by Carlo DeVito
When his father was a clerk in the Royal Navy pay yard in Chatham, Dickens would often take river trips and would have seen large chains and padlocks and cash-boxes. And as Dickens was a former court reporter and visitor to the stock exchange, the cashboxes of the day were not unknown to him either. But it is no mistake that Dickens is painting what are the hard-won trophies of business as the sins of the middle and upper-middle merchant class. Again, it’s a message that appears in Revelations.
When Marley’s Ghost leaves and joins the countless other ghosts (some of whom Scrooge had also known in life) spiraling through London, he hovers near a homeless mother and child, unable to help. This is also part of the admonishment.
The visitation of Marley’s Ghost is notice given, a sort of moral (if not religious) reckoning. Marley’s spirit embodied Dickens’ philosophies. Marley is Dickens’ loudspeaker to the masses. “All through the Christian ages, and especially since the French Revolution, the Western world has been haunted by the idea of freedom and equality; it is only an idea, but it has penetrated to all ranks of society,” wrote George Orwell about Dickens. “The most atrocious injustices, cruelties, lies, snobberies exist everywhere, but there are not many people who can regard these things with the same indifference as, say, a Roman slave-owner. Even the millionaire suffers from a vague sense of guilt, like a dog eating a stolen leg of mutton. Nearly everyone, whatever his actual conduct may be, responds emotionally to the idea of human brotherhood. Dickens voiced a code which was and on the whole still is believed in, even by people who violate it. It is difficult otherwise to explain why he could be both read by working people (a thing that has happened to no other novelist of his stature) and buried in Westminster Abbey.”
* * *
The Ghost of Christmas Past
“Who, and what are you?” Scrooge demanded.
“I am the Ghost of Christmas Past.”
“Long Past?” inquired Scrooge: observant of its dwarfish stature.
“No. Your past.”
Dickens scribbled away at his desk. . . .
Literary historian Mason Currey wrote about Dickens’ writing desk, “His study had to be precisely arranged, with his writing desk placed in front of a window and, on the desk itself, his writing materials—goose quill pens and blue ink—laid out alongside several ornaments: a small vase of fresh flowers, a large paper knife, a gilt leaf with a rabbit perched upon it, and two bronze statuettes, one depicting a pair of fat toads dueling, the other a gentleman swarmed with puppies.”
Charles Dickens at his writing desk.
Dickens was now writing in earnest. And though alternating between Chuzzlewit and Carol was difficult, Dickens put his mind to it. He had much work to do to in order to reveal the compelling past of his main character, and he set about doing so in his typical manner. According to his son Charles, “No city clerk was ever more methodical or orderly than he; no humdrum, monotonous, conventional task could ever have been discharged with more punctuality or with more business like regularity, than he gave to the work of his imagination and fancy.”
Dickens was a worker. He was out of bed by 7 a.m. most mornings, and was at breakfast an hour later. He arrived at his study by 9 a.m. He needed peace and quiet in his study while he tried to write, going so far as having a second door to his study installed in one house so he could get it with a multitude of children, his wife, and her sister milling about. At 2 p.m. Dickens would emerge from his study and lunch with his family. Some days he chatted, others he chomped on his food, spoke barely a word, and raced back to his desk.
“On an ordinary day, he would complete about two-thousand words in this way, but during a flight of imagination he sometimes managed twice that amount,” wrote Currey. “Other days, however, he would hardly write anything; nevertheless, he stuck to his work hours without fail, doodling and staring out the window to pass the time.”
Sometimes he returned promptly to his study, sometimes not. But he always ended his days with a brisk walk. It was his custom to continue to re-examine the stories he was working on, as he himself described it, “searching for some pictures I wanted to build upon.” His brother-in-law remarked on Dickens returning from these walks, “he looked the personification of energy, which seemed to ooze from every pore as from some hidden reservoir.”
Dickens could begin to see the book. And for it, he would want illustrations. By now it was near the third week of writing, and it was time to engage an illustrator. Hablot Knight Browne, also known as “Phiz,” had been illustrating Dickens since The Pickwick Papers, and was engaged in illustrating Martin Chuzzlewit. Dickens decided to offer the opportunity to John Leech. Leech and Dickens had met years earlier when Dickens was interviewing illustrators for The Pickwick Papers. They had been introduced by a mutual friend, the famous caricaturist George Cruikshank. Leech had submitted his drawings and Dickens said some very favorable things about them. Leech mistakenly understood that the commission was his, and invited a friend out to dinner to celebrate. He was disappointed when he did not get the commission. But since the misunderstanding, Leech had blossomed into one of the most highly rated cartoonists of his day, no mean feat in the pen-and-ink days of the Victorian era.
Dickens was not dissatisfied with Browne, in fact it was quite the opposite. He was committed to Browne. However, Leech was persistent. Leech had once again submitted his name for the illustrating of Martin Chuzzlewit when its publication had been announced. But Dickens stuck with Browne for Chuzzlewit. Dickens wrote to Leech in 1842: “I have never forgotten having seen you some years ago, or ceased to watch your progress with much interest and satisfaction. I congratulate you heartily on your success; and myself on having had my eye upon the means by which you have obtained it.”
According to literary historian Michael Patrick Hearn, “The scheme of A Christmas Carol resembles that of another book illustrated by Leech, The Wassail Bowl (1842), a small volume bound in russet cloth with a Christmas device stamped in gold on the cover and illustrated with inserted teal etchings and textual wood-engravings. Dickens owned a copy of this book by his friend Albert Smith, and it may have influenced his decision to hire Leech for A Christmas Carol.”
Now, with A Christmas Carol, Leech and Dickens could finally join forces. By the third week of October, Dickens had some material for Leech to examine. Dickens was paying for the illustrations himself on this printing, and decided on four wood engravings and four color plates to decorate the book.
“As with every other aspect of the design, Dickens went over each preliminary sketch with Leech,” wrote literary historian Michael Patrick Hearn. “This was before the photographic age, so Leech had to draw each picture directly on the wood block to be engraved by William James Litton. Leech etched the four full-page plates himself, two to a steel plate as was the fashion at the time. He also made color sketches to guide the hand colorers.”
John Leech’s illustration of the Ghost of Christmas Past.
Dickens by now had wandered London far and wide, thinking through his plot. And now, with the stage set, and a sense of where he was going, he had to act out the transformation of his covetous old sinner Ebenezer Scrooge. It was somewhat easier said than done. But in the end, the three ghosts that were coming were nothing more than self-revelatory reexamination by none other than Dickens himself. And yet, it would be a trick to turn it regardless. An assessment of Scrooge’s past would be necessary to begin turning that trick.
* * *
The School
“Good Heaven!” said Scrooge, clasping his hands together, as he looked about him. “I was bred in this place. I was a boy here!” . . .
“You recollect the way?” inquired the Spirit.
“Remember it!” cried Scrooge with fervor; “I could walk it blindfold.”
The first ghost compelled a revisiting of his childhood and of his schooling. Now Dickens thought back on his own schoolboy teacher whom he had just seen while visiting Fanny in Manchester. As Dickens paced the stre
ets of London, he traveled back in reverie to his childhood with his beloved teacher, William Giles, in the years before the Dickenses moved from Chatham to London.
“I was taken to Chatham when I was very young, and lived and was educated there till I was twelve or thirteen, I suppose,” Dickens wrote to Mr. Wilkie Collins on June 6, 1865.
Giles’ father, Rev. William Giles, was the minster at the Baptist Chapel nearest the school.
“It [the school] was very gravely and decorously ordered, and on a sound system; with an appeal on everything, to the honor and good faith of the boys, and an avowed intention to rely on their possession of those qualities, unless they proved themselves unworthy of it, which worked wonders,” wrote Charles Dickens in David Copperfield.
The school consisted of several of Giles’ younger siblings including John and Samuel, some children of the soldiers of the local garrison, and a few children of the neighbors. From all accounts Giles seems to have been taken with Dickens during Charles’ stay there.
Charles Dickens’ schoolboy teacher, William Giles.
According to biographer Robert Langton, Giles gave him “every encouragement in his power, even to making a companion of him of an evening, he was soon rewarded by the marked improvement that followed. Charles made rapid progress, and there is no doubt whatever that his wonderful knowledge and felicitous use of the English language in after life was, in great measure, due to the careful training of Mr. Giles, who was widely known as a cultivated reader and elocutionist.”
All these boys were in great spirits, and shouted to each other, until the broad fields were so full of merry music, that the crisp air laughed to hear it!
“These are but shadows of the things that have been,” said the Ghost. “They have no consciousness of us.”
The jocund travellers came on; and as they came, Scrooge knew and named them every one. Why was he rejoiced beyond all bounds to see them! Why did his cold eye glisten, and his heart leap up as they went past!
Mrs. Godfrey, an older sister of one of Charles’ schoolmates and a sister of Mr. Giles, remembered many years later, “Charles was quite at home at all sorts of parties, junkettings, and birthday celebrations, and that he took great delight in Fifth of November festivities around the bonfire.”
Students at Mr. Giles’ school were required to wear white beaver hats during their time there, and Dickens wore one until he left Chatham. Mary Weller, another student of the day, remembered that “they were not always learning, they had the merriest games that they ever played. They rowed up the river in the summer, and skated upon the ice in the winter. They had holidays too, and Twelfth cakes, and parties, when they danced till midnight. As to friends, they had such dear friends, and so many of them, that I want time to reckon them up. They were all young, like the handsome boy.”
He wrote a story called “Misnar, The Sultan of India!” and was well-liked for storytelling and entertaining his classmates. Charles was also a voracious reader, and ate up volumes by Defoe, Goldsmith, and Fielding.
“The school room setting adds, moreover, a layer of irony, conscious or unconscious, because it was a school that the boy in the blacking factory had so yearned to be sent,” wrote biographer Michael Slater. “To complicate matters still further, the young Scrooge’s desolate and decaying schoolhouse, ‘a mansion of dull red brick, with a little weather-cock-surmounted cupola, on the roof,’ recalls Gad’s Hill Place as seen from the outside. The forsaken-child image of the young Dickens sits, deprived of hope but comforted by imaginative literature, in the ruins of his own dream home.”
From their home at St. Mary’s Place, Fanny and Charles could see out over the church and its steeple, as well as the graveyard nearby. Dickens recalled this time in Chatham in a small story, “A Child’s Dream of a Star,” which many scholars feel reflects the closeness of the two in childhood. He wrote:
“There was one clear shining star that used to come out in the sky before the rest, near the church spire, above the graves. It was larger and more beautiful, they thought, than all others, and every night they watched for it, standing hand in hand at the window. Whoever saw it first, cried out, ‘I see the star!’ And often they cried out both together, knowing so well when it would rise, and where. So they grew to be such friends with it, that before lying down in their beds, they always looked out once again, to bid it good night; and when they were turning around to sleep, they used to say, ‘God bless the star!’ ”
Dickens biographer Peter Ackroyd pointed out: “Those who seek reasons for the ubiquity of that name [Fanny] in his fiction might start their search here. . . . On that criterion alone his response to the name is, to say the least, somewhat ambiguous; there is Fanny Dombey, the doomed mother of little Paul who dies in childbirth, but then of course there is also Fanny Squeers, the grotesque and ugly daughter of the famous Yorkshire schoolmaster. And then—in between, as it were—there is Fanny Dorrit, the imperious and petulant elder sister of Little Dorrit. There are also eight other characters who bear the same name. Now there is no doubt that Dickens did use Christian names which for some reason were emblematic for him—that is why the names of his father and sister crop up so often—and there is no doubt, too, that this was on occasions a deliberate device. But the range of Fannies in his fiction is so great that it suggests at the very least a most complicated relationship with his sibling. But we know also that, for Dickens himself, the relationship between brother and sister became the paradigm for human relationships in general; that loving sexless union of siblings is commemorated again and again in his novels.”
He was not reading now, but walking up and down despairingly. Scrooge looked at the Ghost, and with a mournful shaking of his head, glanced anxiously towards the door.
It opened; and a little girl, much younger than the boy, came darting in, and putting her arms about his neck, and often kissing him, addressed him as her “Dear, dear brother.”
“I have come to bring you home, dear brother!” said the child, clapping her tiny hands, and bending down to laugh. “To bring you home, home, home!”
When the Dickens family was reposted to London, Charles stayed behind with Mr. Giles a little while longer. He probably left Chatham around Christmas time 1822 or the early part of 1823.
“Home, little Fan?” returned the boy.
“Yes!” said the child, brimful of glee. “Home, for good and all. Home, for ever and ever. Father is so much kinder than he used to be, that home’s like Heaven! He spoke so gently to me one dear night when I was going to bed, that I was not afraid to ask him once more if you might come home; and he said Yes, you should; and sent me in a coach to bring you. And you’re to be a man!” said the child, opening her eyes, “and are never to come back here. . . .”
The night before he left the school, Mr. Giles “came fitting among the packing cases, to give me Goldsmith’s Bee as a keepsake. Which I kept for his sake, and its own, a long while afterwards.”
On leaving Chatham, Dickens later recounted, “ . . . in the days when there were no railroads in the land, I left it in a stage coach. Through all of the years that have since passed have I ever lost the smell of the damp straw in which I was packed—like game—and forwarded. . . . There was no other inside passenger, and I consumed my sandwiches in solitude and dreariness, and it rained hard all the way. . . .”
For Dickens these memories were not easy ones to choke down, knowing that his departure from Giles’ school would be more bittersweet than he could suppose at the time. The Dickenses had moved to Camden Town.
* * *
Old Fezziwig
The Ghost stopped at a certain warehouse door, and asked Scrooge if he knew it.
“Know it!” said Scrooge. “Was I apprenticed here!”
They went in. At sight of an old gentleman in a Welsh wig, sitting behind such a high desk, that if he had been two inches taller he must have knocked his head against the ceiling, Scrooge cried in great excitement:
“Why, it’s old
Fezziwig! Bless his heart; it’s Fezziwig alive again!”
There are two very important character traits to know about Fezziwig—he’s a responsible businessman and he loves to dance. For Scrooge it is of immense importance to relive his time at Fezziwig’s business. It is an absolutely necessary part of his reclamation. And for Dickens’ own part, he too loved to dance.
Then old Fezziwig stood out to dance with Mrs. Fezziwig. Top couple, too; with a good stiff piece of work cut out for them; three or four and twenty pair of partners; people who were not to be trifled with; people who would dance, and had no notion of walking.
But if they had been twice as many—ah, four times— old Fezziwig would have been a match for them, and so would Mrs. Fezziwig.
“When we were only babies my father determined that we should be taught to dance, so as early as the Genoa days we were given our first lessons,” recalled Mamie Dickens in her memoir My Father, As I Recall Him. “ ‘Our oldest boy and his sisters are to be waited upon next week by a professor of the noble art of dancing,’ [my father] wrote to a friend at this time. And again, in writing to my mother, he says: ‘I hope the dancing lessons will be a success. Don’t fail to let me know.’
“Our progress in the graceful art delighted him, and his admiration of our success was evident when we exhibited to him, as we were perfected in them, all the steps, exercises and dances which formed our lessons. He always encouraged us in our dancing, and praised our grace and aptness, although criticized quite severely in some places for allowing his children to expend so much time and energy upon the training of their feet,” continued Mamie.
The portrait of Old Fezziwig from the title page of the first edition of A Christmas Carol.
