Dickens and Christmas

by Lucinda Hawksley

  ‘Mode – Make the butter sufficiently warm to melt it, but do not allow it to oil; put the flour in to a basin: add to it the sugar, ginger and raisins, which should be stoned and cut into small pieces. When these dry ingredients are thoroughly mixed, stir in the butter, cream, treacle and well-whisked eggs, and beat the mixture for a few minutes. Dissolve the soda in the vinegar, add it to the dough, and be particular that these latter ingredients are well incorporated with the others; put the cake into a buttered mould or tin, place it in a moderate oven immediately, and bake it from 1¾ to 2¼ hours.

  ‘Time – 1¾ to 2¼ hours. Average cost, 1s 6d.’

  The Christmas cake added to an already groaning table of sweet Christmas foods, including plum pudding, which would soon become better known as Christmas pudding, and mince pies. In the past, the filling in the pies was made from minced meat, but by the nineteenth century, it was much more common for the “mincemeat” to be made of fruits, nuts, sugar and brandy. The change from savoury to sweet had begun in the eighteenth century, when sugar became much more plentiful, due to Britain’s connections with the slave trade. In the first half of the nineteenth century, the pies were sometimes made from a combination of meat and fruits, although the fashion was changing. Both Eliza Acton’s 1845 cookbook and Mrs Beeton’s 1861 Book of Household Management include recipes for mince pies which contain minced meat (in Acton’s recipe the pies are filled with ‘minced ox-tongue’), but both describe these as ‘traditional’ mince pies, while seeming to recommend instead the more modern versions of mincemeat which contain only fruit, brandy, spices and sugar (although still bound together with beef suet). Eliza Acton calls her meat-free recipe her ‘superlative mincemeat’, and Mrs Beeton’s is named ‘excellent mincemeat’.

  In June 1861, Dickens was already thinking about the next Christmas issue of his magazine, inviting Wilkie Collins, with whom he was co-writing regularly, to come and ‘arrange our Xmas No. please God, under the shade of the Oak Trees.’ A few weeks later he wrote a commissioning letter to Rev G.R. Gleig:

  It is our custom here at this time of year to invite all our contributors to write for the Extra Christmas No. … Any story would weave into the design; whether narrated in the first person, or the third; whether referring to time present, or time past; whether ghostly or otherwise. No reference to the Christmas season is in the least necessary, on the contrary, such reference is not desired.’

  In the late autumn, Dickens set off on a reading tour, of over fifty events, throughout the country, a tour blighted by the very recent loss of his reading tour manager, Arthur Smith, who died in October. Mamie went to join her father in Carlisle, on his way back home from working in Edinburgh. Dickens, who always missed his dogs when travelling, asked his daughter to bring her Pomeranian, Mrs Bouncer, to the hotel, writing ‘She shall be received with open arms.’

  W.H. Wills worked on the magazine all through Dickens’s absence, sending him proof copies of the Christmas issue to read on the road. On 13 December, Dickens wrote to him from Preston, ‘The news of the Xmas No. is indeed Glorious, and nothing can look brighter or better than the prospects of the Illustrious Publication..’ The following day, however, everything had to change after the country learnt about the death of Prince Albert. As the queen went into mourning, the country was expected to do so as well. Dickens wrote to his sister Letitia, ‘I left Liverpool, confusedly and hastily: having postponed my readings there, because of the Prince’s death.’

  There was no Sydney at the Christmas table that year, as he had joined a new ship. Dickens wrote to Thomas Beard on Boxing Day:

  ‘This is merely to return your Christmas greetings with hearty cordiality … Sydney got appointed to the Orlando (a ship that every one in the service seemed to be trying for), and has sailed for Halifax. He looked very very small when he went away with a chest in which he could easily have stowed himself and a wife and family of his own proportions.’

  By New Year, Dickens was back on his reading tour and away from his family once again. On 2 January, he wrote a heartfelt letter to W.H. Wills, composed while he was ‘stranded’ at Birmingham Station, on his way from Leamington, where he had been working, to Cheltenham, where he was going to stay with his old friend William Charles Macready:

  ‘Firstly to reciprocate all your cordial and affectionate wishes for the New Year, and to express my earnest hope that we may go on through the years to come, as we have gone through many years that are gone. And I think we can say that we doubt whether any two men can have gone on more happily and smoothly, or with greater trust and confidence in one another … Birmingham is in a very depressed state, with very few of its trades at work. Nevertheless we did extremely well here. At Leamington yesterday, immense. Copperfield in the morning absolutely stunned the people: and at Nickleby and the Trial at night, they roared and roared until I think they must have shaken all the air in Warwickshire.’

  He continued his reading tour, now in the South coast of England, all through the remaining Christmas season. There was no chance for a Twelfth Night party with his children this year. As the 1860s continued, Dickens’s Christmas work became even more pressing. His letters suggest he was working for at least six months of the year in preparation for Christmas. Ironically, the man who had encouraged his readers to celebrate in style with family and friends had turned his own Christmases into a season of hard work and not enough time with the people he loved.

  On 25 August 1862, he wrote to John Forster, ‘I am trying to coerce my thoughts into hammering out the Christmas number’ and on 14 September he wrote to Wills, ‘You will be a little surprised (and not disagreeably) to learn that I have done the opening and end of the Xmas No. (!) and that I mean soon to be at work on a pretty story for it.’ Once again, Dickens had decided to spend time in Paris, writing to Thomas Beard in November:

  ‘Mary, Georgina, and I, are here until just before Christmas Day. I am going to ask you a rather startling, staggering question. Hold up, therefore! If I were to decide to go and read in Australia, how stand your inclination and spirits for going with me? Outside term of absence, a year.’

  The proposed Australian reading tour preoccupied Dickens’s mind all over Christmas and well into the new year, although it was never brought to fruition.

  In Paris, he continued to work solidly on the Christmas edition of All The Year Round, writing to his sister Letitia, on 7 November:

  ‘I should have written to you from here sooner, but for having been constantly occupied. The Christmas No. obliges me to go over such an astonishing quantity of Proofs at this time of the year (besides writing myself), that when I have done my day’s work, which involves a pretty large correspondence too, I am glad to get up and go out. Moreover – this is a secret – I am again deliberating whether I will or will not go away for a whole year, and read in Australia; and there are so many reasons for and against, and I am so unwilling to go, that it causes me great uneasiness of mind in trying to do right and to decide for the best … I came over to France before Georgina and Mary … We have a pretty apartment here, but house rent is too awful to mention. Georgina keeps wonderfully better, and Mary is very well, and they send love. Mrs Bouncer (muzzled by the Parisian Police) is also here, and is a wonderful spectacle to behold in the streets, restrained like a raging Lion.’

  Throughout December, Dickens wrote letters from Paris organising a flurry of social events for his time back in England, inviting family members to stay at Gad’s Hill Place and asking friends to visit the pantomime, but although Christmas and New Year were to be spent in Kent, he was already arranging to return to Paris in January to do a charity reading at the British embassy.

  On his return to Gad’s Hill Place he was excited about enjoying a family Christmas. Mamie and Georgina delighted in getting the house decorated and taking out the special Christmas china, including a special brightly coloured dish for the Christmas pudding. In her memoirs, Mamie described a Christmas in the Dickens household:

  �
��I think that our Christmas and New Year’s tides at Gad’s Hill were the happiest of all. Our house was always filled with guests, while a cottage in the village was reserved for the use of the bachelor members of our holiday party. My father himself, always deserted work for the week, and that was almost our greatest treat. He was the fun and life of Christmas gatherings for he loved to emphasise Christmas in every way and considered that the great festival should be fragrant with the love we should bear one another. Long walks with him were daily treats to be remembered. Games passed our evenings merrily. “Dumb Crambo” was a favourite and one in which my father’s great imitative ability showed finely. I remember one evening his dumb showing of the word “frog” was so extremely laughable that even the memory of it convulsed Marcus Stone, the clever artist, when he tried to mention it.’

  Many years later, Henry Fielding Dickens also recalled a game they had played at Christmas, it was a word-association game and Charles Dickens suddenly said the phrase, ‘Warren’s Blacking, 30, Strand.’ Henry recalled, ‘He gave this with an odd twinkle in his eye and a strange inflection in his voice which at once forcibly arrested my attention and left a vivid impression on my mind for some time afterwards. Why, I could not, for the life of me, understand.’

  In the Christmas of 1862, Katey and her husband Charlie Collins joined the family party, and Dickens was hoping for a visit from his son Charley and his wife, the rift between them now healed, and their daughter, Mary Angela. Writing to a friend, Dickens said, ‘Think of the unmitigated nonsense of an inimitable grandfather!’ Despite the wording of this letter, Dickens was a very doting grandfather, although he didn’t like to accept that he was old enough to be one, and refused to let the word be used. Instead he taught Mary Angela to call him ‘Venerables’, and joked constantly in letters that the ‘relationship [is] never permitted to be hinted at’.

  As the commercialisation of Christmas had grown, so too had the concept of Christmas outings. In addition to the pantomime, it was now popular for families to visit museums and other attractions on Boxing Day. On 26 December 1868, Henry Cole, by this time director of the new South Kensington museum, recorded in his diary, ‘More than 20,000 came during this day, the greatest numbers ever attending on Boxing Day.’

  This new fashion meant that Dickens’s life was being arranged around Christmases. The season now dominated everything else in his working life. By 30 August 1863 he was writing to John Forster:

  ‘The Christmas number has come round again – it seems only yesterday that I did the last – but I am full of notions besides for the new twenty numbers. When I can clear the Christmas stone out of the road, I think I can dash into it on the grander journey.’

  The Christmas story for 1863 was Mrs Lirriper’s Lodgings, whose co-authors included Elizabeth Gaskell. The story was hailed as a masterpiece of Dickensian humour, with Mrs Lirriper fondly recalled as being reminiscent of the indomitable Betsy Trotwood in David Copperfield. The story, about the happy adoption of an orphan boy, was exactly what the public wanted to read at Christmas.

  The end to the year was a very sober one. Never again would a family Christmas welcome Elizabeth Dickens and her mocked ‘juvenile cap’. She died in September 1863. While the rest of the country was getting ready for Christmas with their families, the Dickens family was planning another sad goodbye, this one to Frank, who had been found a job with the Bengal Mounted Police and was preparing to travel out to India, joining Walter. Then, on Christmas Eve, the family heard the terrible news that William Thackeray had died very suddenly. After the breakdown of his marriage, Dickens had raged through an emotional, angry, guilt-ridden fury and had ended his friendship with Thackeray, accusing him of spreading rumours about Ellen Ternan. The two men had not spoken for almost five years and the rift had only recently been healed, just before Thackeray’s unexpected death. Henry Cole, in whose household Christmas of 1863 was effectively cancelled, recorded in his diary on Christmas Eve that his son told him of his friend’s death. ‘News brought by Harry of Thackeray’s death ... Went to see his daughters and to search for his will. None found.’ As his daughters would soon discover, Thackeray had drafted his will, but had not signed it. Katey and Charlie Collins, close friends of the Thackeray daughters, rushed to be with them and invited them and Thackeray’s grieving mother to stay in their tiny home. The artist John Everett Millais wrote to his wife Effie:

  ‘I am sure you will be dreadfully shocked, as I was, at the death of Thackeray. I imagine, and hope truly, you will have heard of it before this reaches you. He was found dead by his servant in the morning, and of course the whole house is in a state of the utmost confusion and pain. They first sent to Charlie Collins and his wife, who went immediately, and have been almost constantly there ever since. I sent this morning to know how the mother and girls were, and called myself this afternoon; and they are suffering terribly, as you might expect. He was found lying back, with his arms over his head, as though in great pain … Everyone I meet is affected by his death. Nothing else is spoken of.’

  The Times journalist William Howard Russell, a friend of Thackeray’s, wrote in his diary after the funeral, ‘Such a scene! Such a gathering! Dickens, thin and worn...’

  Another, even closer, tragedy was also in lying in wait for the Dickens family. At New Year, a house party was gathered at Gad’s Hill Place, where they celebrated New Year’s Eve and spent New Year’s Day walking in the countryside and visiting the ruins of Rochester Castle. All the time they were enjoying themselves they had no idea that, far away in Calcutta, Walter Dickens was dying. He had been very ill and was in the military hospital waiting for a ship to take him home to his family, none of whom had seen him since he had left home aged sixteen. Walter died on New Year’s Eve 1863, at the age of 22. Letters from India took weeks to arrive, so Dickens opened the news of his son’s death on 7 February 1864; it had been delivered with the post for his fifty-second birthday. Angela Burdett-Coutts sent a letter of condolence and Dickens responded with a letter showing how superstitious he could be about death and funerals:

  ‘On the last night of the old Year I was acting in charades with all the children. I had made something to carry, as the Goddess of Discord; and it came into my head as it stood against the wall while I was dressing, that it was like the dismal things carried at Funerals. I took a pair of scissors and cut away a quantity of black calico that was upon it, to remove this likeness. But while I was using it, I noticed that its shadow on the wall still had that resemblance, through the thing itself had not. And when I went to bed, it was in my bedroom, and still looked to like, that I took it to pieces before I went to sleep. All this would have been exactly same, if poor Walter had not died that night.’

  Katey wrote to her friend Anny Thackeray about her brother’s death, ‘I don’t believe he is dead – I feel as if he must be coming home. Oh I think he might have been allowed to live just to see home once more.’ The family was now living in fear about what Frank’s fate might be in India. No one had been able to contact him on board his ship, so he arrived in India expecting his brother to be there to greet him. He stayed in India for six more years, returning to England in 1870. He then moved to Canada, where he became an officer in the Royal Canadian Mounted Police.

  The serialisation of Our Mutual Friend was begun in May 1864, and continued for eighteen months, but by July of 1864 Dickens was once more writing to Forster about his Christmas work:

  ‘Although I have not been wanting in industry, I have been wanting in invention, and have fallen back with the book. Looming large before me is the Christmas work, and I can hardly hope to do it without losing a number of Our Friend. I have very nearly lost one already, and two would take half of my whole advance. This week I have been very unwell; am still out of sorts; and, as I know from two days’ slow experience, have a very mountain to climb before I shall see the open country of my work.’

  The Christmas story for 1864 was a reprise of the previous year’s success, Mrs Lirriper
’s Legacy. Dickens had been thinking about the story for months, writing to W.H. Wills in June, ‘It has occurred to me that Mrs Lirriper might have a mixing in it of Paris and London – she and the Major, and the boy, all working out the story in two places.’ In the story, when Mrs Lirriper’s adopted son, young Jemmy, returns home from school, he joins his mother and the Major on an adventure in France, searching for a mysterious benefactor. Mrs Lirriper’s Legacy was an immediate success.

  At the end of November, Dickens returned to Gad’s Hill from London and was thrilled by the arrival of an early Christmas present from W.H. Wills: a new carriage. He wrote to Wills with glee:

  ‘I found the beautiful and perfect Brougham awaiting me in triumph at the station when I came down yesterday afternoon; – Georgina and Marsh both highly mortified that it had fallen dark, and the beauties of the carriage were obscured. But of course I had it out in the yard the first thing this morning, and got in and out at both the doors, and let down and pulled up the windows, and checked an imaginary coachman, and leaned back in a state of placid contemplation. It is the lightest and prettiest and best carriage of the class, ever made. But you know that I value it for higher reasons than these. It will always be dear to me – far dearer than anything on wheels could ever be for its own sake – as a proof of your ever generous friendship and appreciation, and a memorial of a happy intercourse and a perfect confidence that have never had a break, and that surely never can have any break now (after all these years) but one.’

  Another unusual Christmas present was given by a friend on Christmas Eve 1864. While welcoming guests to the usual Christmas house party at a snowy Gad’s Hill Place, Dickens was alerted to a large number of parcels addressed to him that had arrived for him. It was a Swiss Chalet, in ninety-four pieces, ready to be constructed, his Christmas present from the actor Charles Fechter. The men of the house party – which included Fechter – attempted to build the chalet, together with one of Fechter’s servants who was said to be an expert, although Dickens was not convinced. Dickens owned a field across the road from Gad’s Hill Place and the chalet was constructed there. It became his favourite writing place in the summer. He didn’t even need to cross over the public road in public to get to it, as he had commissioned a tunnel to be built under the road and was able to walk straight from his garden to the chalet. He wrote to Forster on 7 January: