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 novelty 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.”
But Dickens pressed Forster again, writing, “And do, my dear fellow, do for God’s sake turn over about Chapman and Hall, and look upon my project as a settled thing. If you object to see them, I must write to them.”
Forster convinced Dickens to delay. As Edgar Johnson rightly pointed out, “Chapman and Hall were publishing A Christmas Carol on commission for Dickens; that announcement that Dickens was quitting them at such time would foolishly jeopardize the little book’s chances.”
With all this swirling in his head, Dickens was now turning to the highpoint of the story. Things here must highlight the direst of circumstances. His walking did not abate. As the book began to near the end of its story, Dickens made more and more preparations for its publication. He hired John Leech to illustrate the title, and agreed to print the book himself, so sure was he of its success (and of his publisher’s inabilities based on the lackluster sales of Martin Chuzzlewit).
Dickens pressed on with Chuzzlewit and Carol.
“Come in!” exclaimed the Ghost. “Come in! and know me better, man!”
Abundance was the signature of the Christmas season for Dickens. And he loved no more abundance than food at Christmas time. Dickens himself was not an over indulger, but the symbolism of it to him was paramount. A respite from the world’s cares and worries, in a moment of enjoyment, jollity, and rest. He loved Christmas.
Dickens was obsessed with his little book, and when John Leech—the celebrated Punch magazine illustrator he had hired—showed him the original hand-tinted illustrations of the Ghost of Christmas Present, Dickens objected to the color of the ghost’s robe; Leech had tinted the robe red. Copies of the illustration exist to this day at the Pierpont Morgan Library. Dickens had described the robe as green in the text, but had Leech taken literary license or was it just a mistake? Nonetheless, Dickens corrected it, and in the final edition the robe was correctly colored green. But these were the kinds of details that were not escaping Dickens despite his massive creative commitments.
“Leech was a nervous, easily offended artist, and Dickens must have taken pains to please and appease him,” wrote historian Hearn.
There was no mistake that Dickens loved Covent Garden. He walked there often. He found its abundance, though, was tarnished, and it was this very thing that Dickens next shared with his readers. The first scene of Stave III was set in the major market of the Old City.
Dickens had first read about Covent Garden Market in George Coleman’s Broad Grins in 1822, which inspired him to come see the market when he was ten years old.
“When I had money enough I used to go to a coffee-shop, and have a half-a-pint of coffee and a slice of bread and butter. When I had no money I took a turn in Covent Garden Market and stared at the pineapples,” Dickens later remembered of his youth when he worked in a factory where he placed labels on pots of boot black.
“Constantly underfed, Charles sniffed hungrily at the food in the London stores and streets. He played mental games whether to buy one type of pudding or another or to buy attractive food now and have no money later, or to buy attractive food later and have no food now, or to act like a grown up and plan sensibly,” wrote biographer Fred Kaplan. Regardless, the market was a bonanza that appealed to Dickens his whole life, and these early childhood experiences stuck with him.
The first record of a “new market in Covent Garden” was in 1654 when market traders set up stalls against the garden wall of Bedford House. The Earl of Bedford acquired a private charter from Charles II in 1670 for a fruit and vegetable market, permitting him and his heirs to hold a market every day except Sunday and Christmas Day. The original market, consisting of wooden stalls and sheds, became disorganized and disorderly with rampant crime and widespread prostitution, and the 6th Earl requested an Act of Parliament in 1813 to regulate it, then commissioned Charles Fowler in 1830 to design the neoclassical market building that is the heart of Covent Garden today. With the new buildings and the new laws surrounding it, the market enjoyed a better (even if it did not have shining) reputation by the time Dickens was walking about in 1844. Still, there was nothing that compared with the abundance with which the market sparkled.
Dickens described his mornings in the garden, writing, “There was early coffee to be got about Covent-garden Market, and that was more company—warm company, too, which was better. Toast of a very substantial quality, was likewise procurable: though the towzled-headed man who made it, in an inner chamber within the coffee-room, hadn’t got his coat on yet, and was so heavy with sleep that in every interval of toast and coffee he went off anew behind the partition into complicated cross-roads of choke and snore, and lost his way directly.”
In the beginning of Stave III, Dickens catalogued the many foods available. “The poulterers’ shops were still half open, and the fruiterers’ were radiant in their glory. There were great, round, pot-bellied baskets of chestnuts, shaped like the waistcoats of jolly old gentlemen, lolling at the doors, and tumbling out into the street in their apoplectic opulence. There were ruddy, brown-faced, broad-girthed Spanish Onions, shining in the fatness of their growth like Spanish Friars. . . . There were pears and apples, clustered high in blooming pyramids; there were bunches of grapes . . . there were piles of filberts, mossy and brown, recalling, in their fragrance, ancient walks among the woods . . . setting off the yellow of the oranges and lemons. . . .”
Dickens mentioned sticks of “cinnamon so long and straight, the other spices so delicious, the candied fruits so caked and spotted with molten sugar as to make the coldest lookers-on feel faint and subsequently bilious.”
. . . on the threshold of the door the Spirit smiled, and stopped to bless Bob Cratchit’s dwelling with the sprinkling of his torch. Think of that! Bob had but fifteen “Bob” a-week himself; he pocketed on Saturdays but fifteen copies of his Christian name; and yet the Ghost of Christmas Present blessed his four-roomed house!
But this blessing—though Dickens himself wrote it— was difficult for him to face, for the Cratchits were none other than the Dickens family when they’d just moved to London, just before their father went into debtors’ prison. Yet the memories of Bayham Street were all painful ones for Dickens.
Remembering years later the loss of innocence in this period, with the ultimate imprisonment of his father and his being sent off to factory work, Dickens wrote, “ . . . I fell into a state of neglect, which I have never been able to look back on without a kind of agony.”
But in the Cratchits, he tried to paint a more stiff-upper lip, more optimistic portrait of his youth. While in Dickens’ mind his family’s days spent on Bayham were awful, he painted the Cratchits as downtrodden but not beaten. They were the heroic working class.
Dickens’ own memories were less optimistic.
“I know that we got on very badly with the butcher and the baker, and that very often we had not too much to eat,” Dickens recalled of their time at Bayham Street. He wrote of his father that “ . . . I degenerated into cleaning his boots of a morning, and my own; and making myself useful in the work of the little house; and looking after my younger brothers and sisters (we were now six in all); and going on such poor errands as arose out of a poor way of living.”
There were eight people altogether in the four-room house—his father and mother, John and Elizabeth, and in order of their birth: Fanny, Charles, Letitia, Harriet, Frederick, and Alfred.
“Workers with some income, could do better,” wrote Victorian historian Daniel Poole about housing in that period, “and a clerk like Bob Cratchit, at the bottom of the middle class, characteristically might enjoy a small four-room house in a London suburb like Camdentown with one room for the kitchen, one for a dining room-parlor, and the other two for bedrooms.”
As an adult, Dickens threw himself into Christmas, but “ . . . others observed that Dickens’ enjoyment of Christmas seemed more determined, even ruthless, than one might expect from someone with a genuinely boyish sense of fun,” wrote Robert Douglas-Fairhurst, a Dickens expert. “Perhaps his memories of Warren’s Blacking were to blame. His family’s accounts certainly suggest an attempt on Dickens’ part to re-create his childhood as it should have been, rather than as it was. His fiction too reveals surprisingly mixed feelings over Christmas as a time of peace and joy. For all its versions of plum puddings and mistletoe, and all that readers have come to think of Dickens as literature’s answer to Santa Claus, he rarely describes a family Christmas without showing how vulnerable it is to being broken apart by a more miserable alternative.”
Then up rose Mrs. Cratchit, Cratchit’s wife, dressed out but poorly in a twice-turned gown, but brave in ribbons, which are cheap and make a goodly show for sixpence; and she laid the cloth, assisted by Belinda Cratchit, second of her daughters, also brave in ribbons; while Master Peter Cratchit plunged a fork into the saucepan of potatoes, and getting the corners of his monstrous shirt collar (Bob’s private property, conferred upon his son and heir in honor of the day) into his mouth, rejoiced to find himself so gallantly attired, and yearned to show his linen in the fashionable Parks.
And now two smaller Cratchits, boy and girl, came tearing in, screaming that outside the baker’s they had smelt the goose, and known it for their own; and basking in luxurious thoughts of sage and onion, these young Cratchits danced about the table, and exalted Master Peter Cratchit to the skies, while he (not proud, although his collars nearly choked him) blew the fire, until the slow potatoes bubbling up, knocked loudly at the saucepan-lid to be let out and peeled.
“That image of everyone sitting around the table with a great big goose—this is when it comes about, in the 1830s and 1840s,” says Alex Werner, a senior curator of social and working history at the Museum of London.
“Narrative snapshots like the Cratchits’ happy family Christmas may linger in the memory, but in Dickens’ fictional world they are set against a background where the domestic ideal is far more likely to be flaking around the edges,” concluded Douglas-Fairhurst.
This tenderness of scene, this simple show of home and hearth and goodwill amongst the Cratchits, is what endeared the Cratchits, and by extension, Dickens, to readers since the story’s publication.
