by Carlo DeVito
This book is dedicated to family. I have been so very, very fortunate to enjoy countless Christmas seasons, none of which would have been worth anything without family. This book is dedicated to my siblings, Claudia, Eugene, and Leigh-Ann; to my aunts and uncles; and to all my cousins . . . you know who you are.
Contents
Epigraph
Author’s Note
Prologue
The Train Ride
STAVE I
Ebenezer Scrooge
Scrooge and Marley
Fred
The Solicitors
Bob Cratchit
Jacob Marley
STAVE II
The Ghost of Christmas Past
The School
Old Fezziwig
Belle
STAVE III
The Ghost of Christmas Present
Tiny Tim
The Miners
STAVE IV
Ghost of the Future
The Ghost of Christmas Yet to Come
The Exchange
The Pawnbroker
The Death of Tiny Tim
The Graveyard
STAVE V
Redemption
The Solicitor Redux
Christmas with Fred
Bob Cratchit’s Raise
Long Live Tiny Tim
Epilogue
Dickens Cuts Loose
Success!
Disappointment
The First Reading
The Last Christmas
The Last Reading
A Christmas Wish
Acknowledgements
About the Author
End Notes
Bibliography
Photography Credits
“Happy, happy Christmas, that can win us back to the delusions of our childhood days, recall to the old man the pleasures of his youth, and transport the traveler back to his own fireside and quiet home!”
—Charles Dickens
* * *
Author’s Note
The idea of this exercise is not to deconstruct Mr. Dickens’ life or work but rather to lift the veil on the creative process. Without question, Charles Dickens remains one of the most widely published and cherished novelists of all time. More than two hundred years after his birth, his popularity has not wavered. And A Christmas Carol is arguably his best-known publication thanks to numerous editions of the book, retellings in various print media, dramatic stage performances, and beloved film adaptations. Each time there is a new interpretation, we find another nuance we never suspected. It is an endlessly fascinating story!
It is also not the object of this volume to affect the wonderful reputation that A Christmas Carol enjoys. But rather its intent is to see where and how this story came about and how it helped to shape the history of the holiday season in the Western world for more than a century and three quarters, and most likely beyond.
I have only dealt with issues pertaining to the book, and have avoided restating obvious facts about Mr. Dickens’ domestic and personal history (except where they influenced the work). It was not my goal to publish a biography of Mr. Dickens (there are too many good ones referenced in this book), but rather to focus on the writer, his process, and his creation.
I also included Mr. Dickens’ performances of the work because they were an ongoing part of his creative relationship with the material that he kept reinventing.
That, and like Charles Dickens, I love the holidays.
—C. DeVito
January 1, 2014
* * *
Prologue
Mr. Dickens strode out onto the stage of the Tremont Temple Baptist Church.
Originally dubbed the “Temple Theatre” when it opened in 1827, the building was renamed when it was purchased in 1843 by a Baptist group. Throughout its history since, it not only served for religious services but was also utilized for numerous public events such as plays, movies, exhibits, and speeches. The great hall was three stories high, ornate and large. A large number of seats extended out from the proscenium stage, with a solid row of balcony seats ringing the theater.
An Egyptian mummy had been displayed there in September 1850 and was one of the cultural touchstones that year in the city of Boston. Four months later, the Ladies American Home Education Society held one of the largest temperance meetings in the city’s history up to that time. The two-thousand-seat auditorium burned down in 1852, but was soon rebuilt. Sam Houston gave a fiery speech against slavery there to a mixed house of white and black abolitionists in February 1855. Five years later a similar group of abolitionists was dispersed from the same theater by the Boston police.
The Tremont Temple Baptist Church in 1851.
And on this day, Bostonians dressed in their holiday best stumbled through the icy winds of winter to see Mr. Dickens perform A Christmas Carol. “Just about everyone knows the tale of the miserly Ebenezer Scrooge, who is visited by three ghosts on Christmas Eve, sees the error of his ways, and becomes a jolly benefactor to poor Tiny Tim and his family,” reported The Boston Globe.
Mr. Dickens’ gait was muscular but elegant. He was resplendent in a black, peak-lapelled, double-breasted, three-quarter coat which was unbuttoned so that his glorious and brilliantly colored silk vest shone through. Augmented with a brilliant red cravat and a golden watch fob elegantly draped across his left side, Dickens was the epitome of the dashing Victorian gentleman, elegantly arrayed (and just shy of foppery).
The audience erupted with applause at the mere sight of the famous performer. Placed at the center of the stage was a podium with a small carafe of water and a glass. At its base was a bright cluster of poinsettia plants, red and white. He approached the podium and prepared himself.
“Marley was dead: to begin with. . . . This must be distinctly understood, or nothing wonderful can come of the story I am going to relate,” began Mr. Dickens. The crowd went quiet, and the only thing to be heard was his voice.
Mr. Dickens went on for a little less than forty minutes. He gesticulated wildly in some instances, and took great glee in switching from one of the many fantastic characters to another with ease. He changed voices and inflections. He drew laughter along with oohhs and ahhs from the assembled throng. He finished the first half of the presentation to massive applause, which was followed by an intermission.
Charles Dickens first read A Christmas Carol to an audience in the United States on December 2, 1867. It had been his second tour of America after visiting the year before he’d written his great yuletide ghost story. That night, he was an immediate sensation.
But this night, the performer was not Charles Dickens, but rather Gerald Dickens, the great-great-grandson of the famed writer. And here he was in December 2013 reenacting his late ancestor’s performance!
Gerald Dickens performing his great-great grandfather’s works.
Despite the conveyance of approximately 170 years, the theater was packed to see this reading of one of the most theatrically produced stories in the history of literature. It was Gerald’s twentieth year performing the Christmas tale. He had first performed it in 1993, in America, for an event on the 150th anniversary of the story’s publication.
“To be honest, I wasn’t that keen on doing it, but the event was a charitable one,” Gerald told The Boston Globe in reference to that first show. “And as soon as I started working on it, it all fell into place. Every major character had their own voice and their own way of standing and their own expression and way of moving an
d everything else. The further I worked through the story, the more it came together. It was an amazing experience.”
Over the years he has performed up to thirty dates per year, both in the US and the UK. “I can be exhausted and feeling like the last thing I want to do is dragging myself onstage and performing, and yet as soon as you say, ‘Marley was dead: to begin with,’ everything just kicks in and you can’t help yourself,” he continued. “I don’t know where that energy comes from, but the text seems to generate it.”
The second half of the performance continued and the audience was just as rapt by the unfolding story. Finally, he ended the story of the reclamation of Ebenezer Scrooge, “and it was always said of him, that he knew how to keep Christmas well, if any man alive possessed the knowledge. May that be truly said of us, and all of us! And so, as Tiny Tim observed, God bless us, every one!” The crowd roared with applause as they rose to give Mr. Dickens a standing ovation.
Audiences have been applauding this tale since it was first published during the Christmas season more than a century and a half ago, and those enthusiastic cheers will surely continue for many years to come.
This enduring story of a covetous old sinner who has lost touch with his humanity has moved generations of readers worldwide; it has been translated into countless languages and transformed into numerous stage productions and cinematic adaptations over the years. At its core, A Christmas Carol delivers a timeless message of hope; it’s about how each one of us can be saved, and about how we can redeem ourselves annually with the help of our friends, family, and loved ones
Yet most inspiring of all is the story behind the story: the incredible true story of how Dickens came to write this legendary yuletide tale.
* * *
The Train Ride
Early in the morning on Wednesday, October 4, 1843, Charles Dickens left his family and his dwellings on 1 Devonshire Terrace, near Regents Park, and hailed a hackney cab. He was just going to nearby Euston Station, but he had luggage because his train ride would take him a long way off, if only for a short period.
“There is a hackney-coach stand under the very window at which we are writing; there is only one coach on it now, but it is a fair specimen of the class of vehicles to which we have alluded—a great, lumbering, square concern of a dingy yellow color (like a bilious brunette), with very small glasses, but very large frames; the panels are ornamented with a faded coat of arms, in shape something like a dissected bat, the axletree is red, and the majority of the wheels are green,” Dickens once wrote. “The horses, with drooping heads, and each with a mane and tail as scanty and straggling as those of a worn-out rocking-horse, are standing patiently on some damp straw, occasionally wincing, and rattling the harness; and now and then, one of them lifts his mouth to the ear of his companion, as if he were saying, in a whisper, that he should like to assassinate the coachman. The coachman himself is in the watering-house; and the waterman, with his hands forced into his pockets as far as they can possibly go, is dancing the ‘double shuffle,’ in front of the pump, to keep his feet warm.”
The cab wheeled about and Dickens got in. The horses popped and clicked, and the coach bounced up and down as it made its way over the uneven streets. No matter the final destination, Dickens was preoccupied with his recent disappointments. He stopped thinking of them for a moment, and checked once again to see if he had his speech with him. Yes, it was there. In those days, Dickens, then thirty-one years old, was not yet the grand man of letters, but a young writer still possibly better known by the masses as “Boz” than by his real name. But Charles Dickens’ name was well known in the book trade, and he was a London favorite thanks to his string of successes— The Pickwick Papers, Nicholas Nickleby, The Old Curiosity Shop, and Oliver Twist, among others.
Charles Dickens as Boz.
But then there was his trip to America, and his subsequent work American Notes, and then his next book Martin Chuzzlewit.
“Chuzzlewit had fallen short of all the expectations formed of it in regard to sale,” wrote close friend and biographer John Forster. “By much the most masterly of his writings hitherto, the public had rallied to it in far less numbers than to any of its predecessors . . . whatever the causes, here was the undeniable fact of a grave depreciation of sale in his writings, unaccompanied by any falling off either in themselves or in the writer’s reputation.” Martin Chuzzlewit had sold less than a third of the sales of his previous bestsellers.
“It is not uncommon though, for a novelist to lose part of his audience as he grows more ambitious,” wrote Jane Smiley, a bestselling author herself, on Dickens’ perplexing sales of Chuzzlewit. “The willingness, even the ability, of the audience to follow a favorite writer into work of greater complexity and more somber vision isn’t always immediate, and every author whose sole income is from his writings has to reckon with this dilemma.”
Dickens was arguing with his publishers over the original advance, which was now still very much unearned, and there was discussion of the return of some of those advanced monies. But with a growing family, and a desire to be firmly ensconced in the middle class (no mean feat for a writer then), Dickens was deeply concerned about finances. Instead of bolstering his monetary situation, Chuzzlewit might now be his ruination.
Dickens probably scheduled the 10 a.m. from Euston Station of the London and Birmingham Railway. That train reached Birmingham by 2:45 p.m., and then promptly arrived in Manchester at 6:25 p.m. just in time for dinner. The trip was 197.5 miles according to the schedule of the day.
Euston Station was the first intercity railway station in London. It opened on July 20, 1837, as the terminus of the London and Birmingham Railway. By the time Dickens approached Euston Station, it had become the hub of the London and North Western Railway. With its massive Doric columns and classic triangular façade, it looked more like a Greek temple than a train station. It had a 200-foot-long train shed and only two platforms—one for departures and one for arrivals. The station was continually expanding as rail traffic grew, until the great hall of the station was finally completed in 1849.
The site had been selected in the early 1830s by George and Robert Stephenson, engineers of the London and Birmingham Railway. The area was then mostly farmland at the edge of the expanding city of London, and the railroad company had had to overcome strenuous objections by local farmers to begin construction. The station was named after Euston Hall in Suffolk, the ancestral home of the Dukes of Grafton who were the main landowners in the area.
Euston Station in 1837.
Dickens described the building of the London and Birmingham Railroad, writing, “Houses were knocked down, streets broken through and stopped; deep pits and trenches dug, in the ground; enormous heaps of earth and clay thrown up; buildings that were undermined and shaken, propped by great beams. Here, a chaos of carts, overthrown and jumbled together, lay topsy-turvy at the bottom of a steep unnatural hill; there, confused treasurers of iron soaked and rusted in something that had accidentally become a pond. Everywhere were bridges that led nowhere . . . and piles of scaffolding, and wilderness of brick, and giant forms of cranes, and tripods straddling above nothing. . . . Boiling water hissed and heaved with dilapidated walls; whence, also, the glare and roar of flames came issuing forth; and mounds of ashes blocked up rights of way, and wholly changed the law and custom of the neighborhood.”
But Dickens loved the railway terminus, and about his regular nighttime walks once wrote, “ . . . when I wanted variety, a railway terminus with the morning mails coming in, was remunerative company. But like most of the company to be had in this world, it lasted only a very short time. The station lamps would burst out ablaze, the porters would emerge from places of concealment, the cabs and trucks would rattle to their places (the post-office carts were already in theirs), and, finally, the bell would strike up, and the train would come banging in. But there were few passengers and little luggage, and everything scuttled away with the greatest expedition. The locomoti
ve post-offices, with their great nets—as if they had been dragging the country for bodies—would fly open as to their doors, and would disgorge a smell of lamp, an exhausted clerk, a guard in a red coat, and their bags of letters; the engine would blow and heave and perspire, like an engine wiping its forehead and saying what a run it had had; and within ten minutes the lamps were out, and I was . . . alone again.”
A porter took Dickens’ things and the two wound their way through the station to the departure terminal. Dickens had already acquired his trademark look of parted, longish, dark and wild hair, and a beard of varying length. He was relatively trim, though he was not tall. He may have worn a gray suit, but probably wore one of his renowned brightly colored vests and an equally shocking cravat for a splash of color.
His walk was crisp and deliberate. He was an avid walker who likely walked up to twenty miles a day. “I think I must be the descendant, at no great distance, of some irreclaimable tramp,” Dickens once said of himself. On these long walks, Dickens exhibited what his walking friends once described as his “swinging” gait. He also “made a practice of increasing his speed when ascending a hill,” according to his friend Marcus Stone.
Dickens kept his hat low upon his brow, and his gaze, which naturally went straight out as he was a wonderful observer of things, darted toward the floor. At this time Dickens was becoming a celebrity, and he had already come to realize that with his newfound fame he had lost the right to be a private citizen. More than once he’d had to change rooms in a hotel, or change hotels completely, to avoid the frenzy of people trying to meet him, shake his hand, etc. Dickens wanted fame, but the crowds could prove unruly. This morning, he just wanted to get on the train.
Dickens ascended into the coach and waited for the train to pull out. He was joined by his friend Thomas Mitton, who had once been his schoolmate. Both had been law clerks together, and after Mitton became a solicitor Dickens hired him for representation. The two chatted as friends do, and may have shared newspapers, magazines, and journals. It would be a long ride.
