“A merry Christmas, uncle! God save you!” cried a cheerful voice. It was the voice of Scrooge’s nephew, who came upon him so quickly that this was the first intimation he had of his approach.
“Bah!” said Scrooge, “Humbug!”
He had so heated himself with rapid walking in the fog and frost, this nephew of Scrooge’s, that he was all in a glow; his face was ruddy and handsome; his eyes sparkled, and his breath smoked again.
Scrooge’s nephew Fred is a jovial, well-intentioned man. But who is Fred?
There is no question among scholars that Fred was probably based on Frederick Dickens, Charles’ favorite brother of his youth. Fred had been born on July 4, 1820. Fred attended a school in Hampstead with their brother Alfred Dickens for two years, until their father John Dickens could no longer afford the fees. At the end of the school day, the boys would be collected by their older brother, Charles.
When John Dickens was imprisoned for debt on February 20, 1824, in the Marshalsea Debtors’ Prison, Elizabeth Barrow Dickens and her three youngest children, including 4-year-old Fred, joined her husband there in April of that year.
In 1834, at the age of fourteen, Charles took Fred in when he moved into a three-room apartment in Furnival’s Inn. By then, the word was out that Dickens was in fact Boz, the writer of The Pickwick Papers. He was still a reporter and was making £275 a year, a very nice sum in those days for a young man on the rise. Charles was now twenty-two years old, and he was slowly becoming the man of the family.
His father had continued to struggle. In the intervening years, Charles, already an established court reporter, had helped find jobs for his father who lost many of them. And Charles’ own finances became worse and worse; at one point, he spent every penny he had to keep his father from debtors’ prison once again, only to find that there were other creditors unknown to the family who were ready to press new charges.
In an effort to change the fortunes of his mother and father, Charles arranged for new and less-expensive lodgings for them and his remaining young siblings. And in an effort to help his young brother, Fred, of whom he was very fond, he took him in.
“Furnival’s Inn was inhabited largely by solicitors with comfortable incomes. The rent of 35 pounds a year that Dickens paid was not small, and he himself would have been in no difficulties but for his father’s debts,” wrote Edgar Johnson.
American journalist Nathaniel Parker Willis, who visited the young writer at his home, remarked on the Spartan accommodations after climbing three flights of stairs and coming “into an uncarpeted and bleak-looking room, with a deal table, two or three chairs and a few books, a small boy, and Mr. Dickens for all the contents.”
Fred and Charles spent much time together. Dickens worked furiously during the day as a reporter, then came home nights to work on Sketches by Boz. Fred was always a help. In fact, when Dickens’ future wife, Catherine Hogarth, took ill with a cold, Charles dispatched Fred to Catherine with a jar of blackcurrant jam. Dickens took great interest in his younger brother, almost paternal, and his fiancé was fond of Fred as well. Fred proved himself dependable, and most importantly loyal, to Charles. They had become very close. And it was Charles’ wish that he school Fred so that Fred would not end up unable to manage his own finances like their father, but to be a solvent and reliable man.
And of course it was Dickens who helped Fred, at fifteen years old, find his first job. Writing to his friend Macrone, “I have deliberated a long time about the propriety of keeping him at his present study, but I am convinced that at his present period of life, it is really only so much a waste of time.” Dickens insisted that Fred take tea at home so that he might continue studying; he thought it a good idea for Fred to take a stool and learn good business habits. Dickens said of Fred to Macrone that “any sharp young fellow, you could not have better suited to your purposes.”
After Charles married Kate, Fred continued to live with Charles in new lodgings at Doughty Street. “The Doughty Street home was soon full of lively doings. In addition to Mary, young Frederick Dickens—by this time sixteen—was now a member of the household, and added to its high spirits. A full-lipped, snub-nosed youth, with raised eyebrows and an amusing oily laugh, he had a ludicrous gift for comic imitations in which Dickens abetted him. The bright, first-floor sitting room often resounded with Kate’s and Mary’s happy laughter.”
And when Kate’s sister Mary was suddenly seized by a grave illness, of whom Charles was immensely fond, shortly thereafter it was Fred who, in the middle of the night, ran through the streets of London to fetch the doctor to no avail.
By now Fred was growing into a gentleman, and Dickens succeeding in getting Lord Stanley to appoint his brother to the Secretary’s Office in the Custom House. The two remained close, and when Dickens took a small summer home in Broadstairs, Fred came to visit. He was a popular personality in the house with friends and family alike. Fred and Mitton would trade barbs and laughs for long periods of time. And Fred and Charles would go aboard ships, keeping the sailors laughing by roaring out a series of completely absurd nautical commands in full loud burst with all the seriousness they could muster, generally keeping the crews in stitches.
It was not uncommon for Fred, the most popular of uncles with Charles and Kate’s brood, to care for the children in the couple’s absence. And when Dickens and Kate traveled to America the first time in 1842, the 22-year-old Fred was left in charge of their young family. As Dickens once wrote to a friend, he trusted Fred so much that he even entrusted him with the key to their wine cellar.
Dickens wrote to Forster before their trip to America that Kate “is satisfied to have nobody in the house but Fred, of whom, as you know, they are all fond. He has got his promotion, and they give him the increased salary from the day on which the minute was made by Baring, I feel so amiable, so meek, so fond of people, so full of gratitudes and reliances, that I am like a sick man. And I am already counting the days between this and coming home again.”
But by 1843 something between Dickens and Fred had started to go wrong. His father’s continued irresponsibility and the careers of his brothers worried him greatly. According to Johnson, “Fred, although his Treasury salary had been increased, was falling into his father’s extravagant ways.” A creditor at Gray’s Inn sent Dickens “for the second time a bill which I think is Frederick’s.” Dickens told Mitton (friend to both) that Fred seemed to resent the way that Dickens had resolved the matter. Fred responded by staying away from Devonshire Terrace, now the abode of the large Dickens family.
Devonshire Terrace was a large home fit for a London gentleman. In it Dickens had installed “mahogany doors, bookshelves, mantelpieces, great mirrors on the walls, thick carpets, white print roller-blinds at every window, and the best available bathroom fittings. A dining room table with five additional leaves was especially made for the columned dining room, and twelve leather chairs. The library became his study, its French windows opening on to a flight of steps down into the garden. There were nurseries in the attics, kitchens in the basement, cellars, a butler’s pantry and a coach house. . . .” wrote biographer Claire Tomalin.
“Your absence from here,” Dickens wrote to Fred, “had been your own act always. I shall be perfectly glad to see you; and should have been, at any time.”
And it is at this stage in the relationship with Charles and Fred, that Scrooge meets his nephew Fred. In this scene, Charles plays out his anger with his brother for his spendthrift ways, as he veers ever closer to their father’s extravagance:
What’s Christmas time to you but a time for paying bills without money; a time for finding yourself a year older, but not an hour richer; a time for balancing your books and having every item in ’em through a round dozen of months presented dead against you?
One cannot help but hear the brother chastise the brother and father in this condemnation from Charles. Given Fred and Charles’ childhood, this fear of indebtedness, prison, poverty, and the inability to manage one’s business affairs was like a mark on the family that Charles was so sad to see in his brother’s personality.
To be sure, Dickens’ condemnation was severe. Charles himself had faced debt and borrowed money to get out of it all his life. But to see his brother fall victim to this particular demon was a difficult pill for Charles to swallow.
More bitter still was Fred’s sudden absence. Fred was as big a personality as Charles in their home. He was well loved by the family. The laughter he caused through his jokes and general buffoonery had left the house quieter in his absence than it had been. Dickens and Kate missed that.
For his part, Dickens put his most heartfelt feelings in Fred’s mouth, when in the story Fred says to Scrooge:
“There are many things from which I might have derived good, by which I have not profited, I dare say,” returned the nephew. “Christmas among the rest. But I am sure I have always thought of Christmas time, when it has come round—apart from the veneration due to its sacred name and origin, if anything belonging to it can be apart from that—as a good time; a kind, forgiving, charitable, pleasant time; the only time I know of, in the long calendar of the year, when men and women seem by one consent to open their shut-up hearts freely, and to think of people below them as if they really were fellow-passengers to the grave, and not another race of creatures bound on other journeys. And therefore, uncle, though it has never put a scrap of gold or silver in my pocket, I believe that it has done me good, and will do me good; and I say, God bless it!”
The enmity between them vexed Dickens as he walked the streets. There is no question that there is a part of Charles in Scrooge, angry at his brother. But there is also a part of Charles that missed his well-natured brother:
“I want nothing from you; I ask nothing of you; why cannot we be friends?”
“Good afternoon,” said Scrooge.
“I am sorry, with all my heart, to find you so resolute. We have never had any quarrel, to which I have been a party. But I have made the trial in homage to Christmas, and I’ll keep my Christmas humor to the last. So a Merry Christmas, uncle!”
It was yet another worry that kept Dickens up at night, and a difficult and painful relationship to sift through as he walked the streets of London.