by Carlo DeVito
“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 Katie 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 rush-light, and to his own whistling, he diligently rehearsed its ‘one, two, three, one, two, three’ until he was once more secure in his knowledge.
“No one can imagine our excitement and nervousness when the evening came on which we were to dance with our pupils. Katie was to have Mr. Leech, who was over six feet tall, for her partner, while my father was to be mine. My heart beat so fast that I could scarcely breathe, I was so fearful for the success of our exhibition. But my fears were groundless, and we were greeted at the finish of our dance with hearty applause, which was more than compensation for the work which had been expended upon its learning.
“My father was certainly not what in the ordinary acceptation of the term would be called ‘a good dancer.’ I doubt whether he had ever received any instruction in ‘the noble art’ other than that which my sister and I gave him. In later years I remember trying to teach him the Schottische, a dance which he particularly admired and desired to learn. But although he was so fond of dancing, except at family gatherings in his own or his most intimate friends’ homes, I never remember seeing him join in it himself, and I doubt if, even as a young man, he ever went to balls. Graceful in motion, his dancing, such as it was, was natural to him. Dance music was delightful to his cheery, genial spirit; the time and steps of a dance suited his tidy nature, if I may so speak. The action and the exercise seemed to be a part of his abundant vitality,” she fondly recalled.
“His dancing was at its best, I think, in the ‘Sir Roger de Coverly’ . . . and in what are known as country dances. In the former, while the end couples are dancing, and the side couples are supposed to be still, my father would insist upon the sides keeping up a kind of jig step, and clapping his hands to add to the fun, and dancing at the backs of those whose enthusiasm he thought needed rousing, was himself never still for a moment until the dance was over. He was very fond of a country dance which he learned at the house of some dear friends at Rockingham Castle, which began with quite a stately minuet to the tune of ‘God save the Queen,’ and then dashed suddenly into ‘Down the Middle and up Again.’ His enthusiasm in this dance, I remember, was so great that, one evening after some of our Tavistock House theatricals, when I was thoroughly worn out with fatigue, being selected by him as his partner, I caught the infection of his merriment, and my weariness vanished. As he himself says, in describing dear old ‘Fezziwig’s’ Christmas party, we were ‘people who would dance and had no notion of walking.’ ”
But for Scrooge, the difference in his relationship with his old master Fezziwig is in strong contrast to his relationship with Cratchit. “The relationship between the youthful Scrooge and his master, Old Fezziwig, had been a paternalist one. Scrooge was Fezziwig’s apprentice, not his employee,” wrote Stephen Nissenbaum. “But as Dickens himself well knew, that was in an earlier age in a precapitalist culture. The economic system had changed, and with it the social relationships between patron and client.”
So, for Dickens, Fezziwig represented the old way things were done, and how heartless he found the employer/employee relationship in this new industrial age. Fezziwig eats at Christmas with his employees. Scrooge and his class do not.
* * *
Belle
“It matters little,” she said, softly. “To you, very little. Another idol has displaced me; and if it can cheer and comfort you in time to come, as I would have tried to do, I have no just cause to grieve.”
Dickens watched Scrooge weather this first ghost, reviewing his past as it were, as Scrooge was experiencing a kind of baptism by fire. It is in these moments that Dickens understood that we all needed to see bits of Scrooge’s humanity, and that the audience needed to understand how society and the unrestrained industrialization of Britain had whittled Scrooge down to the deep, nasty point where he now found himself.
Dickens was thirty-two years old and saddled with the debts of not only his own making but that of his parents and several siblings. He had seen even in himself how circumstances can make one slowly lose the enthusiasms of youth in the responsibilities of adulthood.
Indeed, Dickens saw a bit of himself in Scrooge, as all men and women are supposed to. Like Scrooge as a young adult, Dickens at the time was a young man whose career was just about to take off and, overwhelmed with work, he took for granted his relationship with fiancee Catherine Hogarth.
After a failed tempestuous romance with a young woman named Maria Beadnell, another young lady, Catherine Hogarth, daughter of fellow reporter George Hogarth, caught Dickens’ eye. He was in love. And he put himself on full display for her.
Dickens had fond memories of their courtship. But there seems little doubt that Scrooge’s interlude with Belle came from somewhere in Dickens’ past.
George Hogarth worked for The Morning Chronicle as a writer on political and musical subjects, and was later named the editor of The Evening Chronicle. It was Hogarth who had commissioned Dickens to write a series of stories under the pseudonym “Boz.” The two became friendly, and Hogarth invited the young Dickens to his home.
As Dickens chronicler Claire Tomalin wrote, “Hogarth . . . had a large and still growing family, and when he [Dickens] made his first visit to their house on the Fulham Road, surrounded by gardens and orchards, he met their eldest daughter, nineteen-year-old Catherine. Her unaffectedness appealed to him at once, along with the fact that she was different from the young woman he had recently known, not only in being Scottish but in coming from an educated family with literary connections. The Hogarths, like the Beadnells, were a cut above the Dickens family, but they welcomed Dickens warmly as an equal, and George Hogarth’s enthusiasm for his work was flattering.”
Catherine Dickens.
One of the daughters, Georgina Hogarth, later recalled that on one occasion, Dickens “dressed as a sailor jumped in at the window, danced a hornpipe, whistling the tune jumped out again, and a few minutes later Dickens walked gravely in at the door, as if nothing had happened, shook hands all round, and then, at the sight of their puzzled faces, burst into a roar of laughter.”
Tomalin continued, “He saw in her the affection, compliance and physical pleasure, and he believed he was in love with her. That was enough for him to ask her to be his wife. . . .”
In the fall of 1835, Dickens was over-committed. He still had a day job as a reporter, and was writing fiction on the side that would soon make him a literary superstar. If there was anything that Dickens wanted so much, it was financial and emotional security. His burgeoning career and Catherine Hogarth were both right before him. The demands of the publishers he had committed to were looming. He had in fact over-burdened himself. The juggling of these two overriding ambitions—money and love—were set to work against each other.
“I am writing by candle-light shivering with cold, and choked with smoke,” he told one friend, and related to yet another, “My Laundress who is asthmatic, has dived into a closet . . . and is emitting from behind a closet door an uninterrupted succession of the most unearthly and hollow noises I have ever heard.”
“All the while he was trying to balance the needs of his career against his duties to Catherine, who, on occasions, seems to have been disturbed by his attention to his work at the expense of herself. It was not unreasonable for her to be so: it must have looked as i
f this was the shape their marriage was about to take, and indeed she was not mistaken,” wrote biographer Peter Ackroyd.
“Though she was pettily possessive and resentful of what she felt was his neglect he repeatedly begged her not to blame him,” wrote Norman and Jeanne MacKenzie. “Almost every letter Dickens sent Kate during the winter months was an explanation, an apology, or an assurance intended to mollify her.”
Apologizing to Kate in one note, for yet another missed engagement, Dickens wrote, “You know . . . I have frequently wrote you that my composition is peculiar. I can never write with effect—especially in a serious way—until I have got my steam up, or in other words until I have become so excited with my subject that I cannot leave off.”
“Kate,” wrote Edgar Johnson, “finding that all these demands upon Dickens’ time kept him away from her, began to feel neglected and aggrieved. She complained of being in ‘low spirits’ and tried to make him sorry for her by saying in . . . a childish pout that she was ‘cross,’ reiterating that he could come to see her if he would and that he took pleasure in being away.”
Dickens tried to reason with his unhappy and lonely Kate, writing, “You may be disappointed—I would rather you would—at not seeing me, but you cannot feel vexed at my doing my best with the stake I have to play for—you and a home for the both of us.” Even as he was writing, Dickens’ father was finding himself in financial straits again.
But Dickens could come across seemingly harsh when he wrote her, at one point unhappy with his own literary output one evening, asserting that “the quantity is not sufficient to justify my coming out tonight. If the representations I have so often made to you, about my working as a duty, and not as a pleasure, be not sufficient to keep you in a good humor, which you, of all people in the world should preserve—why then, my dear, you must be out of temper, and there is no help for it.”
But Scrooge and Dickens do diverge. Dickens, for his part, took a room not far from Kate’s house so it would be easier to see her. He made the commitment necessary for them to marry. To him, Kate and her family symbolized the kind of security he had not known as a child.
Scrooge, on the other hand, does not see the folly of his way until it is too late. Accompanied by the Ghost of Christmas Past, Scrooge relives the moment that Belle let him go forever:
“ . . . if you were free to-day, to-morrow, yesterday, can even I believe that you would choose a dowerless girl—you who, in your very confidence with her, weigh everything by Gain: or, choosing her, if for a moment you were false enough to your one guiding principle to do so, do I not know that your repentance and regret would surely follow? I do; and I release you. With a full heart, for the love of him you once were. . . .
“May you be happy in the life you have chosen!”
She left him, and they parted.
“Spirit!” said Scrooge, “show me no more! Conduct me home. Why do you delight to torture me?”
Scrooge is obviously saddened by these images. But his utter failure as a human being is shown in the last scene with Belle. The spirit shows a young girl sitting in a room, and Scrooge believes the girl is Belle. As his vision sharpens, he realizes that the girl is Belle’s daughter, and that Bella, a woman now, resides over a happy home filled with children and commotion. The scene is Christmas Eve, and Belle’s husband arrives with a man in tow whose arms are filled to the brim with presents. The children clamor for their booty.
“Belle,” said the husband, turning to his wife with a smile, “I saw an old friend of yours this afternoon.”
“Who was it?”
“Guess!”
“How can I? Tut, don’t I know?” she added in the same breath, laughing as he laughed. “Mr. Scrooge.”
“Mr. Scrooge it was. I passed his office window; and as it was not shut up, and he had a candle inside, I could scarcely help seeing him. His partner lies upon the point of death, I hear; and there he sat alone. Quite alone in the world, I do believe.”
Scrooge’s aloneness was now complete. His life was confirmed as an utter desolation.
Dickens was now completely taken by A Christmas Carol, obsessed with it as Forster recalled later, “with what a strange mastery it seized him for itself, how he wept over it, and laughed, and wept again, and excited himself to an extraordinary degree, and how he walked thinking of it fifteen and twenty miles about the black streets of London, many and many a night after all sober folks had gone to bed.”
It is no wonder he wept and laughed and wept again. As much as Ebenezer Scrooge was taken back and forth in time, so would Dickens visit many of the good and sad times of his own life and confront his own ghosts and demons more bluntly than he had ever attempted to do so. This little book would bring back shameful, hurtful memories, as well as great smiles. It was to be a heroic private battle with his own past that he would not talk about to his last days.
* * *
The Ghost of Christmas Present
The moment Scrooge’s hand was on the lock, a strange voice called him by his name, and bade him enter. He obeyed.
It was his own room. There was no doubt about that. But it had undergone a surprising transformation. The walls and ceiling were so hung with living green, that it looked a perfect grove; from every part of which, bright gleaming berries glistened. The crisp leaves of holly, mistletoe, and ivy reflected back the light, as if so many little mirrors had been scattered there; and such a mighty blaze went roaring up the chimney, as that dull petrification of a hearth had never known in Scrooge’s time, or Marley’s, or for many and many a winter season gone. Heaped up on the floor, to form a kind of throne, were turkeys, geese, game, poultry, brawn, great joints of meat, sucking-pigs, long wreaths of sausages, mince-pies, plum-puddings, barrels of oysters, red-hot chestnuts, cherry-cheeked apples, juicy oranges, luscious pears, immense twelfth-cakes, and seething bowls of punch, that made the chamber dim with their delicious steam. In easy state upon this couch, there sat a jolly Giant, glorious to see: who bore a glowing torch, in shape not unlike Plenty’s horn, and held it up, high up, to shed its light on Scrooge, as he came peeping round the door.
By the first week of November 1843 Dickens was excited about his progress in the story. He and Forster were going back and forth. He had been juggling writing the installments for Martin Chuzzlewit while also writing Carol.
Dickens was still trying to figure out how to pull away from his publishers Chapman and Hall. He remained angry at them for numerous failures (some of which were real, some imagined, and some brought on by his constant want of money), and was determined to no longer be at their mercy. He owed them money since they had lent him large advances, all of which had not earned out.
“I am bent on paying the money,” Dickens had ranted to Forster in June 1843. He had been courted by other publishers, and Bradbury and Evans were the favored ones. Dickens proposed buying back all the rights to his books and then reselling them to the next publisher. He had been absolutely stunned that his current publishers had suggested cheap editions of his novels while he was still at the height of his fame, a fame which seemed was slowly slipping after his long absence in America and with the troublesome publishing of Martin Chuzzlewit.
“And before going into the matter with anybody I should like you to propound from me the one preliminary question to Bradbury and Evans. It is more than a year and a half since Clowes wrote to urge me to give him a hearing, in case I should ever think of altering my plans. A printer is better than a bookseller, and it is quite as much the interest of one (if not more) to join me. But whoever it is, or whatever, I am bent upon paying Chapman and Hall down. And when I have done that, Mr. Hall shall have a piece of my mind.”
Forster had hoped Dickens’ ire would fade. But Dickens’ letter of November 1, 1843 put that to bed. Dickens at this point was in earnest when he wrote to Forster to tell him that he absolutely intended to write, produce, and publish the book himself. Forster was flabbergasted.
“Don’t be startled by the n
ovelty and extent of my project,” Dickens wrote. “Both startled me at first; but I am well assured of its wisdom and necessity. I am afraid of a magazine—just now. I don’t think the time a good one, or the chances favorable. I am afraid of putting myself before the town as writing tooth and nail for bread, headlong, after the close of a book taking so much out of one as Chuzzlewit. I am afraid I could not do it, with justice to myself. I know that whatever we may say at first, a new magazine, or a new anything, would require so much propping, that I should be forced (as in the Clock) to put myself into it, in my old shape. I am afraid of Bradbury and Evans’s desire to force on the cheap issue of my books, or any of them, prematurely. I am sure if it took place yet awhile, it would damage me and damage the property, enormously. It is very natural in them to want it; but, since they do want it, I have no faith in their regarding me in any other respect than they would regard any other man in a speculation. I see that this is really your opinion as well; and I don’t see what I gain, in such a case, by leaving Chapman and Hall. . . . At the close of Chuzzlewit (by which time the debt will have been materially reduced) I purpose drawing from Chapman and Hall my share of the subscription—bills, or money, will do equally well. I design to tell them that it is not likely I shall do anything for a year; that, in the meantime, I make no arrangement whatever with any one; and our business matters rest in status quo. The same to Bradbury and Evans.”
“There were difficulties, still to be strongly urged, against taking any present step to a final resolve; and he gave way a little,” Forster related.
“I have been, all day in Chuzzlewit agonies—conceiving only. I hope to bring forth to-morrow,” Dickens wrote Forster on November 10, “I want to say a word or two about the cover of the Carol and the advertising, and to consult you on a nice point in the tale.”
