Les Standiford

by The Man Who Invented Christmas: Charles Dickens's

  Following his divorce, and the break with Bradbury and Evans, and the reconfiguring of his magazine into All the Year Round, Dickens entered into a new relationship with his old publishers Chapman and Hall (perhaps encouraged by the fact that Edward Chapman—one of the original partners who had considered docking Dickens £50 from his monthly draw—had been bought out by his cousin Frederic). The first undertaking in his new business was the weekly serialization of A Tale of Two Cities in All the Year Round, beginning in April of 1859, followed by its publication in volume form by Chapman and Hall in December. Weekly sales of the rather humorless saga, set against the backdrop of the French Revolution, exceeded 100,000 copies for many issues, but critical opinion of Dickens’s strength as a historical novelist was divided, then as now. It remains one of Dickens’s most popular works, even if one wonders whether its brevity and the resultant assignment to schoolchildren has something to do with that. If it has no other distinction, its immortal first line, “It was the best of times, it was the worst of times,” likely rivals Bulwer-Lytton’s “dark and stormy night” as the best known in the language.

  Dickens published Great Expectations, his thirteenth novel, in weekly installments of All the Year Round from December 1860 to August 1861; these also appeared more or less simultaneously in Harper’s Weekly in the United States, from whom the author—much to his satisfaction—had managed to negotiate a £1,000 licensing fee. The complicated story of Pip’s encounters with Miss Havisham and his rise from urchin to successful businessman constitutes perhaps the best-rounded of Dickens’s works in its combination of narrative sweep, juggling of plot, complex characterization, and social commentary. Certainly it was popular in its day, selling above 100,000 copies of each number. The book also spawned what is arguably the most accomplished film version of Dickens to date, the 1946 adaptation directed by David Lean, starring John Mills, Alec Guinness, and Jean Simmons. Of that adaptation, James Agee said it was “almost never less than graceful, tasteful and intelligent, and some of it better than that.”

  Dickens’s last completed novel, Our Mutual Friend, was written between May 1864 and November 1865, and though the composition of it exasperated him, Dickens ultimately wove its materials—the chase of a fortune by a complexly intertwined group of Londoners—into what is often called his most expertly plotted work. Though sales for the first installment surpassed 30,000, the numbers had dropped to just under 20,000 by the end of its run, but Dickens was not particularly daunted. He had his work on the magazine to distract him, and there is little doubt that he continued a quite active relationship with Ellen Ternan as well.

  Over the ten years prior to the publication of Our Mutual Friend, Dickens had also devoted more and more time to the avocation of public reading, an activity that led him back to his “little Carol.” In 1854, as he took a rest from his labors on Hard Times, Dickens agreed to make a benefit appearance in Birmingham on behalf of the cause of the education of workingmen, not unlike that appearance he had agreed to in Manchester so many years before. As he pondered just what to do with his time on stage, it occurred to Dickens that—it being December—he might as well read from A Christmas Carol. He had practiced such a thing on his friends plenty of times in the past, after all, and if he could bring a sophisticated group such as that to tears, why not take his act to provincial Birmingham?

  It proved to be an inspired decision. Dickens read three nights in Birmingham, and on the last evening more than 2,000 paid their sixpence to hear and be blessed by Tiny Tim, every one. Dickens, who had never lost his love of the theater, relished every moment of it, and in 1855 he read A Christmas Carol at charitable events in London, Reading, Sherboune, and Bradford, where 3,700 turned out. As the author Jane Smiley notes in her brief biography of Dickens, the intoxicating effect of eliciting tears while acting in a play and reciting the words of another is one thing, but to see some 4,000 people bursting simultaneously into sobs as you read your own words to them is something else again. And as he discovered, there was no shortage of persons willing to pay good money for the experience.

  It was not long, then, before Dickens had begun to give public readings on a regular and commercial basis, a practice he would continue—at considerable gain—until his death. During the winter of 1867–68, in fact, he undertook a triumphant return tour of the United States, where he read in seventy-six cities, to audiences eventually totaling more than 100,000 (including Mark Twain, who wrote of taking his wife-to-be on a first date to hear Dickens perform), and earned himself £19,000 in the process.

  Though he enjoyed public reading immensely and had allowed the practice to distract him from writing following the publication of Our Mutual Friend, Dickens was also getting along in years, and his health—he was plagued now by gout and high blood pressure—had generally begun to fail. The demands of touring and performing exhausted him, and often even ordinary colds would lay him up for days. In April of 1869, following another serious bout of illness, his doctors ordered him to put an end to the readings to which he gave himself so eagerly, but which taxed him in equal measure.

  Somewhat reluctantly, he turned away from those dramatic renditions of the murder scene in Oliver Twist and the intonations of Marley frightening Scrooge near to death, and back to the lonely work of writing at his desk. He struggled along through the late months of 1869 at what he had settled on as The Mystery of Edwin Drood, then took time off—against the vehement opposition of his doctors—for a series of a dozen readings from January to mid-March of 1870.

  Then back to the desk he went, and by June 8—and though one suspects he would have rather been playacting at Sykes slaying Nancy—he managed to complete the sixth installment of his new tale-in-progress. The Mystery of Edwin Drood was conceived as a murder mystery inspired by the works of his friend Wilkie Collins, concerning the exploits of one John Jasper, pious choirmaster of Cloisterham Cathedral, who wakes up one morning to find himself, unaccountably, in a London opium den.

  The generally accepted account of what happened next says that on that evening of June 8, during dinner, Dickens began to complain that he felt out of sorts. Quickly his speech began to slur, then turned to gibberish, and his frantic housekeeper rushed to help him to the floor.

  As became clear, he was suffering a massive stroke, and was soon unconscious. Doctors were summoned and Ellen Ternan was called, but it was all to no avail. By the following morning, Charles Dickens was dead at the age of fifty-eight.

  It might be said, however, that there is an alternative version to the story of Dickens’s last hours. In it, Dickens finishes his day’s work on Edwin Drood and takes a carriage to Peckham, where Ellen Ternan lives. It is at Ellen Ternan’s home that Dickens falls ill, and it is she who cradles him to the floor, much as her sister did on a stage in Manchester nearly fourteen years before.

  And there is in fact some evidence for this scenario, as impossibly pat as it might seem. A Ternan family caretaker has sworn that—to avoid the scandal that Dickens had spent years steadfastly avoiding—he carried the unconscious Dickens from the Ternan house and bore him back to Gad’s Hill, where Dickens lived at the time. Adding some credence to this account is also the fact that Dickens cashed a check for a considerable sum earlier on the day that he collapsed, yet he was found with almost nothing in his pockets when he died. Since his housekeeper had to seek funds for necessities from his attorneys in the wake of Dickens’s passing, it is certain that the money was not given to her.

  All is speculation, of course, but there seems little doubt which version of his passing that Dickens, as a novelist, would have favored. Students of history will simply have to choose for themselves.

  18.

  No one was more intensely fond than Dickens of old nursery tales,” his friend Forster would write, “and he had a secret delight in feeling that he was here only giving them a higher form. The social and manly virtues he desired to teach were to him not less the charm of the ghost, the goblin, and the fairy fancies of his ch
ildhood.”

  This description of the nature and the intent of Dickens’s efforts explains as well their enduring charm. The Naturalists who would follow in Dickens’s footsteps—Crane, Dreiser, the later Twain—came to sneer at his hopefulness. The thought that a real-life Scrooge could be changed by four ghosts or a thousand—were there such things as “ghosts”—was balderdash. And as for the Deconstructionists who came along in the later part of the next century, any meaning to be found in such a fable as A Christmas Carol was as relative to the reader, and as illusory, as the messages in tea leaves.

  Yet, despite such cynicism, Dickens and his oeuvre persist. Doubt shadows the contemporary psyche, to be sure, but it might be pointed out that there are few living nihilists. And, for the most part, the only place where readers consume fictions that do not stir their emotions is in a high school or college classroom.

  In an elegy, Theodore Watts-Dunton, English poet and critic and a contemporary of the generation of writers following Dickens, illustrates the profound impact of the great writer on his times. In an epigraph to his poem, Watts-Dunton relates the story of a Cockney produce vendor who had just been given the news of Dickens’s passing: “Dickens dead?” the young woman cried. “Then will Father Christmas die too?”

  She needn’t have worried, of course, for the holiday has only burgeoned in the wake of Dickens’s passing. Next Christmas, Anytown Elementary and thousands of its counterparts, great and small, will stage their “re-originations” of A Christmas Carol, and perhaps the new Hollywood version and the one after that will have been completed too.

  Millions of ordinary people continue to experience Scrooge’s impossible transformation in one form or another. Some of them will learn of the story of the industrialist who heard Dickens deliver one of his public readings and ran out of the hall on the spot to purchase turkeys for all his employees for Christmas. Odd, a few might think, I got a turkey from my boss just today.

  Such tales abound of Dickens’s power to suggest and to prod to action. Another factory owner was said to proclaim—in the wake of a Dickens reading—that Christmas would ever after be a holiday in his shop. Today, the Grinch who volunteers to work on Christmas will often enjoy double and triple time for his trouble.

  In 1874 Robert Louis Stevenson would write of his great affection for Dickens and his Christmas books: “I feel so good after them and would do anything, yes, and shall do anything, to make it a little better for people.” Some modern critics have faulted books that arouse these positive but aimless impulses in readers—the very desire to be charitable makes one feel good about oneself, the argument goes, and once one feels good, the need to do anything more is dispensed with. And it is true that the world awaits the publication of the study that will prove any direct correlation between the number of times experiencing A Christmas Carol and annual household giving.

  Still—for all the melodrama and the unlikely plot development, and for the impossible notions of goodwill toward men that seem so quaint in an era of mushroom clouds and airport screenings—on any given December 25, when we gather with our families, rich or poor, in homes huge or humble, in an orgy of big-ticket gift-giving or a modest homemade something, with a prize-winning turkey on a groaning table or the best we can manage under the circumstances, there is no gain-saying those words of Nephew Fred to his uncle Scrooge as to the nature of Christmastime: “the only time…in the long calendar of the year, when men and women seem by one consent to open their shut-up hearts.”

  The house on Devonshire Terrace where Dickens wrote those words is gone, as is the blacking house where he tied tops to tiny pots of boot polish. Dickens too is long gone. But still with us, as the turn of every season proves, is the immutable, eternal story.

  Eliminate ignorance, Dickens dreamed in his Carol. Eliminate want. A tall order then, and a tall order now. But one does not need to be a social scientist to know that he identifies the true sources of misery in this world. And it is a mark of Dickens’s genius that we return eagerly to his hopeful vision—millions of us now—year after year. And vow to do the best we can.

  NOTES

  Many before me have been compelled to write of Dickens, of the Christmas season, and of A Christmas Carol in particular. My intent in writing this book has not been to catalog, analyze, or chronicle a life—but rather to weave some rather familiar, if sometimes disparate, elements into a narrative that might enliven the historical facts attendant to it.

  And though I have made use of the same research techniques here that I have employed for many years in academic pursuits, I intend this volume to be a fireside pleasure of the Fezziwigian type, and not a formal work of scholarship. Thus, I have set aside the typical convention of footnotes.

  Where I have included information that seemed to me the unique contribution of an individual, I have endeavored to give the credit due, either in the text or in the notes that follow.

  For the reader who may be interested in tracing an inquiry along some line I have opened in this book, I am hopeful that these notes and the list of sources that were of great interest and help to me as I wrote will be of value to the reader in turn.

  Nativity

  The particulars of young Dickens’s time at Warren’s blacking factory have been reported and analyzed by many commentators. But the essential details in this re-creation of his experience are drawn from the autobiographical fragment composed by Dickens sometime in the 1840s—prior to the writing of David Copper- field, according to the author—later shared with Forster and first published in the latter’s intimate and informative biography, The Life of Charles Dickens, four years after the author’s death.

  One of those to rank Dickens’s tale at the penultimate position of readership is J. H. McNulty, writing nearly a century after the book’s publication. In “Our Carol” (The Dickensian 34: 15–19) McNulty describes A Christmas Carol as “the one perfect short story Dickens wrote,” and goes on to add—as Macaulay said of Boswell—“Eclipse is first and the rest nowhere.”

  1.

  The career-context of Dickens’s invitation to Manchester is discussed by Forster in Book 4 of The Life, “The First Year of Martin Chuzzlewit.”

  The general course of Dickens’s career comes from Forster, Peter Ackroyd’s Dickens, and the invaluable twelve-volume Pilgrim Edition of The Letters of Charles Dickens, edited by House and Storey (Oxford, 1965–2002). A quick and authoritative tour is available in Paul Schlicke’s encyclopedic Oxford Reader’s Companion (1999).

  Sales figures for Dickens’s work cited throughout this volume are drawn from Robert C. Patten’s exhaustive study of the subject, Charles Dickens and His Publishers.

  For more on Wellerisms, see George B. Bryan and Wolfgang Mieder, “As Sam Weller Said, When Finding Himself on the Stage,” De Proverbio 3, no. 1 (1997).

  An interesting history of British publishing in general, including the transformation attendant to the rise of the novel in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, with Dickens’s part in the latter, may be found in John Feather’s A History of British Publishing (New York: Routledge, 1991).

  2.

  Walter C. Phillips describes the Victorian era as witnessing a complete remaking of the trade in printed matter and the transformation of the earning power of popular writers. “No single figure was more influential in this revolution than Dickens,” he adds. In Dickens, Reade and Collins: Sensation Novelists.

  For a contemporary view of Victorian publishing and the nature of the reading public of the day, see the final volume of Charles Knight’s illustrated The Popular History of England (London: Warne, 1856–62). Knight, the son of a bookseller and publisher, published his comprehensive eight-volume set, he said, in an effort to tie up social history with the standard account of the country’s political history.

  The tenor and the details of Dickens’s 1842 visit to the United States are of course best rendered in the author’s own words—in his letters to friends and in American Notes for General Circulatio
n. The edition of the latter referred to here is from St. Martin’s Press, 1985.

  3.

  The edition of Martin Chuzzlewit cited here is Penguin, 1986.

  4.

  Watkin’s account of Dickens’s 1843 visit to Manchester, “Peeps at Dickens,” is collected in The Dickensian 34: 37–39.

  A discussion of Dickens’s associates in Manchester, along with a summary of all his visits to the city, is found in F. R. Dean’s “Dickens and Manchester,” in The Dickensian 34: 111–18.

  5.

  For more on Cobden, see Nicholas C. Edsall, Richard Cobden: Independent Radical (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1987).

  Sorrentino’s quite lovely story is “The Moon in Its Flight”(1971), collected recently in a volume of the same name (Minneapolis: Coffee House Press, 2004).

  An incisive portrait of Manchester and its influence on the work of Marx and Engels may be found in Boyer’s “The Historical Background of the Communist Manifesto,” in Journal of Economic Perspectives, Autumn, 1998: 151–74.

  This author has expanded on Carnegie in Meet You in Hell (New York: Crown Publishers, 2005).

  References to Dickens’s remarks before the Athenaeum come from Fielding’s The Speeches of Charles Dickens (Oxford, 1960).

  6.

  The process by which A Christmas Carol came to consume Dickens in the wake of his visit to the Saffron Hill school and to Manchester is extrapolated from The Letters, esp. vol. 3, and from Forster, Book 4 of The Life, “Chuzzlewit Disappointments and Christmas Carol.”