In these notes I have occasionally drawn upon previous editions of the Christmas Books, in particular Michael Hearn’s Annotated Christmas Carol (New York and London, 1976), Michael Slater’s Penguin edition of the Christmas Books (Harmondsworth, 1971) and the earlier Oxford World’s Classics Christmas Books, including ‘A Christmas Carol’ edited by Ruth Glancy (Oxford, 1988). I have also benefited from the unpublished notes compiled by T. W. Hill, Honorary Secretary of the Dickens Fellowship, 1914–19, and Honorary Treasurer, 1932–47, now in the archives of the Dickensian. Specific debts are indicated by the author’s name in parentheses following the note. All biblical references are to the King James Bible (1611).
A CHRISTMAS CAROL
9 ‘Change: the Royal Exchange, the financial centre of London, situated between Threadneedle Street and Cornhill. The original building had burned down in 1838, and a replacement was under construction at the time A Christmas Carol was being written.
the wisdom of our ancestors: a phrase popular with Tory politicians and often mocked by Dickens. When he had some dummy books made for his study in Tavistock House, one series carried the title The Wisdom of Our Ancestors, with individual volumes labelled Ignorance, Superstition, The Block, The Stake, The Rack, Dirt and Disease. (Slater)
assign … legatee: legal expressions; an assign is one to whom the property and affairs of the deceased are transferred; a legatee is one who is bequeathed what remains of an estate after all debts have been paid. (Hearn)
Hamlet’s Father … taking a stroll at night: Hamlet, I. i, in which the disappearance of the Ghost of Old Hamlet is associated with a Christmas legend: ‘Some say that ever ‘gainst that season comes | Wherein our Saviour’s birth is celebrated, | The bird of dawning singeth all night long.’ In Dickens’s original manuscript, this paragraph continued with some further, equally sturdy comments on Hamlet’s state of mind: ‘Perhaps you think Hamlet’s intellects were strong. I doubt it. If you could have such a son tomorrow, depend upon it, you would find him a poser. He would be thought a most impractical fellow to deal with, and however creditable he might be to his family, he would prove a special incumbrance in his lifetime, trust me.’
10 dog-days: the period 3 July to 11 August, when the dog-star Sirius rises and sets with the sun; popular belief has it that dogs can be driven mad by the summer heat.
10 didn’t know where to have him: (slang) didn’t know how to affect him.
‘came down’: (slang) gave money.
‘nuts’: (slang) a great pleasure.
11 ‘Humbug!’: nonsense; originally a fraud or sham.
13 Bedlam: popular nickname of the Hospital of St Mary of Bethlehem, founded in the fourteenth century as an institution for the insane. In 1812 it was moved to a new building in Lambeth, which currently houses the Imperial War Museum.
14 Union workhouses: the Poor Law Amendment Act of 1834, heavily criticized by Dickens in Oliver Twist (1837–8), grouped parishes together into ‘poor law unions’ which established workhouses (popularly known as ‘Unions’) to house the destitute.
decrease the surplus population: a reference to the theories of the Revd Thomas Malthus (1766–1834), who argued in the second edition of his Essay on the Principles of Population (1803) that anyone who could not be supported by his parents, and whose labour was not wanted by society, ‘has no claim of right to the smallest portion of food, and, in fact, has no business to be where he is. At nature’s mighty feast there is no cover for him. She tells him to be gone …’
flaring links: torches made of cloth dipped in pitch or tar; nineteenth-century travellers could hire a ‘link-boy’ or ‘link’ to light their way along the streets.
15 Saint Dunstan … lusty purpose: St Dunstan (924–88), patron saint of armourers, blacksmiths, goldsmiths, locksmiths, and musicians. In his Child’s History of England (1851–3), Dickens recounts the legend that Dunstan was once at work in his forge when the devil looked in through the window and tried to tempt him to a life of pleasure, ‘whereupon, having his pincers in the fire, red hot, he seized the devil by the nose and put him to such pain, that his bellowings were heard for miles and miles …’
‘God bless you … dismay!’: a revision of the traditional Christmas carol, printed in William Sandys’s Christmas Carols, Ancient and Modern (1833), which begins ‘God rest you merry, gentlemen, | Let nothing you dismay.’
16 next morning: 26 December, known in the UK as Boxing Day from the tradition of giving presents of money (‘Christmas boxes’) to servants and tradesmen, was an ordinary working day until an Act of Parliament turned it into a Bank Holiday in 1871. (Slater)
Cornhill: a street in London’s banking district, between two and three miles from Camden Town, where many City clerks and their families lived.
blindman’s-buff: a traditional game in which one player is blindfolded and is playfully pushed about while he tries to catch and identify one or more of the others; it is played by Mr Pickwick at Dingly Dell in chapter 28 of The Pickwick Papers (1837).
corporation, aldermen, and livery: the Corporation is the governing body of the City of London, the senior members of which are called Alderman; Liverymen, who had the power to elect the City of London’s Mayor and local government officials, were members of one of the ancient trade guilds, deriving their name from the distinctive dress (livery) worn by their members.
17 Marley’s face: an echo of the transformation scene in E. T. A. Hoffmann’s story ‘The Golden Pot’ (1814), translated by Carlyle in 1827. Dickens had earlier written about ‘the physiognomy of street-door knockers’ in Sketches by Boz (1839).
a bad young Act of Parliament: a reference to Daniel O’Connell, the Irish lawyer and MP nicknamed ‘the Liberator’, who is said to have boasted that he could drive a coach drawn by six horses through a loosely worded Act.
splinter-bar: a cross-bar in a carriage or coach to which the traces are attached.
18 dip: a candle, made by dipping a wick several times in melted tallow.
the ancient Prophet’s rod: a reference to the story of Aaron’s rod (Exodus 7: 12) which was turned into a serpent and swallowed the serpents conjured up by Pharaoh’s magicians.
19 Marley had no bowels: a pun on the literal sense of bowels, meaning ‘entrails’ or ‘innards’, and its metaphorical sense of ‘pity’ or ‘compassion’, drawing on 1 John 3:17: ‘But whoso hath this world’s good, and seeth his brother have need, and shutteth up his bowels of compassion from him, how dwelleth the love of God in him?’ (Hearn)
21 ‘to a shade’: to a degree, punning on ‘shade’ as a ghost.
22 the bandage round its head: during the nineteenth century bandages were often wrapped around the chin and head of the dead, in order to keep the mouth closed and prevent it from producing an unseemly post-mortem leer. (Hearn)
23 Ward: a night watchman; the ‘wards’ were the 26 parishes of London.
24 when the bell tolls One: another echo of Hamlet, I. i.
26 Invisible World: the realm of departed spirits, and a phrase often used in the nineteenth century to describe anything thought to lurk beyond the human senses or powers of reason. Dickens’s lifelong ambivalence is discussed in Harry Stone, Dickens and the Invisible World: Fairy Tales, Fantasy and Novel-Making (Bloomington, Ind.: Indiana University Press, 1979).
27 repeater: a watch or clock able to strike the hour and quarter hour when a button is pressed.
a mere United States’ security: during the 1830s, individual States borrowed heavily from foreign investors to finance large public projects such as the building of railways and canals, and the financial crisis of 1837 left many of them unable to repay their debts; the schemes quickly became a byword for something worthless or fraudulent.
28 now a thing with one arm … melted away: an echo of Ariel in The Tempest (1. ii. 196–201).
29 The voice was soft and gentle. Singularly low: an echo of Lear’s description of his dead daughter Cordelia: ‘Her voice was ever soft, | Gentle and low’ (King Lear, v. iii. 271–2).
‘bonneted’: to ‘bonnet’ someone is to pull their hat down over their eyes. In Sketches by Boz (1836–7), Dickens describes how two young wags in a coffee-house ‘varied their amusement by “bonneting” the proprietor’, while in chapter 44 of The Pickwick Papers (1837) Sam Weller mistakenly ‘bonnets’ his own father.
30 his heart leap up: an allusion to one of Dickens’s favourite poems, Wordsworth’s ‘My heart leaps up’, which ends ‘The Child is father of the Man; | And I could wish my days to be | Bound each to each by natural piety.’
31 plain deal forms: long benches made from unvarnished deal wood or pine.
Not a latent echo … to his tears: the situation and phrasing echo Tennyson’s poem ‘Mariana’ (1830).
Ali Baba: the hero of ‘Ali Baba and the Forty Thieves’ from The Arabian Nights, a collection of popular tales that first reached England via the French translation of Antoine Galland (1704–8) and was often reprinted during the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. Dickens first read it as a child, possibly in Jonathan Scott’s six-volume edition of 1811, and it remained one of his favourite books; in the essay ‘A Christmas Tree’ (1850) he recalls the magical effect of his childhood reading: ‘Oh, now all common things become uncommon and enchanted to me! All lamps are wonderful; all rings are talismans. Common flower-pots are full of treasure, with a little earth scattered on the top; trees are for Ali Baba to hide in …’
Valentine … and his wild brother, Orson: the heroes of a fifteenth-century French romance, first translated into English in the early sixteenth century as The History of two Valyannte Brethren, Valentyne and Orson, which became a popular children’s story. After the twin brothers are separated at birth, Valentine is raised as a knight in the king’s court, while Orson is carried off by a bear and becomes a wild man of the woods. (Glancy)
32 the Princess: in the Arabian Nights story ‘Nur-ed-Din and his Son and Shems-ed-Din and his Daughter’, the daughter is forced to marry the Sultan’s groom, who is an ugly hunchback. Thanks to the help of a genie and a fairy, at the wedding Nur-ed-Din’s son replaces the Groom, who is held upside-down all night. At dawn the son is carried away by the fairy and left at the gates of Damascus ‘in his shirt and drawers’.
There goes Friday … the little creek: a reference to Daniel Defoe’s Robinson Crusoe (1719), another favourite story of Dickens’s childhood, in which Crusoe first sees Man Friday swimming across the creek to escape from cannibals. Dickens later recalled the same scene in his essay ‘Nurse’s Stories’ (i860): ‘No face is ever reflected in the waters of the little creek which Friday swam across when pursued by his two brother cannibals with sharpened stomachs.’
34 Welsh wig: a woollen cap.
organ of benevolence: according to the Victorian pseudo-science of phrenology, personal qualities were determined by the shape of the skull, which phrenologists divided up into forty sections or ‘organs’, each of which was supposed to govern one particular mental or moral faculty. The ‘organ of benevolence’ was located near the top of the forehead. Dickens’s references to phrenology are usually sceptical: in Great Expectations (1860–1), Magwitch describes how, as a homeless child thrown into prison, interfering adults ‘measured my head, some on ’em,—they had better a measured my stomach’. Dickens himself had been given a phrenological examination on 5 February 1842, in Worcester, Massachusetts, by the leading American practitioner Lorenzo N. Fowler, who reported that Dickens possessed a small organ of veneration, indicating that he ‘is not serious nor respectful’, but that his largest organ was benevolence, suggesting that he ‘feels lively sympathy for distress; does good to all.’ (Hearn)
35 porter: a dark brown beer, especially popular with porters and other manual workers.
negus: wine (usually port or sherry) mixed with hot water, sweetened with sugar, and sometimes flavoured with lemon and spices.
36 ‘Sir Roger de Coverley’: an English country-dance named after a character in Addison’s Spectator (1711–14). In ‘Where We Stopped Growing’ (1853), Dickens explained that adults who remain young in spirit ‘have not outgrown Sir Roger de Coverley’; according to R. H. Horne in A New Spirit of the Age (1844), Dickens himself was ‘very much given to dancing Sir Roger de Coverley’.
‘cut’: in dancing, to jump into the air while rapidly criss-crossing the feet.
37 A golden one: according to Exodus 32: 1–35, Aaron constructed a golden idol in the shape of a calf, in defiance of holy law, while Moses was on Mount Sinai.
39 the celebrated herd in the poem: an allusion to Wordsworth’s poem ‘Written in March’: ‘The cattle are grazing, | Their heads never raising; | There are forty feeding like one!’
42 free-and-easy sort: sporting types; a ‘free-and-easy’ was a place that catered for young men about town who enjoyed smoking, drinking, singing, and gambling.
acquainted with a move or two … equal to the time-of-day: (slang) on the ball, streetwise.
42 pitch-and-toss: a street gambling game in which coins are tossed at a target, and the player whose coin lands nearest is allowed to throw all the remaining coins up in the air and claim those that land face up.
43 spontaneous combustion: a much disputed Victorian medical theory that corrupt human bodies could become so unstable that they exploded. Dickens was attacked by a number of critics, particularly George Henry Lewes, for being ghoulishly unscientific after making Krook die of spontaneous combustion in Bleak House.
twelfth-cakes: large decorated cakes, traditionally eaten on Twelfth Night (6 January) to mark the end of Christmas festivities.
46 Norfolk Biffins: red cooking apples.
gold and silver fish: live carp in glass bowls were commonly available from grocers and street-sellers in the nineteenth century; according to Henry Mayhew’s London Labour and the London Poor (1851) there were over seventy sellers in London alone. (Hearn)
47 for Christmas daws to peck at: ‘for people to find fault with’, an echo of Iago’s speech in Othello, I. i (‘I will wear my heart upon my sleeve | For daws to peck at’).
carrying their dinners to the bakers’ shops: bakers were forbidden by law to bake bread on Sundays or Christmas Day, but were allowed to cook food (mostly joints of meat and pies) brought to them, often by those who were too poor to afford proper cooking facilities of their own.
48 close these places on the Seventh Day: between 1832 and 1837 Sir Andrew Agnew (1793–1849) repeatedly attempted to introduce a Sunday Observance Bill in the House of Commons, which would have closed the bakeries and severely limited opportunities for the poor to enjoy themselves on their day off. Dickens had signalled his opposition to Agnew in an 1836 pamphlet Sunday Under Three Heads. As It is; As Sabbath Bills would make it; As it might be made.
‘Bob’: a shilling.
49 twice-turned gown: a dress that has been altered twice, either to bring it in line with fashion or to achieve extra wear from the material.
50 blood horse: a thoroughbred racehorse.
copper: a large metal container, originally made of copper but now more often iron, mainly used for washing laundry.
who made lame beggars walk, and blind men see: a reference to the miracles of healing performed by Christ, as related in John 5: 1–10 and Mark 8: 22–6.
51 half-a-quartern: 1¼ fluid ounces, or about 35 ml.
53 good long rest: milliners’ apprentices were notoriously overworked and underpaid; in Sketches by Boz (1839), Dickens reported that they were among ‘the hardest worked, the worst paid, and too often, the worst used class of the community’. (Hearn)
54 burial-place of giants: Cornwall is home to many legends involving giants, including ‘Jack the Giant Killer’, and was visited by Dickens in 1842 in order to investigate the appalling conditions of child workers in the tin mines.
55 grog: rum and water, traditionally drunk by sailors, and named after the grogram coat of Admiral Vernon, who in 1740 ordered that the sailors’ ration of rum should be watered down. (Glancy)
57 tucker: a detachable frilly collar worn over the breast.
58 Glee or Catch: a glee is an unaccompanied song for three or more voices; a catch is a round for several voices who ‘catch’ one another’s words as they overlap in performance.
59 loved her love to admiration with all the letters of the alphabet: a parlour game in which each player has to compose a series of sentences based on letters of the alphabet. In Our Mutual Friend (1864–5) the dolls’ dressmaker Jenny Wren plays an idiosyncratic version of the game when giving some clues about her profession: ‘I love my love with a B because she’s Beautiful; I hate my love with a B because she is Brazen; I took her to the sign of the Blue Boar, and I treated her with Bonnets; her name’s Bouncer, and she lives in Bedlam.’
How, When, and Where: a parlour game in which players take it in turn to ask ‘How do you like it?’, ‘When do you like it?’, ‘Where do you like it?’
best Whitechapel: the working-class east London suburb of Whitechapel was known for the quality of its metalwork, including the manufacture of needles; ‘Not a wery nice neighbourhood’, according to Sam Weller in chapter 22 of The Pickwick Papers (1837).
61 little brief authority: alluding to Measure for Measure, II. ii. 119–24: ‘… man, proud man! | Dress’d in a little brief authority | … Plays such fantastic tricks before high heaven | As makes the angels weep.’
65 black gloves: these were routinely provided for mourners at middle-class funerals.
Old Scratch: a nickname for the Devil, from the Old Norse skratta, a goblin.
67 pick holes in each other’s coats: (slang) quarrel with each other.
68 screw: (slang) a miser or skinflint.
70 withdraw the veil: from Plato onwards the veil has been used to suggest what is hidden or inaccessible to human understanding, in particular what lies beyond the barrier of death. It was especially common in the nineteenth century, as religious and scientific speculation continued to press against the limits of human knowledge: Tennyson’s In Memoriam (1850) asks ‘What hope of answer, or redress?— | Behind the veil, behind the veil’, while George Eliot’s The Lifted Veil (1859) features a character who confesses a secret that seemed to have died with her, after she is brought back to life with a blood transfusion.
70 this is thy dominion!: an echo of biblical phrasing, e.g. Romans 6: 9: ‘Knowing that Christ being raised from the dead dieth no more; death hath no more dominion over him.’
72 ‘And he took a child … in the midst of them’: Matthew 18: 2, one of Dickens’s favourite passages of the Bible, which he frequently set in opposition to the sort of ‘gloomy theology’ characterized by the Murdstones in chapter 48 of David Copperfield, which ‘made all children out to be a nest of vipers (though there was a child once set in the midst of the Disciples)’.
75 choked up with too much burying: a common nineteenth-century complaint, dramatized by Dickens in Bleak House (1852–3), in which the crossing-sweeper Jo recalls that Nemo’s corpse was buried in the graveyard ‘wery nigh the top. They was obliged to stamp upon it to git it in.’
78 Laocoön: the Trojan priest who tried to persuade his fellow citizens not to bring the fatal wooden horse into their city. In punishment the goddess Athena sent two huge sea serpents to crush Laocoön and his sons to death. The scene is vividly depicted in a piece of Roman sculpture displayed in the Vatican, which became central to discussions of how successfully art could represent human emotions following the publication of G. E. Lessing’s influential treatise Laokoon (1766).
79 ‘Walk-ER!’: ‘Walker’ is nineteenth-century Cockney slang roughly equivalent to ‘Come off it!’ or ‘Get away!’; it is a favourite exclamation of Sam Weller’s father in The Pickwick Papers (1837).
Joe Miller: an eighteenth-century actor famous for his comic quips; the collection Joe Miller’s Jests was first published in 1739, and was frequently revised and reprinted during Dickens’s lifetime.
83 smoking bishop: a hot drink made with red wine, oranges, sugar, and spices, so called because it is said to be the same colour as a bishop’s cassock.
Total Abstinence Principle: a joking reference to temperance campaigners, many of them associated with the Methodist movement, who encouraged the public to ‘take the pledge’ by swearing to avoid all alcoholic drinks.
THE CHIMES
88 an old church: Dickens’s model seems to have been St Dunstan-in-the-West, Fleet Street, which is the church depicted in Doyle and Stanfield’s illustration for the first edition. In fact St Dunstan’s in 1844 was not an old church: the medieval building (mentioned in Barnaby Rudge) had been pulled down in 1830, to be replaced by a new church designed by John Shaw. (Hill)
Henry the Eighth had melted down their mugs: as part of his break with the Catholic Church, Henry VIII dissolved the English monasteries and redistributed much of their property to his own nobles.
89 ticket-porter: a London street-porter who usually wore a white apron and displayed his licence like a badge. By 1861 Henry Mayhew’s London Labour and the London Poor was describing them as a dying breed.
90 teetotums: a teetotum is a small top spun around with the fingers, applied figuratively to things that are unsteady or in a whirl: Thackeray’s Roundabout Papers (1860) asks ‘Who knows how long that dear teetotum happiness can be made to spin without toppling over?’
tap: a room in a tavern in which liquors are kept on tap.
95 laughing gas: nitrous oxide, whose nickname was coined to describe the exhilarating effects caused when it is inhaled. Discovered in 1793 by the English scientist Joseph Priestley, in the 1840s it was experimented with as an alternative anaesthetic to ether. Some of Dickens’s readers may have witnessed its effects in scientific demonstrations, but many more would have experienced them at first hand through the travelling medicine shows and carnivals which encouraged the public to pay a small price to inhale a minute’s worth of the gas.
Polonies: pork sausages.
Pettitoes: pigs’ trotters.
chitterlings: pigs’ intestines, sometimes filled with minced meat to make a kind of sausage.
100 pepper-and-salt: cloth made of interwoven dark and light threads, giving a flecked or speckled appearance.
Alderman Cute: a caricature of Sir Peter Laurie (1778–1861), a Middlesex magistrate noted for his bluff humour and common sense, and for his ability to talk to offenders in language they could understand.
bills of mortality: the 109 parishes in and around London, named after the regular recording of deaths in this area carried out by the London Company of Parish Clerks from the late sixteenth century onwards. (Slater)
101 he’s a robber: a riposte to the review of A Christmas Carol in the Westminster Review (June 1844), the journal most closely associated with the political economists Dickens despised, which had concluded that ‘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—is a disagreeable reflection kept wholly out of sight.’
the good old times!: Dickens frequently attacked those who were content to ruminate nostalgically on the past while ignoring its cruelty and misery; in American Notes (1842), for example, he scoffed at ‘those good old customs of the good old times which made England, even so recently as in the reign of the Third King George, in respect of her criminal code and prison regulations, one of the most bloody-minded and barbarous countries on the earth.’ This reference to ‘the good old times’ is all that remains of an earlier draft of The Chimes, cut on the advice of John Forster, in which Dickens set out to satirize the ‘Young England’ movement: a group of aristocratic Tory MPs led by Benjamin Disraeli who favoured a return to a feudal system of government, in which ‘Each knew his place: king, peasant, peer, or priest, | The greatest owned connexion with the least; | From rank to rank the generous feeling ran, | And linked society as man to man’ (Lord John Manners, England’s Trust, 1841).
101 Strutt’s Costumes: Strutt’s Costumes. A Complete View of the Dress and Habits of the People of England (1796–9) by the antiquarian Joseph Strutt; a new edition had come out in 1842. Maclise’s 1842 painting of Dickens’s children shows one of them studying this work. (Slater)
102 ‘chaff’: (slang) to banter or tease.
103 Methuselah: according to Genesis 5: 27 Methuselah lived to the age of 969.
104 We reduced it to a mathematical certainty long ago!: a reference to nineteenth-century political economists, many of them influenced by Thomas Malthus (see note on A Christmas Carol, p. 14), who seemed to reduce all of human life to a matter of statistics by arguing that the poor should not marry until they could afford to support a family.
105 the church-service: the Litany in the Book of Common Prayer refers to ‘all sick persons and young children’, described by Dickens as ‘that beautiful passage’ in chapter 6 of American Notes (1842).
Put all suicide Down: in 1841 Laurie had begun a campaign to put a stop to the crime of attempted suicide, which was especially prevalent among the poor, by sentencing offenders to prison and hard labour. In 1844 he committed a woman to trial for attempting to poison herself, observing that ‘He had put an end to persons attempting to drown themselves; he would now try the same cure for attempted poisoning.’ (Slater)
108 His place was the ticket: a reference to the phrase ‘That’s the ticket’, meaning what is wanted or expected; this was a new piece of slang in 1844: the OED’s first recorded use is from 1838.
110 the Poor Man’s Friend: on 6 April 1844 Punch published an article by Douglas Jerrold which described Lord Brougham, the Whig ex-Chancellor, as ‘the poor man’s friend’. It was intended ironically: Brougham had come under attack for presenting himself as a champion of working people, while revealing in his speeches to the Lords on the 1844 Factory Bill that his real attitude towards the poor was at best insensitive and at worst indifferent. (Slater)
112 put down: punning on two senses of the phrase: to suppress and to put to death.
pinking and eyelet-holing: decorating cloth by cutting scalloped edges or small holes.
music on the new system: the system of notation originally devised by Sarah Glover (1785–1867) and developed by John Curwen in 1843, which used sol-fa syllables and their initial letters for the notes of the scale, and divided the bar by colons, dots, and inverted commas. (Glancy)
113 Vagabond: an allusion to the Vagrancy Act of 1824, which gave Justices of the Peace the power to arrest and imprison ‘Vagabonds and Incorrigible Rogues’.
118 the Union: the workhouse. See note on A Christmas Carol, p. 14.
121 Solomon: the famously wise and just King of Israel. 1 Kings 3: 16–28 tells the story of how he adjudicated between the rival claims of two women to be the mother of the same child.
My wits are wool-gathering: indulging in wandering thoughts or idle fancies, so called from the practice of gathering up tufts of wool left by sheep on bushes and fences.
122 a woman who had laid her desperate hands … her young child: alluding to the notorious case of Mary Furley, who was sentenced to death for infanticide on 16 April 1844 after she had tried to drown herself and her young child rather than return to the workhouse where the child had been ill-treated. Following a public outcry in which Dickens played a leading role (his ‘Threatening Letter to Thomas Hood from an Ancient Gentleman’ was published in Hood’s Magazine, May 1844), the sentence was commuted to seven years’ transportation. (Slater)
125 Black are the brooding clouds … can tell: Edward Bulwer-Lytton noted that this passage unconsciously borrowed the ‘style and manner of expression’ from his novel Zanoni (1842).
133 skittles—with his tenants!: one idea put forward by the ‘Young England’ movement (see note on p. 101) was that landowners could reinforce paternalistic ties by playing games with their tenants.
bluff King Hal: Henry VIII, the ‘horrors’ of whose reign are described by Dickens in A Child’s History of England, chapter 28: ‘We now come to King Henry the Eighth, whom it has been too much the fashion to call “Bluff King Hal” and “Burly King Harry” and other fine names; but whom I shall take the liberty of calling, plainly, one of the most detestable villains that ever drew breath.’
135 Daniel: one of the apocryphal additions to the Bible tells the story of how the clever young lawyer Daniel saved Susannah from a false charge of adultery.
136 You’ve drunk the Labourer: ‘the health of the labourer’ was a traditional toast that landowners and farmers made to their workers at agricultural dinners; a number of Victorian commentators noted the irony of a custom that involved raising a glass to men who were paid only starvation wages.
138 ‘Whither thou goest … Nor thy God my God!: a reversal of the promise made in Ruth 1:16: ‘And Ruth said … whither thou goest, I will go; and whence thou lodgest, I will lodge: thy people shall be my people, and thy God my God.’
143 He suffered her to sit beside His feet, and dry them with her hair: a reference to Mary Magdalene, the penitent prostitute forgiven by Christ (Luke 7: 38).
146 Sally Lunns: a kind of teacake, eaten hot with butter, supposedly named after the woman who invented the recipe in Bath at the end of the eighteenth century.
146 the cream and marrow: an alternative to ‘pith and marrow’, meaning the central or essential part of something.
150 Like Fighting Cocks: ‘to live like fighting cocks’ is a slang phrase meaning to live in luxury; fighting cocks were well fed in order to increase their size and strength.
151 runaway carriage-doubles: a popular pastime amongst London children was to knock twice upon the door of a grand house and then run away; the double-knock may have been intended to mimic a signal used to indicate the arrival of visitors in a carriage. (Slater)
153 There’ll be a Fire to-night: the lighting of hayricks by farm labourers, driven to arson by low wages and poor living conditions, was a particular concern at the time of writing; the Annual Register (1844) noted that 102 cases had been reported in 1843, a considerable rise on the average figure of 49 in 1838–42. (Slater)
154 preached upon a Mount: the Sermon on the Mount, described in Matthew 5–7.
wearied and lay down to die: probably alluding to a passage in Carlyle’s recently published Past and Present (1843), which describes how an Irish widow in Edinburgh was refused help by one charity after another ‘till she had exhausted them all; till her strength and heart failed her: she sank down in typhus-fever; died…’ (Slater)
159 marrow-bones and cleavers: refers to the custom at popular festivities of using a butcher’s chopper to beat out a clinking rhythm on large bones, a cheap alternative to more sophisticated forms of music.
flip: a hot drink made with spirits, beer, and sugar, sometimes with the addition of an egg.
161 Dorsetshire: changed from Hertfordshire in the proofs to reflect the worsening reputation of Dorset as a county where the rural poor lived and worked in especially abject conditions. On 28 April 1844, Lloyd’s Weekly London Newspaper printed a letter signed ‘A Dorsetshire Landlord’ which claimed that unless these conditions were improved, they would ‘produce a revolution not less frightful than that which France has been subjected to’. (Slater)
THE CRICKET ON THE HEARTH
164 Lord Jeffrey: Francis Jeffrey (1773–1850), a founder and editor of the Edinburgh Review, godfather to Dickens’s third son (Francis Jeffrey Dickens), and the novelist’s self-designated ‘Critic Laureate’. He had been warmly appreciative of Dickens’s sympathetic treatment of the poor in The Chimes, and later praised The Battle of Life for its ‘generous sentiments’.
165 convulsive little Haymaker: probably a figure of Father Time carrying his scythe, a popular ornament on the top of Dutch clocks. (Hill)
pattens: wooden shoes. The reference to Euclid (below) indicates that Mrs Peerybingle’s are made with iron patten rings, designed to raise the soles off the ground.
the first proposition in Euclid: a geometrical exercise designed to show the construction of an equilateral triangle on a finite straight line; the points of the triangle are situated on two intersecting circles, which is the pattern made by the iron rings on Dot’s pattens.
166 the Royal George: an English warship that sank at Spithead in 1782; efforts to raise her had repeatedly failed.
169 dot and carry: usually ‘dot and carry one’, an expression used in elementary arithmetic, meaning to set down the units and carry over the tens to the next column of figures. (Glancy)
171 ‘How doth the little: from ‘Against Idleness and Mischief’, the twentieth of Isaac Watts’s Divine and Moral Songs for Children (1715): ‘How doth the little busy bee | Improve each shining hour | And gather honey all the day | From every opening flower.’ Lewis Carroll parodies the verse as ‘How doth the little crocodile’ in Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland (1865).
172 the luckiest thing in all the world!: a singing cricket in the house is considered good luck in a number of cultures; traditionally, crickets have even been kept in small cages to prevent luck from escaping the house.
175 The Old Gentleman: (slang) the Devil.
176 the other six: an allusion to the legend of the Seven Sleepers of Ephesus. As recounted in chapter 33 of Gibbon’s The History of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire (1776–88), seven Christian youths, who had been imprisoned in a cave by the Roman emperor Decius, fell into a miraculous sleep until they were accidentally discovered 187 years later. (Slater)
house lamb: a lamb raised by hand, either as a pet or to provide especially succulent flesh. Dickens enjoyed blurring the distinction: chapter 15 of The Uncommercial Traveller recalls his nurse’s stories of Captain Murderer, whose cannibal appetites meant that ‘On his marriage morning, he always caused both sides of the way to church to be planted with curious flowers; and when his bride said, “Dear Captain Murderer, I never saw flowers like these before: what are they called?” he answered, “They are called Garnish for house-lamb,” and laughed at his ferocious practical joke in a horrid manner, disquieting the minds of the noble bridal company, with a very sharp show of teeth.’
178 Philosopher’s stone: a mythical substance which medieval and Renaissance alchemists searched for in the hope that it would transmute ordinary substances into gold.
179 What’s the damage?: how much do I owe you?
180 Pony-nightmare: an oddly tautologous way of describing a nightmare, which originally referred to a feeling of being ‘hag-ridden’ while asleep by a female spirit or monster. The expression does not appear in OED.
190 such arbitrary marks as satin, cotton-print, and bits of rag: Dickens often draws attention to the absurdity of distinguishing different classes by their clothing, probably influenced by Carlyle’s satirical ‘Clothes Philosophy’ in Sartor Resartus (1838). (Slater)
192 Bacchanalian song: a drinking song, after Bacchus, the Roman god of wine.
193 Bedlam: see note to A Christmas Carol, p. 13.
194 Pic-Nic: used here in its original sense to mean ‘A fashionable social entertainment in which each person present contributed a share of the provisions’ (OED 1a).
marrow-bones, cleavers: see note to The Chimes, p. 159.
197 spencer: a kind of close-fitting jacket or bodice.
nankeen raised-pie: a kind of hat made from buff-coloured cloth (a raised pie is one that does not require the support of a dish).
Turnpike Trust: turnpikes were public highways on which tolls were collected, and were managed by trustees or commissioners.
200 Dame-Schools: elementary schools for children, mostly run by women, and often satirized for the poor quality of their teaching. Dickens offers a comic portrait of one such school in chapter 7 of Great Expectations (1860–1).
201 Fairy-rings: ‘A circular band of grass differing in colour from the grass around it, a phenomenon supposed in popular belief to be produced by fairies when dancing; really caused by the growth of certain fungi’ (OED).
202 chip: the main sense is that she is small and thin, with the added implication perhaps that she is also dry and dull (OED, ‘chip’ 5).
203 such small deer: King Lear, III. iv. 123–4: ‘But mice and rats and such small deer | Have been Tom’s food for seven long year.’
let us be genteel, or die!: Dickens frequently pokes fun at people who dress to impress, with no fewer than nineteen allusions to the wearing of gloves as a mark of gentility. (Hill)
205 Indigo Trade: until the development of a synthetic substitute, all blue textiles (including the serge uniforms worn by the British police force) were dyed with natural indigo, which was the subject of a fiercely competitive trade in India and other countries.
206 bait: a snack or light refreshment taken on a journey.
dreadnought coat: a thick coat designed to withstand severe weather, also known as a ‘fearnought’.
209 Welsh Giant: in the fairy-tale ‘Jack the Giant Killer’, Jack tricks the giant by stuffing his breakfast into a leather bag hidden in his shirt, and then slitting it open. The giant, wanting to copy this trick, slits open his own stomach and falls down dead. The story makes several reappearances in Dickens’s fiction, including once as a circus routine in Hard Times (1854), admiringly described by the lisping Mr Sleary: ‘That’h Jack the Giant Killer—piethe of comic infant bithnith.’
Samson: the legendary strongman and last of the Judges of Israel; his exploits are described in Judges 13–16.
226 Saint Vitus: Saint Vitus’s Dance, originally a name given to the dancing madness (choreomania) which spread through Europe in the fifteenth century, was later extended to refer to a medical disorder, usually occurring in early life, characterized by convulsions and involuntary muscular contractions. It derives from the old German tradition of dancing in front of a statue of St Vitus to ensure good health.
238 the song about the Sparkling Bowl: there are several popular songs in this vein, such as ‘The Flowing Bowl’ (‘Fill the bowl with sparkling nectar’); a more literary example Dickens may have had in his mind’s ear is Thomas Gray’s ‘The Bard’: ‘Fill high the sparkling bowl, | The rich repast prepare’. Chapter 7 of The Pickwick Papers (1836–7) records ‘a song (supposed to have been sung by Mr. Jingle), in which the words “bowl” “sparkling” “ruby” “bright” and “wine” are frequently repeated at short intervals’.
THE BATTLE OF LIFE
246 MY ENGLISH FRIENDS IN SWITZERLAND Dickens lived in Lausanne between June and November 1846, and although he was depressed by the ‘mighty dull little town’ and the spectacle of its native inhabitants (many of whom were deformed due to iodine deficiencies), he forged a strong friendship there with the Hon. Richard Watson (1800–52) and his wife Lavinia (1816–88) which lasted for the rest of his life.
248 Harvest Home: the occasion or time of bringing home the last of the harvest.
corslet: a piece of defensive armour covering the body.
249 opera-dancers: ballet had been an integral part of opera performance since its introduction by Jean-Baptiste Lully during the reign of Louis XIV (1638–1715).
252 Great character of mother … to the angels: a Victorian commonplace, given memorable expression in Samuel Smiles’s account of one mother, as reported by her daughter, in his best-selling Self-Help (1859): ‘When she entered the room it had the effect of immediately raising the tone of the conversation, and as if purifying the moral atmosphere—all seeming to breathe more freely, and stand more erectly.’
253 Philosopher’s stone: see note to The Cricket on the Hearth, p. 178.
255 blue bag: the bag used by junior barristers to carry legal papers is traditionally blue.
the French wit: Rabelais, whose dying words were reported to have been ‘Tirez le rideau: la farce est jouée.’
256 winter-pippin: an apple.
the sister Fates … the Graces... the three weird prophets: in Greek mythology, the Fates are three old women who spin the threads of life and decide when each person’s thread should be cut. The Graces are Zeus’ daughters, usually depicted as three intertwined bodies, symbolizing beauty, nobility, and purity. The weird prophets are the three witches in Shakespeare’s Macbeth.
257 Grand Carver: an especially skilful carver of meat, also known as a ‘First Carver’.
261 Young England: see note to The Chimes, p. 101.
man Miles to the Doctor’s Friar Bacon: in Robert Greene’s comic play Friar Bacon, and Friar Bungay (1594), the two friars make a brass head and enlist the Devil’s help to make it talk. They are told that they will only have one chance to hear it speak, but their servant Miles fails to wake them when the moment arrives and the head smashes on the floor.
263 Lord High Chancellor: as the highest legal authority in the land, he had official jurisdiction over lunatics.
pocket library: small editions of popular books, designed to be slipped into a pocket, were often published in the nineteenth century; in 1889 Routledge’s Pocket Library included a 14 cm-high edition of The Battle of Life.
pearl of great price: Matthew 13: 46 compares the kingdom of heaven to a merchant ‘Who, when he found one pearl of great price, went and sold all that he had, and bought it.’
a lucky penny, a cramp bone: a penny with a hole in it was thought to bring good luck; the kneecap of a sheep was thought to be a charm against cramp. In Martin Chuzzlewit (1842–4), Mrs Gamp explains how Mrs Harris carries a tin containing ‘two cramp-bones, a bit o’ ginger, and a grater like a blessed infant’s shoe’.
264 done brown: (slang) ‘cheated’ or ‘got the better of’.
the golden rule: traditionally, ‘Do as you would be done by’ (from Matthew 7: 12).
a mouthful: a small quantity.
good Genius: one of two mutually opposed spirits (the other being an evil Genius) supposed to attend each person throughout his or her life, here meaning that Clemency is a powerful influence for good on Mr Britain’s character and fortune.
flappers: a flapper is someone who arouses the attention or jogs the memory of another, so named after Swift’s satire on absent-minded scientists in Gulliver’s Travels (1726) each of whom employs a Flapper ‘gently to strike with his Bladder the Mouth of him who is to speak, and the Right Ear of him … to whom the Speaker addresseth himself’.
268 The Gazette: one of three government publications (The London Gazette, The Edinburgh Gazette, and The Dublin Gazette) which listed bankruptcies, official appointments, military promotions, and other public notices.
269 Blue chamber: an allusion to the fairy-tale of Bluebeard, whose wife enters a forbidden room in his castle and there discovers the bodies of his former wives.
270 prodigal son: in Luke 15: 11–32 Christ tells the parable of the wastrel son whose return is celebrated by his father with a feast: ‘For this my son was dead, and is alive again; he was lost, and is found.’
276 reckoning without his host: refusing to consider anyone else’s opinions, literally adding up his bill without consulting the tavern-keeper.
277 ‘ “And being in her own home … the Penitent” ’: written by Dickens himself, but paraphrasing a series of Victorian commonplaces about the place of the home in social and moral life.
278 two spoons in my saucer: according to popular superstition, two spoons accidentally placed on the same saucer indicates that a wedding will take place soon; it can also mean that the person on whose saucer they appear will marry twice, or that she will have twins.
283 stay and mantua-maker: a dressmaker who specializes in corsets (stays) and gowns (mantuas).
294 poussette: a move in country dancing in which couples join hands and spin around.
pegtop: a pear-shaped spinning top, set in action by the rapid uncoiling of a string wound around it.
310 jack: a machine for turning the spit when roasting meat.
311 how often men still entertained angels, unawares: see Hebrews 13: 2, alluding to the visit of three angels to Abraham (Genesis 18: 3). Dickens’s essay ‘What Christmas Is, As We Grow Older’ (1851), reprinted as Appendix 1, describes how the spirits of dead children cluster around the family hearth at Christmas time: ‘Entertaining angels unawares, as the Patriarchs did, the playful children are unconscious of their guests; but we can see them.’
321 canvassing you for the county: as a freehold landowner, Britain is now eligible to vote in the election of members to the House of Commons. (Glancy)
THE HAUNTED MAN
325 the ballad: according to the old ballad, Giles Scroggins dies before he can marry his sweetheart Molly Brown. His ghost then appears to her, crying ‘O Molly you must go with I’; when she refuses, pointing out ‘I am not dead, you fool’, he replies, ‘Vy, that’s no rule.’
327 Cassim Baba: Ali Baba’s brother in the Arabian Nights, who learns how to get into the cave of the forty thieves, but then forgets the password and is unable to escape before the thieves return.
the merchant Abudah’s bedroom: a reference to ‘The Talisman of Oromanes’ in the popular collection of Persian stories Tales of the Genii, translated by ‘Sir Charles Morell’ [James Ridley] in 1764, in which the merchant is nightly accused of delaying his search for the talisman of Oromanes by ‘a diminutive old hag’ who appears shaking her crutches from a small box in his bedroom. The story was one that Dickens recalled from his childhood (see ‘Nurse’s Stories’ in The Uncommercial Traveller); he refers to the same scene in chapter 5 of Martin Chuzzlewit (1842–4).
328 a straddling giant: from the traditional English fairy-tale Jack the Giant Killer, where the giant Blunderbore hunts Jack with the cry ‘Fee fi fo fum | I smell the blood of an Englishman. | Be he alive or be he dead, | I’ll grind his bones to make my bread.’
329 Peckham Fair: a rowdy annual event, lasting up to three weeks, that was held in the Peckham Road until 1827, when it was abolished as a nuisance. (Hill)
Battersea: the original Battersea Bridge was a wooden structure built in 1770–1, and boats were often wrecked by colliding with one of the piers while attempting to shoot the arches. The present bridge dates from 1886–90. (Slater)
330 Castors: sugar, salt, or pepper shakers.
331 stone-chaney: hard pottery made by mixing together clay and flint (‘chaney’ is a dialect variant of ‘china’).
339 The Christmas Waits: a band of musicians and carol singers who go from door to door at Christmas offering seasonal music in return for small sums of money.
348 casting his boots upon the waters: revising Ecclesiastes 11: 1: ‘Cast thy bread upon the waters: for thou shalt find it after many days.’
Moloch: in 2 Kings 23: 10, Moloch is the god of the Ammonites, who sacrificed children to him; in Paradise Lost, Milton depicts him as one of Satan’s chief henchmen.
349 serial pirates: hack writers often published cheap plagiarisms of Dickens’s novels (‘serial’ puns on his preference for serial publication and the fact that many plagiarists were repeat offenders), which he was unable to prevent due to the inadequate copyright laws; he unsuccessfully took one publisher to court for a piracy of A Christmas Carol in 1844.
350 bodiless creation: an imaginary person, alluding to Hamlet, III. iv. 133–4: ‘This bodiless creation ecstasy | Is very cunning in.’
poor’s-rates: a local tax intended to support the workhouses and other forms of poor relief.
351 mesmeric influence: hypnotic powers, named after Franz Anton Mesmer (1734–1815), who launched a Europe-wide craze in the late eighteenth century, and led to mesmerism being a popular and much debated Victorian medical fad. Dickens was an enthusiastic practitioner: see Fred Kaplan, Dickens and Mesmerism: The Hidden Springs of Fiction (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1975).
352 immense percentage of babies never attain to two years old: Dickens gives more details of Victorian infant mortality rates in The Uncommercial Traveller (1861), writing in the voice of an anxious father: ‘I learn from the statistical tables that one child in five dies within the first year of its life; and one child in three, within the fifth’ (‘Births. Mrs Meek, of a Son’).
353 comforter: a long woollen scarf.
356 like the Eastern rose in respect of the nightingale: probably an allusion to ‘The Veiled Prophet of Khorassan’, the first tale in Thomas Moore’s Lalla Rookh (1817): ‘There’s a bower of roses by Bendemeer’s stream | And the nightingales sing round it all the day long; | In the time of my childhood ’twas like a sweet dream | To sit in the roses and hear the bird’s song.’ (Hill)
362 they are not coffins, but purses: ‘Coffins out of the fire are hollow oblong cinders spurted from it, and are a sign of coming death … If the cinder … is round, it is a purse and means prosperity’ (recorded in I. Opie and M. Tatum (eds.), A Dictionary of Superstitions, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1989). (Slater)
383 no step or atom … the great universe: drawing on the Law of Conservation of Matter, first formulated by Antoine-Laurent de Lavoisier (1743–94), which states that over time matter and energy are neither created nor destroyed, but merely change their form.
390 short-commons: insufficient food.
394 Doctor Watts: No. 17 of Isaac Watts’s Divine Songs for Children (1715), on ‘Love between Brothers and Sisters’, contains the lines ‘But, children, you should never let | Such angry passions rise; | Your little hands were never made | To tear each other’s eyes.’ (Slater)
choking in the jug like a ventriloquist: Victorian ventriloquists were celebrated for their ability to throw voices into a range of hollow objects, from milk jugs to snuff-boxes. Dickens was more suspicious, and satirized their patter in The Uncommercial Traveller (1861): ‘[The bee] will be with difficulty caught in the hand of Monsieur the Ventriloquist—he will escape—he will again hover—at length he will be recaptured by Monsieur the Ventriloquist, and will be with difficulty put into the bottle’ (‘In the French-Flemish Country’).
Poor people … ought not to have children: a commonplace of Victorian economic and moral thought, drawing on Thomas Malthus’s Essay on the Principle of Population (1798). See note to A Christmas Carol, p. 14.
407 rebuking … those who kept them from Him: see Matthew 19: 13–14.
APPENDIX I: ‘What Christmas Is, As We Grow Older’
409 priceless pearl: Matthew 13: 46.
Greek or Roman story: a number of classical legends, such as the story of Damon and Pythias, celebrate powerful friendships between men. Given the looming presence of death in his description, Dickens may also have had in mind the heroic exploits of the Spartan army, founded and organized on ties of comradeship that led to friends dying for or with one another.
411 withered leaves: the traditional comparison of ghosts to dead leaves can be traced back through Virgil, Aeneid vi, to Homer, Iliad vi; later sources that may have been in Dickens’s mind include Dante, Inferno, iii. 112–14, and P. B. Shelley, ‘Ode to the West Wind’.
these children angels: a common Victorian idea, and one that Dickens returned to throughout his career; closer to home, he may have had in mind his infant daughter Dora, who died on 14 April 1851.
Entertaining angels unawares: see note to The Battle of Life, p. 311.
poor mis-shapen boy on earth: many of Dickens’s fictional children are handicapped or deformed (Smike in Nicholas Nickleby, Tiny Tim in A Christmas Carol, Jenny Wren in Our Mutual Friend). Here the reference is probably to his crippled nephew Harry, who died in January 1849; his mother, Dickens’s much-loved sister Fanny Burnett, had died in September 1848.
412 a dear girl—almost a woman: Mary Hogarth, the younger sister of Dickens’s wife Catherine, whose sudden death aged 17 on 7 May 1837 left Dickens prostrated with grief. Dickens idolized her in life and idealized her in death; she appears lightly disguised in a number of his stories, as discussed by Michael Slater in Dickens and Women (London: J. M. Dent, 1983).
daughter of Jairus: Mark 5: 35–43.
the Sacred tread were fresh upon the water: Mark 6: 46–62.
413 the living and the dead: a secular echo of the Apostles’ Creed from the Book of Common Prayer, which describes how all people will be brought together when Christ returns ‘to judge the quick and the dead’.