Bah! Humbug!

Published February 10, 2008

In 1868, two years before his death and fagged out with the annual chore of coming up with a new Christmas number of his magazine All the Year Round, Charles Dickens complained to a friend `I feel as if I had murdered a Christmas number years ago (perhaps I did!) and its ghost perpetually haunted me.` A few months later, shortly before deciding to drop the Christmas edition altogether, he groaned to another correspondent `I am sick of the thing.`

While this might not quite amount to `Bah! Humbug!`, it is a reminder that Dickens`s relationship with Christmas was more vexed and varied than we like to believe. Certainly it extends far beyond the prodigious success of A Christmas Carol, the 1843 novella that is generally agreed to have formed a template for all our subsequent mid-winter feasting. In a writing career that spanned 35 years and started before Victoria had come to the throne, Dickens wrote five short Christmas books and countless slighter stories on a festive theme. And in that time, inevitably, the Christmases he set before the public shifted dramatically in shape and tone.

Partly this was a consequence of the changing social and political times through which he worked hunger, plenty, war and peace have a way of leaking into even his slightest bits of prose. Partly it was a response to events in Dickens`s personal life.The death of his infant daughter, the disastrous reunion with his first love Maria Beadnell and, in 1858, the bad-tempered separation from his wife all left their rueful marks on his seasonal narratives, which, as the decades passed, increasingly brooded on themes of loss, memory and solitude.

Nor was there any single compulsion driving Dickens to make his annual return to the topic of Christmas. Rather, it was a set of pragmatic considerations that took him there each October. He was, for instance, attracted to festive stories as a way of exploring New Testament virtues without being obliged to delve into the kind of theological discourse to which he was constitutionally unsuited. (Even A Christmas Carol is remarkably free of references to the Christian story — `this great birthday` is about the nearest you get to the nativity.) In another way entirely, Dickens used these end-of-year ephemera as a safe space in which to try out themes and techniques that could later be transplanted to the big, important novels he was nearly always writing in parallel. And then there was the simple fact that Dickens always came back to Christmas because he knew that he had the makings of a highly lucrative franchise. In 1847, the first year since A Christmas Carol in which he failed to produce a December book, he fretted not simply about disappointing the nation, but also about forfeiting easy profit, admitting to his friend and biographer John Forster that he was `very loath to lose the money`.

So Dickens did not invent Christmas. It was, in fact, getting on perfectly well without him before he first turned his attention to it in an early magazine sketch of 1835. As

Michael Slater has pointed out in his excellent introduction to the Penguin A Christmas Carol, ever since the beginning of the 19th century, writers of a conservative stamp had been busy trying to revive the festival as an important part of national cultural life. Worried by the example of the French revolution, not to mention the increasing signs of organised unrest among British workers, these commentators hoped that keeping an old-fashioned festive season — all 12 days of it, preferably — might be just the thing to re-cement social bonds between the classes.

Taking as his model a fuzzy kind of medieval Christmas feast, the poet laureate Robert Southey spoke wistfully of `old ceremonies and old festivities` that had now become `obsolete`. Meanwhile, in his introduction to the sixth canto of `Marmion`, Walter Scott wrote lovingly of Christmas in the Baron`s Hall, complete with a boar`s head and yule log around which `vassal, tenant, serf and all` clustered. Three decades later, Daniel Maclise, a painter friend of Dickens, was to visualise this very scene in his wildly popular Merry Christmas in the Baron`s Hall, a romantic rendering of feudal community ties extending horizontally to include kith as well as kin. All this stood in implicit contrast to the sterile legal contracts that increasingly bound master and man in Britain`s new urban environments.

Writing in the lee of this romantic antiquarianism, it was inevitable

that Dickens`s first fully fledged fictional Christmas should be very different from the one for which he subsequently became famous. In 1836, a full seven years before A Christmas Carol, Mr Pickwick and his friends set out for Dingley Dell to enjoy a Christmas that bears a striking resemblance to the one imagined by Scott. `Gay and merry` from as early as December 22, the Pickwickians are clearly determined to celebrate a whole season rather than a single day, as they strike out cross-country `with the fresh clear air blowing in their faces, and gladdening their very hearts within them`.

Their destination, Manor Farm, has all the feudal attributes Southey could hope for, including a `good, long, dark-panelled room with a high chimney-piece, and a capacious chimney`, `a shady bower of holly and evergreens`, `massive old silver candlesticks with four branches each` and, most importantly, `the two best fiddlers and the only harp` in the surrounding area. And, in case there is any doubt about what kind of Christmas this is going to be, Mr Wardle, the Pickwickians` host, explains `Our invariable custom [is that]... everybody sits down with us on Christmas Eve, as you see them now — servants and all; and here we wait, until the clock strikes twelve, to usher Christmas in, and beguile the time with forfeits and old stories.` And, true to his word, Wardle proceeds to tell a story that has been handed down through the generations — an account of the local `cross-grained, surly` sexton Gabriel Grub who is prevailed upon to give up his misanthropic ways and reintegrate into a community `full of mirth and cheerfulness`.

Apart from a small piece that appeared in 1840 in the abortive weekly miscellany Master Humphrey`s Clock, Charles Dickens let Christmas alone for the next few years. This was the period of Oliver Twist and Nicholas Nickleby, novels that catapulted the young man, still not yet 30, to unparalleled international popularity. Yet, by the time Martin Chuzzlewit began to appear at the beginning of 1843, there were signs that Dickens was not quite the marvellous boy he had once been. The novel`s relentlessly grim story did not attract his usual vast audience, and his publisher was making noises about reducing his monthly payment by a damaging £50. In panicky response, Dickens toyed with the idea of saving money by letting his London house and taking his growing family to live abroad.

So it is ironic — or perhaps entirely understandable — that at this very moment Dickens came up with a story that brought its author huge commercial success. (He didn`t see it like that, complaining bitterly that A Christmas Carol continued to be `an intolerable anxiety and disappointment` financially.) Not that his motivation for writing the book was entirely mercenary. Along with the rest of thinking Britain, Dickens had been appalled by the recent report of the Children`s Employment Commission, which revealed that many young people laboured in wretched conditions. Thrashing around for an appropriate response, he eventually settled on writing a book that would remind the employing classes of their responsibility towards the men and women who worked in their shops, offices and mills.

Written at breakneck speed in the odd moments when he was not working on the increasingly thankless Chuzzlewit, A Christmas Carol worked its transforming magic even on its own creator. In a letter written to an American friend, Dickens describes himself weeping, laughing and pounding the London pavements for 20 miles each night in the ecstatic realisation that he had created somet hing extraordinary.

What makes A Christmas Carol so important is that it marks the first time that anyone tried to imagine what a modern, urban Christmas might look like. Here you will find no lingering nostalgia for the Baron`s Hall with its extended kith network and 12 days of feudal feasting. Instead, this is a pared-down Christmas, a single day`s holiday enjoyed by small nuclear families with no historical or social links to anything beyond themselves. We never hear about Bob Cratchit`s mother or sister, and even Scrooge`s nephew`s house party consists only of close family. When the memory of a joyful Christmas past is held out to Scrooge in the form of Fezziwig`s Ball, which he attended as a young man, it is an after-work party held in a merchant`s warehouse rather than a scene of feudal feasting.

So Dickens demonstrates triumphantly that a meaningful Christmas is possible even in the most contemporary and urban of settings. Fears among gloomy commentators such as Thomas Carlyle that the dour Dissenting creed of the manufacturing classes had killed off older, more spontaneous types of seasonal joy are banished by Scrooge`s conversion to the Christmas spirit. Starting the story as a textbook Utilitarian who calmly accepts that starvation is Nature`s way of keeping the population under control, he finishes it not by attempting to revive some pre-industrial whimsy overseen by the Lord of Misrule, but by raising Cratchit`s wages and ordering an extra scuttle of coal.

The real Utilitarians, who ran the Westminster Review, were naturally not happy with this blatant economic rule-breaking, and thundered in response `Who went without turkey and punch in order that Bob Cratchit might get them? — for unless there were turkeys and punch in surplus, some one must go without.` Everyone else, however, was mighty pleased with this reassurance that keeping Christmas in the city did not mean having to resort to a bogus hey-nonny-no. Even Carlyle, not known as a constitutionally cheery soul, was so enthused by the story that he immediately organised two dinner parties in his Cheyne Walk lair.

Dickens, to his great credit, did not let the `most prodigious success` of A Christmas Carol blow him off his chosen course of using the season to preach a pointed social sermon. The very next December he produced The Chimes, a dark and bitter book that deals, among other things, with Will Fern, an agricultural labourer charged with rick-burning. It was, though, a finger-wagging too far. Expecting a repeat of Tiny Tim, the buying public gave The Chimes a wide berth. Clearly rattled, the next year Dickens returned in the schmaltzy The Cricket on the Hearth to an uncannily familiar plot, which features a misanthropic employer, a handicapped youngster and the intervention of a tiresome set of supernatural beings.

Still, Dickens would not give up entirely on his project to use Christmas as a time to wake up the dozing conscience of the prosperous urban middle classes. In the last seasonal book that he wrote, he revisited with renewed energy the problem of how Christ`s birthday might be celebrated in an urban environment where it was all too easy for individuals to slip through the social net. In The Haunted Man and the Ghost`s Bargain (1848) he gives us a deeply unsettling unnamed street-child — alienation from society has rendered him entirely savage. Taking the risk of offending his readers, Dickens puts down his narrator`s mask to make it clear just where the responsibility for such an abomination lies. `There is not a country throughout the earth on which... [this creature] would not bring a curse.` He would not again be so explicit, so angry, until he stepped forward to hold his readers to thunderous account for the life and death of Jo, the wretched crossing sweeper in Bleak House.

The street-child is not the only source of darkness in The Haunted Man. On to this narrative of righteous social anger Dickens grafts a far more personal account of memory, hurt and loss. Now approaching 40, he was clearly casting back over the painful recollections of his early life (it is no coincidence that his next full-length book would be David Copperfield, with its autobiographical account of the deeply wounding blacking factory). In a plot anticipatory of the Hollywood film `Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind`, the central character Redlaw is given the chance of relief from all his painful memories, which include a scarring awareness of an early romantic betrayal. Far from bringing peace of mind, this emotional oblivion delivers only extra misery. Dickens`s point is that, without a full spectrum of recollections, painful as well as happy, we lose the true north of our moral compass.

Unsurprisingly, The Haunted Man did not sell well and turned out to be Dickens`s last attempt at a stand-alone Christmas book. From now on he would concentrate on producing shorter fiction for the Christmas editions of his new family magazines, first Household Words and then All the Year Round. While many of these festive stories are listless potboilers, there are one or two which show Dickens continuing to work away at the perplexing question of what social and symbolic function Christmas might perform in an age of increasing anomie. One short piece in particular — `A Christmas Tree` (1850) — is remarkable for its deft blending of genres and narrative voice (literary hybridity does not belong exclusively to the post-modern age).

All the while that Dickens churned out his festive magazine stories, the popularity of A Christmas Carol continued to grow. A hit from the beginning — the first edition sold out by Christmas Eve 1843 — it now started its steady progress towards becoming something more than a set of words on paper. For there was something about A Christmas Carol that allowed readers to take away from it exactly what they wanted. In his The Lives and Times of Ebenezer Scrooge, the American critic Paul Davis has shown convincingly that Dickens`s original audiences were not, by and large, very interested in Scrooge`s back story, with its lengthy detours into his boyhood and courtship days. The ghosts bored them, too. What they liked, and wanted more of, was the Cratchits who, in an age where God was increasingly in hiding, could be easily turned into an alternative Holy Family, with Tiny Tim doubling up as the Christ Child.

This process of literary morphing was aided by the many pirate editions of the book, which appeared within weeks of the original, often adding new scenes and characters. (Dickens immediately applied for a court injunction against these rogues and imposters, which suggests that there were definite limits to his reserves of seasonal goodwill.) Ironically, however, the biggest cannibaliser of A Christmas Carol was its author himself. In his wildly successful reading tours, undertaken between 1853 and 1870, Dickens created entirely new versions of his most popular work. The darker social menace was cut out (no one wanted to think of Tiny Tim as a potential Chartist) and what remained was a cheery account of the Cratchits` luscious goose dinner followed by a pudding `like a speckled cannon-ball, so hard and firm, blazing in half of half-a-quartern of ignited brandy`.

As a result, A Christmas Carol became not so much an iconic text as an iconic idea of a text. By the 1870s, pursed-lip critics including Mrs Oliphant were accusing Dickens of creating a jingling story that merely celebrated `the immense spiritual power of the Christmas turkey`. Ruskin, meanwhile, sneered that Christmas had become nothing more to Dickens than `mistletoe and pudding`. These criticisms were markedly unfair since they took no account of the full text, which was darker and more complex than anyone cared to recall. Who, for instance, now thinks of Scrooge confronting the wasted child figures named as `Ignorance` and `Want`? Who remembers him being taken by the Ghost of Christmas Present to look upon the mariners and miners whose pinched and narrow lives represent the reality of rural labour in the new industrial age ? And what about those desolate scenes where rats gather to gnaw at Scrooge`s corpse, while his deathbed attendant tries to get a good price for his old sheets?

As the later decades of the 19th century unfurled, A Christmas Carol was re-edited by its readers to make it fit each new context. They were aided by a flurry of new prequels and sequels, not to mention sets of illustrations describing scenes which never actually happened. (Scrooge peering round the door to join the Cratchits` Christmas dinner was a particularly popular addition.) In the process, Dickens`s status as the creator of a very particular kind of British festive season was cemented. The irony was that what had originated as a dynamic social and intellectual inquiry into the meaning of Christmas, stretching over several decades and many different publications, had both hardened and softened into a story that no one could now quite remember.

— Dawn/Guardian Service

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