Dickens and Christmas

by Lucinda Hawksley

  The decision not to produce a Christmas story for 1849, seems to have made Dickens much happier than in the previous year. His letters are full of stories about parties and trips to the theatre, including a letter he wrote to Mark Lemon on Christmas Day, ‘Merry Christmas and a happy new year, to you and all yours! Are you for a pankelmime on Thursday? If so, name your hour of dinner – anywhere – and I think I can bring Stanny with me.’ Stanny was their friend, the artist Clarkson Stanfield RA.

  The party for Charley’s thirteenth birthday was fondly remembered in the family because, on 5 January 1850, Angela Burdett-Coutts sent her godson such a large Twelfth Cake, that the children danced an impromptu jig of delight around the cake as it waited on the table in preparation for the following day’s party. In her memoir, My Father As I Recall Him, Mamie remembered:

  ‘When “the boys” came home for the holidays there were constant rehearsals for the Christmas and New Year’s parties; and more especially for the dance on Twelfth Night, the anniversary of my brother Charlie’s birthday. Just before one of these celebrations my father insisted that my sister ... and I should teach the polka step to Mr. Leech and himself. My father was as much in earnest about learning to take that wonderful step correctly, as though there were nothing of greater importance in the world. Often he would practice gravely in a corner, without either partner or music, and I remember one cold winter’s night his awakening with the fear that he had forgotten the step so strong upon him that, jumping out of bed, by the scant illumination of the old-fashioned rushlight, and to his own whistling, he diligently rehearsed its “one, two, three, one, two, three” until he was once more secure in his knowledge.’

  By the end of the 1840s and the start of the 1850s, Charles Dickens was very heavily involved with trying to bring about social change. In addition to his and Angela Burdett-Coutts’ Urania Cottage project, in 1849 he campaigned passionately for a change in the law that governed the death penalty. He was not campaigning against the death penalty itself, but against the practice of executions being carried out in public. He was sickened by the spectacle this presented, and the holiday atmosphere in which whole families would arrive as day-trippers to watch criminals being hanged. In Oliver Twist, at the start of his career, he had written a very compassionate account of Fagin’s last night on earth. The chapter feels claustrophobic to read, as the reader gets sucked into the criminal’s own counting down of the hours to his death, listening to the mob outside baying for him to be hanged. The letters that Dickens wrote to The Times in 1849, about public executions, in which the author queried what made the mob lusting after the spectacle of a hanging any better than the criminals being hanged, helped to sway public opinion and, ultimately, caused the law to be changed; public executions ended in Britain in 1868. From that time on, they were carried out only inside prisons where the public was unable to watch.

  As the 1840s drew to a close, Dickens was thinking about making a change in the way he worked. He had been exhausted, both physically and emotionally, by the constant clamour from his public and his publishers about the desire for a new Christmas book every December and he knew he needed to change the way he was working. He also made a new business decision. He was tired of his work being edited and of seeing the money for the magazines which sold on the back of his works going into the pockets of others. So, he approached his publisher with an idea for setting up a magazine of his own. The new magazine was called Household Words and he used it to make a much-needed change in his Christmas publications. Dickens ran and edited Household Words, alongside his faithful colleague and editor William Henry Wills (better known by his initials, as W.H. Wills). Dickens had found the production of his five Christmas books exhausting. A Christmas Carol was different from the others. It had been a vocation, something he had felt called upon to write in an attempt to bring about social change. That desperate need to write it had made it the most straightforward and heartfelt of his Christmas books. With each successive year, however, he had found himself drained by the need to produce another Christmas book, or by the need to explain why he hadn’t written one.

  Although each of his five Christmas books was very popular in its time, the only one that has remained popular is A Christmas Carol and many people have no idea that Dickens wrote another four. With the beginning of Household Words, Dickens was able to start a new Christmas tradition, one that was less arduous and time-consuming than writing a new book every December. Instead of Christmas books, he began writing Christmas stories. He also commissioned other writers to do the same, including Wilkie Collins, Elizabeth Gaskell and George Augustus Sala. Household Words continued until 1859, when Dickens replaced it with a new magazine, All The Year Round.

  Both magazines became famous for their Christmas stories, which were published in a bumper Christmas edition – but the stories weren’t necessarily about Christmas or New Year. By the time he became editor of All The Year Round, Dickens’s commissioning instructions specified that he would be happy if their stories made no reference to the festive season, as is shown in this message sent by W.H. Wills ‘To Contributors to All The Year Round’ on 18 September 1862:

  ‘In inviting you to contribute to our Christmas No. I beg to send you Mr Dickens’s Memorandum of the range that may be taken this year. You will see that it is a wide one. The slight leading notion of the No. being devised with a view to placing as little restriction as possible on the fancies of my fellow-writers in it, there is again no limitation as to scene, or first person, or third person; nor is any reference to the season of the year essential.’

  ‘Christmas goes out in fine style – with Twelfth Night. It is a finish worthy of the time. Christmas Day was the morning of the season: New Year’s Day the middle of it, or noon; Twelfth Night is the night, brilliant with innumerable planets or Twelfth Cakes. The whole island keeps court; nay, all Christendom. All the world are kings and queens.’

  Leigh Hunt, 1840

  CHAPTER FOURTEEN

  Christmas All the Year Round

  ‘The custom of having illuminated trees at Christmas, laden with pretty little trifles, as mementoes to be presented to the guests of the Christmas party, is derived from Germany. A young fir is generally selected for the Christmas Tree, and little presents of various kinds are bound on the branches, as, crochet-purses, bonbons, preserved fruits, alum baskets, charms, dolls, toys in endless variety ... The whole is illuminated by numerous little wax tapers, which are lighted just before the guests are admitted to inspect the tree. Before the tapers are quite burnt out the guests all assemble around the tree, and the souvenirs are taken off and presented to the guests whose names have either been previously appended to them, or at the discretion of the distributor.’

  Dictionary of Daily Wants 1858

  In December 1850, Dickens had two important issues on his mind; one was his determination to get the queen to give a pension to an impoverished writer named John Poole. Dickens wrote personally to the Prime Minister, Lord John Russell, who had already provided some emergency funds, of the necessity of Poole receiving a regular pension:

  ‘He is in a prematurely shattered state, and perfectly unable to write ... To the best of my belief, he has no relative whomsoever. He must either have starved, or gone to the workhouse (and I have little doubt that he would have done the former) but for the funds I have doled out to him, – which were exhausted before you generously assisted him from the Queen’s Bounty. He has no resource of any kind.’

  The prime minister agreed, and on Christmas Eve Dickens wrote a jubilant letter to Poole:

  ‘My dear Poole, On the Sunday when I last saw you, I went straight to Lord John’s with the letter you read …To-day I got a letter from him, announcing that you have a pension of a hundred a year! of which I heartily wish you joy.’

  The other issue commanding Dickens’s attention, was the preparation and rehearsals for the family’s Twelfth Night play. This year he had Dion Boucicault’s play Used Up, and he threw himself in
to the production with great energy, helping his children learn their lines and commanding the operation of transforming the children’s schoolroom at 1, Devonshire Terrace into a theatre. There were now nine children in the Dickens household, a third daughter, baby Dora, having been born in August. Several of the older children were taking part in the family theatrical, and there was great excitement over Charley’s role as a tiger, for which a specially commissioned tiger suit was tailor-made.

  For eighteen months, Dickens had been hard at work writing David Copperfield – which his children would later describe as their father’s ‘favourite child’ – the novel which is usually considered his most autobiographical work. The novel was a great success and the final instalment was published in November of 1850, leaving its author free to enjoy himself at Christmas time. In David Copperfield, Dickens included a sad Christmas scene, evoking the feelings he remembered so well after being rejected by Maria Beadnell in the 1830s. In times of sadness, he still brooded on his lost love affair and his feelings for Maria had inspired the character of Dora Spenlow. While he is married to Dora, David comes to realise how unsuited they are, and finally understands – as the reader has long understood – that the right woman for him is Agnes Wickfield, his loyal friend since childhood, but whom David has only ever looked upon as a ‘sister’. After Dora has died leaving David a sad young widower, he feels unable to tell Agnes that he loves her, believing she does not return his feelings. Convinced he is about to lose the woman he loves to an unknown rival, he finds the season one of misery:

  ‘The year came round to Christmas-time, and I had been at home above two months … It was – what lasting reason have I to remember it! – a cold, harsh, winter day. There had been snow, some hours before; and it lay, not deep, but hard-frozen on the ground. Out at sea, beyond my window, the wind blew ruggedly from the north. I had been thinking of it, sweeping over those mountain wastes of snow in Switzerland, then inaccessible to any human foot; and had been speculating which was the lonelier, those solitary regions, or a deserted ocean … How well I recollect the wintry ride! The frozen particles of ice, brushed from the blades of grass by the wind, and borne across my face; the hard clatter of the horse’s hoofs, beating a tune upon the ground; the stiff-tilled soil; the snowdrift, lightly eddying in the chalkpit as the breeze ruffled it; the smoking team with the waggon of old hay, stopping to breathe on the hill-top, and shaking their bells musically; the whitened slopes and sweeps of Down-land lying against the dark sky, as if they were drawn on a huge slate!’

  By contrast, over the Christmas of 1850, Dickens, having completed David Copperfield, was in a proud and excitable mood. On 19 December 1850, he wrote to his friend Lavinia Watson about his preparations for the family theatrical and joked about the despair allegedly felt by his manservant:

  ‘I have closely overhauled the little Theatre, and the Carpenter and Painter. The whole has been entirely repainted (I mean the Proscenium and Scenery) for this especial purpose and it is extremely pretty … It is as good as the Queen’s little theatre at Windsor; raised stage excepted. I have had an alteration made, which will enable us to use the door. I am at present breaking my man’s heart, by teaching him how to imitate the sounds of the smashing of the window, and the breaking of the balcony, in Used Up. In the event of his Death from grief, I have promised to do something for his Mother.’

  It was a jubilant year for the family and the celebrations and play rehearsals continued throughout the twelve days of Christmas. Dickens wrote again to Lavinia Watson on New Year’s Day:

  ‘… we had a country dance last night (of nearly all my Amateur Company) which was of the wildest description, and the most appalling duration … (I write this on my back on the floor.)”

  Dickens’s first Christmas story appeared in Household Words in 1850. Its title, A Christmas Tree, was very topical, once again capturing the zeitgeist:

  ‘I have been looking on, this evening, at a merry company of children assembled round that pretty German toy, a Christmas Tree. The tree was planted in the middle of a great round table, and towered high above their heads. It was brilliantly lighted by a multitude of little tapers; and everywhere sparkled and glittered with bright objects. There were rosy-cheeked dolls, hiding behind the green leaves; and there were real watches (with movable hands, at least, and an endless capacity of being wound up) dangling from innumerable twigs; there were French-polished tables, chairs, bedsteads, wardrobes, eight-day clocks, and various other articles of domestic furniture (wonderfully made, in tin, at Wolverhampton), perched among the boughs, as if in preparation for some fairy housekeeping; there were jolly, broad-faced little men, much more agreeable in appearance than many real men – and no wonder, for their heads took off, and showed them to be full of sugar-plums; there were fiddles and drums; there were tambourines, books, workboxes, paint-boxes, sweetmeat-boxes, peep-show boxes, and all kinds of boxes; there were trinkets for the elder girls, far brighter than any grown-up gold and jewels; there were baskets and pincushions in all devices; there were guns, swords, and banners; there were witches standing in enchanted rings of pasteboard, to tell fortunes; there were teetotums, humming-tops, needle-cases, penwipers, smelling-bottles, conversation-cards, bouquet-holders; real fruit, made artificially dazzling with gold leaf; imitation apples, pears, and walnuts, crammed with surprises …’ (‘A Christmas Tree’, Household Words, 21 December 1850)

  From this year onwards, instead of waiting for a new Christmas book, Dickens’s fans eagerly awaited a magazine filled with Christmas stories. In common with other publications, Household Words produced a special Christmas edition, and the planning of it took up much of Dickens’s and Wills’s time from late summer until the end of the year.

  For both Charles and Catherine Dickens 1851 was a very sad year, in which they both suffered from depression. In March, the family was shocked by the death of John Dickens, and just two weeks later, baby Dora Dickens died. Since birth, she had not been a healthy baby and her father described her death as having been caused by ‘something like congestion of the brain’. Charles and Catherine’s marriage was already starting to feel the strain of his celebrity and the death of their daughter pushed them further apart. Both of them needed other things to focus on and as Dickens threw himself into his writing, editing and amateur theatricals, Catherine began working on a book of her own.

  Under the pseudonym of Lady Maria Clutterbuck, a role she had played when they performed the play Used Up at Rockingham Castle, the home of their friends Richard and Lavinia Watson and the inspiration for Chesney Wold in Bleak House, Rockingham Castle, Catherine wrote a cookbook, What Shall We Have for Dinner? The book came out a few weeks before Christmas, well timed to be published for the season. It was subtitled ‘A Guide for Young Wives’ and contained menus for dinners and dinner parties for between two and eighteen people. It was popular and went into several editions over the next couple of years. For some reason, several academics have striven over the years to claim the book was actually written by Charles Dickens, even though it is well documented as having been written by Catherine, who was an excellent cook. The book reveals an interesting side to Dickens family life, as well as about the large number of courses and dishes expected at even a simple Victorian dinner party. One of Charles Dickens’s favourite dishes, often served for the Savoury course at the end of a meal, was ‘toasted cheese’. This recipe appears multiple times in the book’s menus. Surprisingly, there are no special Christmas menus in the book.

  Just before Christmas of 1851, the Dickens family left 1, Devonshire Terrace and moved to Tavistock House, on the edge of Tavistock Square, in the heart of London’s Bloomsbury. This was a large house divided into two family homes. Their neighbours were their friends, Frank Stone and his family. Frank Stone was one of Dickens’s illustrators and his eldest son, Marcus, was training to be an artist, as was Katey Dickens. In later years, after his father’s death, Marcus Stone would also become one of Dickens’s illustrators.

&n
bsp; The Dickens family’s side of the house, which was made up of eighteen rooms, was big enough to let them celebrate Christmas in grand style, but the builders took so long to complete the renovations that Charles and Catherine started to despair of it ever being ready in time. In October, Dickens wrote despairingly to Thomas Beard:

  ‘I am wild to begin a new book – and can’t, until I am settled – and have all manner of workmen, scooping, grooving, chiseling, sawing, planing, dabbing, puttying, clinking, hammering and going up ladders apparently with no earthly object but that of staying there until dinner time, every day.’

  His brother-in-law Henry Austin, husband of his younger sister Letitia, was an architect who helped them with the renovations. A surviving sketch drawn by Dickens and sent to Henry Austin is of a modern-looking ‘warm bath’ – a bathtub with a shower above it, surrounded by ‘waterproof curtains’ – which he wanted to be installed in Tavistock House.

  The Danish author Hans Christian Andersen visited Dickens at Tavistock House and some time later wrote down his memories of the family home:

  ‘In Tavistock Square stands Tavistock House. This and the strip of garden in front of it are shut out from the thoroughfare by an iron railing. A large garden ... stretches behind the house, and gives it a countrified look in the midst of this coal and gas steaming London … On the first floor was a rich library, with a fireplace and a writingtable, looking out on the garden; and here it was that in winter Dickens and his friends acted plays to the satisfaction of all parties. The kitchen was underground, and at the top of the house were the bedrooms.’