it down.”

  Thackeray gave it his all in trying to find something negative to say about the book, but clearly Dickens, “even if he had little Latin and less Greek,” had put him to the test this time out. “I am not sure the allegory is a very complete one,” he muttered, “and [I] protest, with the classics, against the use of blank verse in prose; but here all objections stop.”

 
By the end, this university-educated blue-blood, who had always begrudged the self-taught Dickens’s success and popular appeal, simply bowed his head before the book’s power: “The last two people I heard speak of it were women; neither knew the other, or the author, and both said, by way of criticism, ‘God bless him!’” For once, Thackeray was willing to be magnanimous. “What a feeling this is for a writer to be able to inspire, and what a reward to reap!”

  12.

  Dickens wrote a simple preface to the original edition of his Carol, in which he expressed relatively modest hopes: “I have endeavored in this Ghostly little book,” he said, “to raise the Ghost of an idea, which shall not put my readers out of humor with themselves, with each other, with the season, or with me. May it haunt their houses pleasantly, and no one wish to lay it!”

  As it happened, few did choose to turn away from A Christmas Carol. Dickens also wrote enthusiastically to Miss Burdett Coutts on December 27: “You will be glad to hear, I know, that my Carol is a prodigious success.” Forster would say, “Never had little book an outset so full of brilliancy of promise. It was hailed on every side with enthusiastic greeting. The first edition of six thousand copies was sold the first day [sic], and on 3 January, he wrote to me that ‘two thousand of the three printed for second and third editions are already taken by the trade.’”

  Shortly after the New Year, Dickens wrote to his American friend Cornelius Felton, including his own version of the party where he so dazzled Mrs. Carlyle: “If you could have seen me at a children’s party at Macreadys the other night, going down a country dance (something longer than the Library at Cambridge) with Mrs M. you would have thought I was a country Gentleman of independent property, residing on a tip-top farm, with the wind blowing straight in my face every day.”

  And in that same missive he used a favorite device, discussing himself in the third person to describe the triumph of his new book: “By every post, all manner of strangers write all manner of letters to him about their homes and hearths, and how this same Carol is read aloud there and kept on a very little shelf by itself. Indeed it is the greatest success as I am told, that this ruff an and rascal has ever achieved.”

  Heady times indeed for a ruffian and rascal. But being a novelist as well, Dickens might have begun to wonder if any circumstance that appeared so bright might not have some dark underside about to surface. Sure enough, scarcely had Dickens begun to exult in his good fortune than there appeared equal cause to lament.

  For one thing, the great swell of approval in England for the book suggested that the American public, which had clamored for news of Little Nell, would be equally receptive to A Christmas Carol. And though this proved to be the case, not all of those clamoring would act in Dickens’s best interests. The first shipment of books arrived in Boston on January 21, and as Michael Patrick Hearn puts it, “the pirates must have been waiting at the dock.”

  The American press was by and large favorably impressed by this offering from a Brit who had savaged their country in American Notes and Chuzzlewit. “It is one of those stories, the reading of which makes every one better, more contented with life, more resigned to misfortune, more hopeful, more charitable,” declared the New World.

  But once Dickens’s authorized edition arrived on American shelves, little time passed before the familiar depredations began. Almost immediately the New York firm of Harper and Brothers was advertising in the newspapers that their own edition of A Christmas Carol would hit the stands on January 24. This blatant act of expropriation appeared in the form of a pale imitation of Dickens’s lavish book, with two columns of text crowded on a page, lacking illustrations, bound in cheap blue paper, and selling at six cents a copy.

  Given that a pound exchanged for about five American dollars at the time, the price was quite a bargain compared to the $1.25 that buyers forked over for an authorized copy. At that discount, the absence of gilt edging and a few colored engravings could probably be forgiven by many of Dickens’s U.S. fans. Dickens, however, would see not as much as a ha’penny from Harper and Brothers or any of the several other American pirates who gleefully reprinted his new work.

  It was not that Americans were altogether heedless of the concept of copyright. Indeed, one of the earliest accomplishments of the U.S. Congress was the passage of the Copyright Act of 1790, which was established to “promote the progress of science and the useful arts,” and to protect the rights of authors and publishers…so long as they were American citizens, that is. Anything published by anyone living elsewhere was simply fair game for reprinting in the United States.

  And while Dickens and other writers in England and elsewhere were outraged by the equanimity with which American publishers went about their thievery, a number of American authors, Washington Irving among them, were just as upset with their own treatment by publishers across the pond. England had acknowledged the concept of copyright since the establishment of the Statute of Queen Anne in 1710, which introduced the then-revolutionary concept of an artist retaining a stake in his own creation. Though the legislation was enacted primarily to put an end to the formation of monopolies by publishers that traditionally paid only a flat fee to “own” a literary work, much as a collector of statuary might buy a chiseled rendering of a general on a rearing horse outright, the practical effect of it was to allow writers an ongoing financial interest in their own works.

  By 1844, however, England had not yet gotten around to establishing a reciprocal agreement regarding intellectual property rights with the United States, a situation that was exacerbated by the fact that politically powerful publishers on both sides were making significant sums through piracy. Thus, just as Dickens suffered in America, when a British publisher released an edition of “The Masque of the Red Death” or “The Fall of the House of Usher,” Edgar Allan Poe saw not a penny from it. It was a situation that lingered until the 1870s, when price wars reached a critical point in American publishing. Instead of undercutting one another on competing editions of identical material, publishers began to understand the competitive advantage in securing exclusive rights to an author’s work. As a result they were more willing to enter into agreements with writers from England and the Continent as well. This in turn led to the establishment of more-orderly copyright relations with England and the Continent.

  For Dickens, however, there would be no immediate remedy in America. The six-cent version of A Christmas Carol put out by Harper and Brothers was followed in short order by editions in the New York paper True Sun, which first serialized it in five episodes, then reprinted the whole in an edition that it sold for only three cents. Shortly thereafter, the well-known literary magazine the New World blithely serialized the story as well, though it did not neglect to add insult to injury by scolding Dickens for his negative portrayals of the United States in American Notes and Chuzzlewit.

  Dickens probably expected such treatment from the U.S. market, and in any case there was little he could do about it there. But when he discovered the outrage that Lee and Haddock, a London publisher, had perpetrated, he dropped his long-standing practice of ignoring domestic poachers and went directly to chancellor’s court.

  What he sought there was an injunction to restrain Richard Egan Lee and his partners from selling an issue of a periodical titled Parley’s Illuminated Library and dated January 6, 1844. The item, which sold for two pennies, contained something called “A Christmas Ghost Story, re-originated from the original by Charles Dickens, and analytically condensed expressly for this work.” In this case, “re-originating” apparently meant writing two or three lines of introduction and then reprinting the complete text of Dickens’s book with minor alterations.

  Dickens, as might be imagined, was beside himself, but it was not as if this were his first brush with domestic piracy and plagiarism. Though his literal texts were protected by British copyright law, his immense popularity had encouraged any number of hacks and fly-by-night publishers to profit from the most blatant imitations of
his work. One of the earliest of these was The Posthumous Notes of the Pickwick Club, by “Bos,” a miserably executed lift from the original, which sold for a penny (one-twelfth of the going rate for the real thing). It was followed by other such efforts as Pickwick in America, Oliver Twiss, Nickelas Nicklebery, Barnaby Budge, and more by Bos, Buz, Poz, and others.

  Though the penny imitations were truly dreadful, and read primarily by the poor and semi-illiterate who would have been hard-pressed to appreciate the difference from the actual Boz, there were also imitations aimed at the same middle-class audience who loved Dickens and who simply could not get enough of their favorite author. A journalist and editor by the name of G. W. M. Reynolds began a cottage industry of his own by aping Dickens in the pages of Monthly Magazine. Reynolds defended his serialization of something he titled “Pickwick Abroad” by saying that while he might have appropriated Dickens’s characters, the stories and the writing were his alone. If Dickens had been too shortsighted to continue Pickwick’s run on his own, “it is not my fault,” said Reynolds.

  Dickens was not particularly happy about any of these shenanigans, and had in days past inquired halfheartedly of his solicitors what might be done, but he had never taken the trouble to pursue any actions in court. In the case of A Christmas Carol, however, he was not only the writer but the publisher as well, and so was particularly vulnerable to such thievery. Furthermore, his circumstances were far more dire than they had been. As they would learn, Lee and Haddock were trifling with a desperate man.

  “I have not the least doubt that these Vagabonds can be stopped, they must be,” Dickens wrote to Mitton the day after the abominable issue of Parley’s Illuminated had appeared. “Let us go to work in such terrible earnest that everything tumble down before it…. Let us be sledge-hammer in this, or I shall be beset by hundreds of the same crew, when I come out with a long story.”