by Carlo DeVito
“And indeed this was his panic and fear: the fear of ruin, of being thrust down again into poverty, to go the way of his father into a debtors’ prison, all the success and fame he has achieved to be stripped from him as he is cast back into the state of childhood,” wrote Ackroyd with keen insight. “There must have been times when it seemed to him that all his achievement was a dream, and that he would wake up once again in Bayham Street or the little attic room of Lant Street. There was still so much fear behind the bright appearance of the eminent novelist.”
But Dickens was not done tinkering with A Christmas Carol. No, the tinkering had just begun.
* * *
The First Reading
A Christmas Carol had performed a miracle in Dickens’ present career, and it was still to have immense influence on him the rest of his life— especially his public life. He was now about to ascend from a literary star to a performing one, which would enhance his public persona and reputation in a much bigger way.
In January 1853, Dickens visited Birmingham, probably having taken the first leg of the same train he had taken on his way to Manchester in 1843. He had arrived there to receive a diamond ring and other presents from the city’s Society of Artists. Dickens already owned a diamond ring, but replaced it with the gift to show his appreciation. Following the presentation there was a banquet in this honor.
While at that event he came to find out about the founding of a new industrial and literary institute in the city. The Birmingham and Midland Institute, now on Margaret Street in the city center of Birmingham, was a pioneer of adult scientific and technical education and also offered arts and science lectures, exhibitions, and concerts. The idea was to make education available to working people. Of course, this was something that immediately appealed to Dickens and could not but help bring back memories of events a decade earlier in Manchester. The idea of bringing education to the masses was always delightful news to him.
During the ceremony, Dickens had voiced his disbelief in “the coxcombical idea of writing down to the popular intelligence,” and his belief in the populace. In his view, the working class “had set literature free.” Dickens also said in that same speech, “I believe no true man, with anything to tell, need have the least misgiving, either for himself or for his message, before a large number of hearers.”
“On the way to the railway station after the banquet, it suddenly occurred to him that he could help raise money for the venture by giving a public reading in Birmingham,” wrote Ackroyd.
Arriving home in London, Dickens, who was then working on Bleak House, wrote to one of the founders of the Institute, “there would be some novelty in the thing, as I have never done it in public, though I have in private and (if I may say so) with a great effect on the hearers.” Dickens suggested he perform in December of that year. Dickens’ only stipulation was that “working people” should be let in free to sit beside the middle classes. The Society agreed after some negotiations, and a date was set during the Christmas season of that same year. He had consented to read the Carol on the 27th and The Cricket on the Hearth on the 29th.
Dickens had read A Christmas Carol to a group of English friends who were living in Italy in 1844, the same year he and his family lived there. Dickens had attempted to cancel this private engagement when he learned that the hosts had invited “strangers” to hear him. Once the dispute was settled, Dickens visited and nervously read the story to them. One of the guests remembered years later that Dickens was very nervous and refused to have anyone sit behind him during the length of the reading. He wanted everyone to be in front of him, where he could see them, and where they could be under the gaze of his magnetic eyes.
Months passed and December finally rolled around. By mid-month, he was well into preparing for his reading. His wife, Catherine, and her sister Georgina (Georgy) accompanied him to Birmingham with several of their older children. The Birmingham Town Hall was an enormous building, and this was no small affair. Birmingham Town Hall remains a highly rated concert hall and venue for popular assemblies, opened in 1834 in Victoria Square. The first of the monumental town halls that would come to characterize the cities of Victorian England, Birmingham Town Hall was also the first significant work of the nineteenth-century revival of Roman architecture. The design was based on the proportions of the Temple of Castor and Pollux in the Roman Forum. With its large, triangular, plain façade sitting atop eight giant columns, this white structure dominated Birmingham’s cityscape at the time.
Birmingham Town Hall.
On December 27 there was a snowstorm in Birmingham. Wind whipped through the city’s streets with blinding swirls of snow and sleet. The hall was packed with somewhere between 1,700 and 2,000 people, and “the enthusiasm was great,” according to Forster.
“As a child Charles was exposed to, and loved, the theater. As a schoolboy he formed a small dramatic company of his friends,” wrote Dickens historian David Perdue. “Had it not been for an illness on the morning of a scheduled audition at the Covent Garden Theater in the early 1830s, just before his writing gained attention, he may have made a career on the stage.” Now here he was in Birmingham.
On December 27, 1853, Charles Dickens ascended the stage for the first time to give a dramatic reading of A Christmas Carol in front of a paying crowd. He had spoken publicly before, mostly giving speeches, but he had never read from one of his books. In fact, up to that time no major novelist had ever read from one of their works for the public in such a way. He was about to make history.
Dickens, dressed impeccably, walked up to the stage nervously. A rousing applause filled the massive hall. He looked over the assembled group, which he knew had travelled through rough weather just to see him. The venue was magnitudes larger than the Manchester Athenaeum. It was understandable that he should feel uncomfortable in such an unusual situation.
“I had not considered all that carefully, and I believe made the most distant person hear as well as if I had been reading in my own room,” he later admitted.
Once he was positioned on stage and din of the audience had reduced to a hush, Dickens began.
“Marely was dead. . . .”
The crowd became silent as the well-dressed yet nervous author quickly took command. The performance lasted three hours, though he originally predicted it would be two. And he forgot his nerves a little way into the reading, later telling a friend, “ . . . we were all going on together, in the first page, so easily, to all appearance, as if we had been sitting around the fire.”
“Dickens’s delighted enjoyment, in fact, of everything in any way connected with the theatrical profession, was second only to that shown by him in the indulgence of the master-passion of his life, his love of literature. The way in which he threw himself into his labors, as a Reader, was only another indication of his intense affection for the dramatic art. For, as we have already insisted, the Readings were more than simply Readings, they were in the fullest meaning of the words singularly ingenious and highly elaborated histrionic performances. And his sustained success in them during fifteen years altogether, and, as we have seen, through as many as five hundred representations, may be accounted for in the same way as his still more prolonged success, from the beginning of his career as a Novelist down to its very close . . . as the most popular author of his generation,” remembered Charles Kent of Dickens’ talents. Kent worked on Dickens’ subsequent reading tours. “[H]e had in an extraordinary degree the dramatic element in his character. It was an integral part of his individuality. It colored his whole temperament or idiosyncracy.”
“The secret of his original success, and of the long sustainment of it in each of these two careers—as Writer and as Reader—is in a great measure discoverable in this, that whatever powers he possessed he applied to their very uttermost. Whether as Author or as Impersonator, he gave himself up to his appointed task, not partially or intermittingly, but thoroughly and indefatigably,” remembered Kent.
The Birmingha
m Journal reported on “how Mr. Dickens twirled his moustache, or played with his paper knife, or laid down his book, and leaned confidently. . . .”
“[H]e consented to read his Carol a second time, on Friday the 30th, if seats were reserved for working men at prices within their means,” wrote Forster. Two thousand people attended.
Dickens thought the third audience was the best of the three. This reading had been especially priced for working men and women. “They lost nothing, followed everything closely, laughed and cried,” Dickens himself reported, “and animated me to that extent that I felt as if we were all bodily going up into the clouds together.”
According to the Birmingham Journal, Dickens mounted the stage, and before he began his reading, stepped forward and began by addressing them as “My good friends. . . .” But he had to stop, because immediately there was “a perfect hurricane of applause.”
He continued, telling his audience that he had always wished “To have the great pleasure of meeting you face to face at this Christmas time. If ever there was a time when any one class could of itself do much for its own good, and for the welfare of society—which I greatly doubt— that time is unquestionably past. It is in the fusion of different classes, without confusion; in the bringing together of employers and employed; in the creating of a better common understanding among those whose interests are identical, who depend upon each other, and who can never be in unnatural antagonism without deplorable results, that one of our chief principles of a Mechanic’s Institution should consist.”
Dickens concluded his introduction, saying, “I now proceed to the pleasant task to which I assure you I have looked forward now for a long time.”
“Marley was dead . . .” Dickens began again.
After the recitation was over, and the immense applause had died down, the performer again spoke directly to the audience, saying, “ . . . I am truly and sincerely interested in you . . . any service to you I have freely rendered from my heart. . . .”
The result was an addition of between £400 and £500 to the funds for establishment of the new Institute. A prettily worked silver flower-basket, presented to Mrs. Dickens, commemorated these first public readings “to nearly six thousand people, and the design they had generously helped,” wrote Forster years later.
The result of the performances was so fantastic, and the word spread so quickly, that Dickens was deluged with requests to perform the same feats elsewhere. Dickens at first refused requests that offered payments or honorariums, protesting that it was not right for a novelist to perform.
“If Dickens does turn Reader he will make another fortune. He will never offer to do so, of course. But if they will have him he will do it, he told me today,” wrote a friend of Dickens later.
Eventually, Dickens came around to these requests and became one of the first novelists of his generation to perform his own works in such a way. When he eventually changed his mind and began giving public readings as a means of support, he was able to make more money than he had ever known as a novelist, and became one of the first modern celebrities of the age.
* * *
The Last Christmas
“The Carol also shows a notable development in the consciously autobiographical element in Dickens’ writing. The story actually turns on memory, specifically on the deleterious consequences of blanking out one’s own past, as he himself had often fantasized about doing,” wrote biographer Michael Slater. “As a writer, Dickens cannot yet, it seems, directly confront the blacking factory itself but nevertheless comes closer here to the factual truth of his boyhood sufferings than ever before.”
Would this be the Christmas that he would finally confront those memories?
Dickens had been in poor health. He had battled foot infections the last five years of his life, sometimes due to his own bad habits of walking in the snow and rain and not taking off his boots, causing massive pain.
On September 2, 1867, he wrote to The Times denying rumors of illness, and the next day wrote to a friend, “I never was better in my life—doubt if anybody ever was or can be better—and have not had anything the matter with me but that squeezed foot, which was an affair of a few days.”
On Christmas Day, 1869, Charles Dickens’ foot was so swollen that he could not leave his room. It was too painful to walk, and he only hobbled down at the end of the day to join in the family’s festivities after Christmas dinner.
He laid on the sofa in the drawing room, with his family filling the room with conversation and laughter. He watched them play parlor games. This was his favorite part of the season, but with his strength sapped it was a difficult time for him.
As Andre Maurois wrote many years later, “Dickens was lying ill on a sofa, playing with his children a simple game known to the family as the ‘memory game.’ It consisted of accumulating in turn words or phrases with no link of association. . . .”
It was one of Dickens’ favorite games. On this specific night, Dickens’ son Henry, who went on to become a very successful barrister, remembered a very important moment. He was twenty years old at the time. After several turns watching, Dickens could not help but join in the game even from his prone position.
“My father, after many turns had successfully gone through the long string of words and finished up with his own contribution, ‘Warren’s Blacking, 30 Strand.’ 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,” recalled Henry.
It was the address of the blacking factory where Dickens had withstood the immense hurt of being sent to work while still a child. “The site of his childhood labor and humiliation. The source of all his agony. And yet the name meant nothing to his family; none of them knew of his past. Just another phrase in the course of a Christmas game, but, to Dickens, how pregnant with the whole mystery of his life,” wrote Ackroyd.
A young Charles Dickens laboring at the blacking factory.
Referring to Warren’s blacking, Michael and Mollie Hardwick wrote that “the damage had been done. Until old Hungerford Market was pulled down, and the old Hungerford Stairs and the rotting old house were destroyed, Dickens never had the courage to go near them, either as a youth or man.”
“As Dickens grew up he became eager for success and security, and he quickly acquired the manners of a gentleman. Yet he remained compulsively fascinated by his suppressed experience. It had formed an indissoluble bond of sympathy, even of identity, with the homeless, the friendless, the orphans, the hungry, the uneducated, and even the prisoners of London’s lower depths. His childhood had been lost there and all his wanderings were a search for it,” wrote Norman and Jeanne MacKenzie.
“It was a very long time before I liked to go up Chandos Street. My old way home by the Borough made me cry, even after my eldest child could speak,” Dickens wrote many years later.
Dickens did not explain his choice of words in the game, and no one pressed him. In fact, none of them would know about the boot black factory until they (and the public) read about it in Forster’s biography several years later.
“It was not until his biography appeared, after his death, that they remembered those words which he had spoken with such curious reluctance, and yet unable to stop himself, and realized that they were the address of the blacking factory where he had toiled to keep his family when his father was in prison,” wrote Maurois.
“All that his readers knew or surmised about Dickens’ childhood, apart from the glimpse they had been given in the Cheap Edition preface to Nicholas Nickleby . . . they would have derived a generalized impression of a secure middle-class background. . . .” wrote biographer Michael Slater. “Forster’s first volume therefore came as a revelation indeed. . . . Certainly the reviewers found much in Dickens’s powerfully written account of what Forster calls his ‘hard experiences in boyhood’ that explained why he developed into the kind of novelist that he did.”
“Thrown among the poor and needy, and sympathizing with all their sufferings, he handled their sorrows as one of themselves, and this was more than enough to counterbalance the fact that he lacked ‘the manners of a gentleman,’ ” remarked the Times of Forster’s version of Dickens’ childhood.
“Certain biographers have shown surprise at his reticence concerning this period of his life, and regarded his painful sensibility as proof of a rather despicable vanity. These critics can never have experienced humiliation in their own childhood. It is a fine thing for a man to be wise when, in the course of a long life, he has painfully formed his own wisdom; but how foolish it is to expect spontaneous wisdom from a child! And when a child has suffered, as Dickens did, a change of caste, he must be superhuman if he is left unscathed,” wrote Maurois.
Henry never forgot. Many years later, at family Christmas gatherings at Henry Dickens’ home at 8 Mulberry Walk in London, he performed imitations of his father giving his famous “Readings,” during which he would wear a geranium, his father’s favorite flower, and lean on the same velvet-covered reading stand used by Charles Dickens during his reading tours. He had listened to his father many times, and older members of his audience said Henry Dickens’ performances were amazingly like those given by his father. To celebrate his eightieth birthday in 1929, Henry went through the whole of A Christmas Carol without a hitch, his false teeth loosening at the melodramatic sections. In October 1914 he performed the recitals of his father’s works in support of the Red Cross Society. These included excerpts from David Copperfield, A Christmas Carol, The Chimes, and The Cricket on the Hearth. Through his efforts he raised £1,200 for the Society.
