Les Standiford

by The Man Who Invented Christmas: Charles Dickens's

  Some of the critics were happy to opine on the matter: “Exaggerated, absurd, impossible sentimentality,” is what the Morning Chronicle had to say of his efforts in The Battle of Life, and the fact that most of the other reviews were equally hostile puts to rest any notion that the Chronicle’s editors might have been influenced by Dickens’s fling at competition with them. (Overwhelmed by the demands of editing a daily paper, Dickens had resigned his post less than three weeks after the Daily News began publication.) Still, The Battle of Life sold 23,000 copies on the day of its publication, and though there were but few dramatizations, Dickens did receive £100 for a production staged at the Lyceum by his actor friend Robert Keely (who had also produced versions of The Chimes and The Cricket on the Hearth).

  His preoccupation with Dombey and Son, which was selling at as many as 35,000 copies per installment (issues of Thackeray’s Vanity Fair were selling about 5,000 copies at the same time), kept Dickens from writing a Christmas book in 1847. But, “loath to lose the money,” as he put it to Forster, he began work on his fifth and final Christmas book in October of 1848. After a month spent primarily, as he described it, “frowning horribly at a quire of paper,” he wrote Miss Burdett Coutts that the logjam had finally broken. “I have hit upon a little notion…with a good Christmas tendency,” he told his old friend, and finished The Haunted Man on November 30, in Brighton, and after “crying my eyes out over it.”

  The story is that of Redlaw, a depressive academic who has sunk into despair over the contemplation of his many past losses and betrayals, including memories of a miserable childhood. On Christmas Eve, Redlaw receives a visit from a spirit, who not only grants him relief from all his painful memories but also endows Redlaw with the power to do the same for others in turn. The gift proves to be a curse, however, for Redlaw comes to understand that without the memory of painful experiences, human beings have no way to judge what pleasure is by contrast.

  When he begs for release, the spirit is indifferent and decrees that he will first have to meet with Milly, wife of the college’s lodging house master. Milly, the kindest person Redlaw knows, proves more than capable of resisting his evil powers, and the encounter transforms Redlaw back into a fully balanced human, capable of gratitude and compassion.

  While some modern commentators have praised the psychological accuracy and artistry (and the absence of melodramatic contrivance that marked the middle Christmas books), the darkness and complexity of the tale—with its focus on the inner world and not the outer—was hardly the stuff to set the likes of Mr. Fezziwig and Pickwick and their families into a holiday jig. Dickens wrote bravely to a friend that The Haunted Man had sold 18,000 copies upon its December 19 debut, but that number was down nearly a quarter from the sales of The Battle of Life. In fact, there were still unsold copies of The Haunted Man warehoused at the time of Dickens’s death, more than twenty years later.

  Dickens never commented on why he never wrote another Christmas book, but there is evidence for speculation. Since he had taken the year off to stay focused on Dombey in 1847, and spoke of the “grind” of trying to get moving on The Haunted Man in 1848, it is possible that he had simply exhausted himself on the subject and realized that it was more practical to stay focused on the longer works. The sales of the first four installments of Dombey were enough to bring him finally out of debt, and, as Forster says, “all embarrassments connected with money” were put to rest.

  But there might have been a more provocative reason as well. By the fall of 1849, he was well along on The Personal History of David Copperfield, the first number of which had appeared on May 1 of that year, and he would continue publishing installments of that novel until November of 1850. In the story of a young man who survives a miserable and abusive childhood to become a parliamentary reporter and then a novelist, Dickens is clearly making use of autobiographical elements.

  In addition, it was just prior to beginning the writing of Copperfield, that most commentators believe that Dickens made an attempt to deal directly with the traumatic events of his own childhood, laying them out in that “autobiographical fragment,” which he shared only with Forster. And, in both The Haunted Man and David Copperfield, we see a preoccupation with the power of childhood unhappiness upon adult life; the glimpse of a young Ebenezer, abandoned at his boarding school, is one of the many touches that transform the miser from stereotype to sympathetic figure, and which in turn gives A Christmas Carol such power.

  Thus, the common notion that Dickens may have exhausted himself on the subject of Christmas might be replaced by the speculation that beginning with A Christmas Carol and culminating in David Copperfield, Dickens had finally dragged up the powerful demons of his past and wrestled them away, to the extent that successful literature allows, at least. If that is true, then the engine that had driven him down this path in the first place was at last stilled.

  In any case, while sales of its installments dropped down to 20,000 or so, the critical response of his peers to David Copperfield was universally positive, and to this day, some find it the very best of all his works. Dickens himself proclaimed the book to be “a very complicated interweaving of truth and fiction,” and was happily consumed by the writing of it. As Forster put it, “Once fairly in it, the story bore him irresistibly along…and he was probably never less harassed by interruptions or breaks in his invention.”

  Whatever the reasons, Dickens would go to his grave calling David Copperfield his own “favorite child.” In his preface to the 1867 edition, he said, “Of all my books, I like this the best.”

  At the same time that he was consumed with David Copperfield, Dickens was also involved in another significant undertaking, one that would in its own way lead him back to Christmas. In late March of 1850, he had begun—in partnership with Bradbury and Evans, who took a quarter-share, and Forster, who held an eighth—the publication of a weekly magazine called Household Words. A collection of journalism, sketches, poetry, and short stories, the publication, with Dickens as its editor, would continue until he died.

  Priced at tuppence, and with an editorial by Dickens in every issue and contributions from himself and his friends—the leading literati of the day—the magazine, which was aimed at what might be described as The New Yorker audience of its day, became a resounding success. The first issue sold 100,000 copies, and though those were not the numbers of a penny rag for the masses, which could reach as high as 300,000, Dickens and his partners were quite happy. Household Words settled in at around 40,000 thereafter, and the magazine would provide Dickens with a stable income (he received a yearly salary of £500 as well as his half-share in the profits) and a satisfying ancillary focus for the rest of his life and career.

  But if the editorship of the magazine, combined with the race to finish David Copperfield in November, made the writing of a Christmas book practically impossible, his new undertaking also allowed Dickens to do the next best thing. If he could not publish a Christmas book, at the very least he could bring out a holiday-themed issue of his new magazine, and he would of course contribute something to it.

  The first Christmas issue of Household Words was published on December 21, 1850, and among the nine pieces included was Dickens’s masterwork of nonfiction, “A Christmas Tree.” In this blend of essay and reminiscence and pure paean to life, Dickens sets down the great depth of his feeling for the season directly and without pretense. He manages, without a false note and in essay form, to convey the same blend of childhood wonder, fantasy, humor, celebration, and solemnity that distinguishes A Christmas Carol in narrative form.

  Dickens closes his piece with a reminder of the tree as the centerpiece of the season’s celebratory nature: “Now, the tree is decorated with bright merriment, and song, and dance, and cheerfulness. And they are welcome. Innocent and welcome be they ever held, beneath the branches of the Christmas Tree, which cast no gloomy shadow!”

  And while he might have left it there, with a reminder of good cheer and goodwill a
nd fellowship that marked the season so indelibly for him, he adds a postscript—“But, as it sinks into the ground, I hear a whisper going through the leaves. ‘This, in commemoration of the law of love and kindness, mercy and compassion. This, in remembrance of Me!’”—and in this reference to the words of Jesus and the Eucharist, he ties together the holy reason for the celebration and the act of celebration itself. Though the clergy of the Anglican Church might be troubled by the concept of a Christmas tree as sacrament, for Dickens it was the perfect union of the cloister and the hearth.

  17.

  Even if it is true that, from the inception of A Christmas Carol through the completion of David Copperfield, Dickens was unconsciously wrestling with the demons from his childhood, and even if the publication of “A Christmas Tree” in 1850 was the final punctuation mark in that process, there was much to come from Dickens, both in life and art, and also as regards his beloved holiday.

  Sales of the 1850 Christmas issue of Household Words soared to 80,000, and subsequent holiday numbers of the magazine published through 1858 would hold steady at that number. And such halcyon days might have continued for the magazine, save for the fact that in that year, Dickens separated from his wife, Catherine, with whom he had raised ten children and from whom he had grown increasingly estranged over the decade. The dissolution of this marriage of twenty-two years became so acrimonious that, in an attempt to discredit rumors floated by the Hogarth family that he was having an illicit affair, Dickens used the front page of Household Words to print a statement protesting his innocence.

  The action might seem mind-boggling enough—imagine Benjamin Bradlee taking over the front page of the Washington Post to explain some delicate matter from his personal life—but Dickens compounded the awkward situation by asking Bradbury and Evans to reprint his statement in Punch, which they had published since its inception. When Bradbury and Evans suggested that this was perhaps not the sort of thing to be published in a magazine of social commentary and satire, Dickens exploded and tried to force the publishers from their quarter-share of Household Words.

  When Bradbury and Evans went to court, claiming exclusive rights to the title of the magazine, Dickens countered by simply dissolving Household Words and announcing the formation of a successor, All the Year Round. As if to prove the adage that there is no such thing as bad publicity, sales of the new magazine soared immediately above 100,000 copies; for the holiday numbers, sales rose to 300,000 and more, though it would not sustain those rates forever.

  The 1850s were in fact an up-and-down period for Dickens. He followed David Copperfield with Bleak House (1852–53), an ambitious novel that received mixed reviews in its day (Forster faulted it for its didactic approach toward social institutions, including the chancery courts), but which modern critics have hailed as his masterpiece. Despite its rather downbeat story line and the disdain of many contemporary critics, Bleak House nonetheless proved popular, with its sales averaging 34,000 per issue, well up from those for David Copperfield. As a result, Dickens realized a profit of more than £11,000, sending him into previously uncharted financial realms for a writer. Robert C. Patten, a biographer who has meticulously tallied the economics of Dickens’s career, says that Bleak House made the author “the literary Croesus” of his time.

  In 1854 Dickens began the serial publication of Hard Times as part of a strategy to boost the suddenly sagging sales of Household Words. It was the first time Dickens had published a novel in weekly rather than monthly installments since the days of Barnaby Rudge, and while he lamented the tight deadlines and strictures of space, the strategy worked insofar as Household Words was concerned. Published in twenty weekly installments between April 1 and August 12 of 1854, the novel raised the net profits of the magazine by 237 percent. Critics of the day found the book all but impossible to read, however, and indeed the characters in the book are little more than ciphers for Dickens’s scathing commentary on an industrialized society. By this time the author was in his forties, and as Hard Times seemed to make clear, something of his youthful optimism had burned away, and his hopeful stance replaced by a decidedly critical one.

  In late 1855 Dickens began the monthly publication of Little Dorrit, his eleventh novel, under the terms of a new contract with Bradbury and Evans. The eight-year term of their original agreement having expired, Dickens negotiated a new contract that reduced the publishers’ share of profits slightly and gave Dickens the opportunity to walk away whenever he chose. Though once again the critics found the rise of the Dorrit family from abject poverty to wealth overly didactic, with the sixth installment featuring the family’s incarceration in the Marshalsea debtors’ prison, monthly sales of the book rose as high as 40,000 copies per month. “It is a brilliant triumph,” Dickens proclaimed to his publishers, and in the preface to the collected edition he wrote, “I have never had so many readers.”

  Nor had he ever had so many admirers, it would seem. In the fallow period that followed the completion of Little Dorrit in June of 1857, Dickens busied himself with the production of several benefit performances of a play by his friend Wilkie Collins, The Frozen Deep, to aid the family of a writer friend, Douglas Jerrold, who had died unexpectedly. Dickens himself took the part of a noble Arctic explorer who dies while attempting to save the life of a rival. Several preliminary presentations, including a command performance before the queen, had produced the lachrymose effects on the audience that always signaled success to Dickens. But when they were booked into the vast new Free Trade Hall in Manchester, he realized that his troupe of amateurs would need to be bolstered by professionals who could project to the far reaches of the theater.

  Thus began, with the hiring of the Ternan family, including mother Frances and her three comely daughters, Fanny, Maria, and Ellen, the last momentous chapter of Dickens’s life. The final scene of the play, in which the lovely Maria Ternan dissolved into unscripted tears as she held the dying Dickens in her arms, “electrified” the audience in Manchester, according to one critic. And while the reviewer did not note the sparks that also flew between youngest sister Ellen Ternan and Mr. Dickens during the performance—or the coincidence that his life was once again taking a momentous turn upon a Manchester stage—talk of Dickens and “Nelly” Ternan was soon the gossip of London literary society.

  The story of the affair between Dickens and Miss Ternan is a difficult one to trace, owing largely to the fact that the author, who until that moment had lived his life in full public view, began thereafter an abrupt turnabout, one of the most marked in the history of celebrity. Formerly, Dickens’s personal and private lives had been virtually indistinguishable, and his conduct the very emblem of the Fezziwigian hail-fellow-well-met, more-the-merrier way of life. But after his introduction to Miss Ternan, and his subsequent divorce from Catherine, Dickens simply slammed the door on his private life, a fact that has given modern biographers no end of grief.

  The story has its sad and tawdry aspect and is perhaps a bit familiar to the jaded modern reader: noted celebrity fathers several children to devoted wife, and then, finding her turned unaccountably bovine and dull, runs off with a beautiful wisp of an actress less than half his age (Ellen Ternan was all of eighteen when they met, he forty-five). One surmises, however, that from Dickens’s point of view—and at his age—it may have seemed that he had miraculously been given a second chance at the sort of rapture he was denied in his youth, when Maria Beadnell rejected him for better prospects.

  He had previously written on this subject to Forster, lamenting in 1855 that passion was the “one happiness” he had missed out on in life. In a twist of fate that might be termed Dickensian, a few weeks after he had written to Forster, he received a letter from the former Miss Beadnell, who wanted to let him know that she had been following his career these many years, and was quite proud of what he had accomplished.

  She also told Dickens that she was married, of course, and that she was also “toothless, fat, old and ugly.” Such caveats seemed
like a coquette’s protests to Dickens, however, and he persisted in his entreaties until Miss Beadnell, now Mrs. Winter, agreed to bring her husband (a sawmill manager) along to lunch, provided Dickens would escort his wife as well.

  At that meeting, it turned out that Mrs. Winter was as accurate as a Victorian novelist in her self-description, and Dickens walked away from the encounter perfectly dazed by the loss of the dream he had borne within him for more than twenty years. No fairy-tale prince who’d dragged himself up a hundred feet of princess hair only to find a hag’s face beaming at him could have been more disheartened.

  In any case, the fact that the image of the ineffable Miss Beadnell had vanished forever did not relieve Dickens of his sense that he had made a terrible mistake a long time ago. In September 1857, Dickens would write to Forster, “Poor Catherine and I are not made for each other, and there is no help for it…. She is exactly what you know, in the way of being amiable and complying; but we are strangely ill-assorted for the bond that lays between us.” Soon thereafter, Dickens moved his bed into his dressing room and hired a carpenter to close the door that connected it to Catherine’s chambers with a set of shelves.

  Whether or not Dickens and Ellen Ternan ever became lovers is a topic that fuels entire volumes to this day, but—beyond such circumstantial evidence as receipts for jewelry and other gifts sent by him to her, and occasional public sightings of the two together, and the fact that Dickens left Ternan £1,000 in his will—inquiring minds must eternally wait in their quest to know. It can be stated, however, that in the year following his meeting Ellen Ternan, Dickens did leave Catherine, and provide his ex-wife with a home and a yearly stipend of £600, and with access to their children as she chose.