John Forster, Dickens’s first biographer, reflected in 1873 that his friend had ‘identified himself’ with Christmas, and noted
that ‘its privilege to light up with some sort of comfort the squalidest of places, he had made his own’.
1 From the earliest days of his writing career, Dickens had lighted upon Christmas as a season of good cheer and fellow feeling.
In his youthful collection of journalistic pieces,
Sketches by Boz (1836), he had celebrated the pleasures of Christmas thus:
Christmas time! … There seems a magic in the very name of Christmas. Petty jealousies and discords are forgotten; social feelings
are awakened, in bosoms to which they have long been strangers; father and son, or brother and sister, who have met and passed
with averted gaze, or a look of cold recognition, for months before, proffer and return the cordial embrace, and bury their
past animosities in their present happiness. Kindly hearts that have yearned towards each other, but have been withheld by
false notions of pride and self-dignity, are again reunited, and all is kindness and benevolence! Would that Christmas lasted
the whole year through (as it ought), and that the prejudices and passions which deform our better nature, were never called
into action among those to whom they should ever be strangers!
2
In the ‘good-humoured Christmas Chapter’ of The Pickwick Papers Dickens similarly venerates Christmas as a ‘brief season of happiness and enjoyment … How many old recollections, and how
many dormant sympathies, does Christmas time awaken!’ (ch. 28).
Dickens came to be so strongly associated with Christmas that on the occasion of his death a story circulated that on hearing
the dreadful news a young barrow girl in Covent Garden market exclaimed, ‘Then will Father Christmas die too?’
3 Given that Dickens may be said to have forged, almost single-handedly, the modern conception of Christmas, it is interesting
to note that there was a white Christmas for each of the first eight years of his life.
4 The Dickens family took Christmas more seriously than many of their contemporaries, and every year the Dickens children
performed plays on Twelfth Night, the final evening of the Christmas season. Dancing, homespun games and domestic entertainments
were all characteristic of the Dickens family Christmas, seasonal activities in which friends were invited to participate
each year. Dickens describes the Christmases of his own childhood in ‘A Christmas Tree’ (1850), the first of his Christmas
stories written for his weekly magazine,
Household Words.
Dickens did not actually invent Christmas, though: Robert Seymour, the initial illustrator for
The Pickwick Papers, had brought out
The Book of Christmas in 1835, and this has many of the ingredients of the classic Dickensian Christmas. Prince Albert had popularised the German
tradition of the Christmas tree in 1841, although it had first been introduced in England a few years earlier. Christmas cards
were not introduced until 1846, and Christmas crackers emerged in the 1850s.
5 At the mid century Christmas was still a one-day holiday: children were given presents, but it was not the extended season
of festivity that we now know.
Dickens’s Christmas sentiments are most memorably encapsulated in the first of his Christmas books,
A Christmas Carol (1843). The nephew of the curmudgeonly Ebenezer Scrooge insists on Christmas season 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’ (stave 1). Between 1843 and 1848 Dickens produced five tales for Christmas which,
first published separately, were collected in 1852 in a single-volume cheap edition. These novellas, together with the Christmas
stories he wrote for
Household Words and
All the Year Round in the 1850s and 1860s, have permanently linked his name with Christmas, and they embody what has popularly become known
as the Dickensian Christmas spirit: a cheerful benevolence, moral idealism and a saturnalian revelling in the yuletide festivities.
The Dickensian ideal of Christmas, most quintessentially captured in
A Christmas Carol, was further popularised in the author’s lifetime by his public readings of it, which were hugely successful. Dickens first
adapted the story for a reading in Birmingham in December 1853, and it remained in his repertoire throughout his extensive
reading career, forming the centrepiece of his final farewell performance in 1870, the year he died.
6Dickens’s urging, in his Christmas books, of the regenerating power of human fellowship and fireside domesticity had a very
particular resonance in the 1840s, when he was writing. For this decade was known as
the ‘Hungry Forties’, a time when Britain’s landscape was scarred by poverty and social unrest. And whilst each of the Christmas
books resolves itself around joyful winter festivities, it is clear that what Dickens is offering is an alleviation, in the
realm of imaginative literature, of poverty and deprivation, and a fictional resolution of the very real class antagonisms
which erupted in continental Europe in the revolutions of 1848, the year of Dickens’s final Christmas book.
A Christmas Carol,
The Chimes and
The Haunted Man, in particular, all seem to be designed to educate the social conscience of Dickens’s popular readership: the deprivation
and social disruption that lurk within these tales could only be assuaged by the awakening of Dickens’s readership into benevolent
action. Dickens states this purpose in a general way in his preface to the first cheap edition of the Christmas books in September
1852: ‘My purpose was, in a whimsical kind of masque which the good humour of the season justified, to awaken some loving
and forbearing thoughts, never out of season in a Christian land.’
One of the main fictional devices Dickens deploys in his Christmas books to establish a sense of unity, comfort and harmony
is a focus on domesticity as a panacea. Cosy, contented, cheerful and sheltering homes are presented as a social and emotional
cure-all in each of the tales. A writer for the
Morning Chronicle, reviewing
The Battle of Life in December 1846, identified Dickens’s strength as ‘a writer of home life, a delineator of household gods, a painter of domestic
scenes’. In the
Carol, it is the Cratchits’ Christmas lunch that forms the focus for Dickens’s realisation of the domestic ideal: after the meal
‘the cloth was cleared, the hearth swept, and the fire made up … Then all the Cratchit family drew around the hearth’ (stave
3). The hearth itself is an index of domestic happiness in the Christmas books and elsewhere in Dickens’s fiction: whilst
the Cratchits are united and comforted as they come together around their cosy domestic fireside, Scrooge’s ‘very small’ fire
burns meanly low as he huddles over it in an attempt to defy the frost (stave 1). John Redlaw’s fire, in
The Haunted Man, ‘collapsed and fell with a rattle’ as the phantom, Redlaw’s malevolent double, approached (ch. 1). The enjoyment of food
is another characteristic index of domestic happiness in Dickens’s fiction: whilst the Cratchits eat their Christmas meal
with relish, Scrooge blames the eruption of Marley’s ghost on indigestion: ‘“You may be an undigested bit of beef, a blot
of mustard, a crumb of cheese, a fragment of underdone potato. There’s more of gravy than of grave about you, whatever you
are”’ (stave 1). In
The Chimes, Toby Veck’s picnic meal of tripe, which he relishes, is spoiled by the canting political economy of Mr Filer,
who berates the wastefulness of the poor; this episode prefaces Veck’s doom-filled vision of his daughter’s projected marriage.
A celebration of the domestic ideal amidst winter festivities invariably restores harmony to the troubled social landscapes
of Dickens’s Christmas books. And yet those troubles are never totally submerged in the tales, which persistently dramatise
disruptions within the domestic sphere. These narratives are also preoccupied with transgressive female figures, who throw
into relief the more traditional domestic angels of the stories. In
A Christmas Carol the domestic haven of the Cratchit family is threatened from without by poverty and ill health. The diminutive, sick and
ailing Tiny Tim, the youngest of the family, is shown to have died in Scrooge’s vision of ‘Christmas Yet to Come’ – only a
better standard of living can save him. In the vision of ‘Christmas Past’, Scrooge himself is shown to have sacrificed the
possibility of domestic bliss on the altar of financial ambition and greed. In this Christmas book alone, disruptive female
figures are largely absent: the allegorical girl-child, called ‘Want’, and the homeless mother and infant in the bitter-cold
street outside Scrooge’s residence, provide only gestures towards the plight of poor women and children in mid-Victorian London.
The Chimes considerably elaborates this theme. The projected marriage between the seamstress Meg Veck and her handsome artisan fiancé,
Richard, is threatened, in Toby Veck’s nightmare vision, by the spectres of destitution, prostitution, suicide and infanticide.
7 In
The Cricket on the Hearth, a fear that the domestic angel in the house may in fact turn out to be sexually faithless is dramatised at some length.
This same anxiety is staged again in Dickens’s next Christmas book,
The Battle of Life, and it recurs in the last of the series,
The Haunted Man, in which the reader learns that the central protagonist’s fiancée eloped with his best friend. In this story, too, a disruptive
femininity – introduced through Redlaw’s melodramatic encounter with a prostitute in a slumland lodging house – is set in
opposition to, and is arguably much more memorable than, the angelic femininity of Milly Swidger.
As well as staging the threats posed to domesticity by a society ill at ease with itself, Dickens’s Christmas books also engage
with the more concrete social and political issues current in the 1840s; the
Carol is in one sense an attack on utilitarian thought. Political economy is also satirically lampooned in the figure of Mr Filer
in
The Chimes, who accuses Toby Veck of being ‘a robber’ (first quarter) for eating tripe, which involves, he claims, much wastage in the
process of producing it as a foodstuff. Malthus’s theory of population is also attacked in both these first two
Christmas books. Malthus’s
Essay on the Principle of Population (1803) had decreed that those who could not provide food or a living for themselves, and the children of those who could
not provide, were all part of the ‘surplus population’ that needed to be minimised. Mr Scrooge, in the
Carol, refuses to provide charity for the poor on the basis that the death of paupers would serve a positive function in decreasing
‘the surplus population’ (stave 1); Mr Filer, in
The Chimes, is appalled that Meg and Richard should contemplate marriage when their economic future, and ability to provide for a family,
is so uncertain. In the first of the stories, Dickens hurls Scrooge’s Malthusian vocabulary back at him as, in one of the
visions, he contemplates the prospect of Tiny Tim’s death when he begs the ‘Ghost of Christmas Present’ to spare the little
boy’s life, and the Ghost, in a parodic echo of Scrooge’s own words, declares: ‘“if he be like to die, he had better do it,
and decrease the surplus population”’ (stave 3). In
The Chimes, Dickens counters Malthusian arguments with a declaration in favour of young marriages amongst the poor.
At the centre of Dickens’s social criticism in
The Chimes is the death of a child, a child drowned by its own starving mother in an act of desperation. Childhood is central to so
much of Dickens’s fiction, and the Christmas books are no exception. Only
The Battle of Life lacks any significant child figures, and this is arguably one of its weaknesses (the other is the lack of a quasi-supernatural
dimension, which lends such power to the other tales). In the first and last of the series of Christmas books – the
Carol and
The Haunted Man – children and childhood have a pronounced thematic force. Tiny Tim serves to refute Malthusian arguments while the allegorical
figures of Ignorance and Want – the boy-child and girl-child in the vision of ‘Christmas Present’ – represent an argument
against the New Poor Law of 1834, with its notorious workhouse system as a way of dealing with pauperism. These figures, ‘yellow,
meagre, ragged, scowling, wolfish’, act as a warning to Dickens’s readers, as well as to Scrooge, of what will become of the
human race if the comfortable middle classes blink at poverty and distress (stave 3). These monstrous children find echoes
in
The Chimes in the ‘swarming … dwarf phantoms’ (third quarter) who seem to accost Toby Veck in the bell tower before he contemplates
the sight of his infanticidal daughter. The figure of the monstrous child is much more fully realised, though, in
The Haunted Man. The maternal but childless Milly Swidger takes in a creature ‘more like a young wild beast than a young child’ (ch. 1) whom
she found ‘shivering upon a door-step’ on Christmas Eve. The child finds its way to Redlaw’s study, where Redlaw contemplates
him as ‘A baby savage, a young monster, a
child who had never been a child, a creature who might live to take the outward form of man, but who, within, would live and
perish a mere beast’ (ch. 2). This is a child of London’s slumland, homeless, rootless, without education and without the
benefit of human kindness and care. During Redlaw’s dark night of the soul, as he wanders through London’s streets and is
taken to the slum districts by the monstrous child, his evil angel accosts him with the reality of what the existence of such
children will mean for civilisation. The reader is, by implication, blamed for his toleration of a social environment which
permits children to be neglected in this way. By the end of the story, the monstrous child, under Milly’s maternal tutelage,
is shown to at least be enjoying watching the other children at play in the Swidgers’ domestic haven, although he is incapable
of such innocent social behaviour himself.
The process of psychological, emotional and moral renovation which is hinted at as a future possibility for the monstrous
child in The Haunted Man is central to three of the Christmas books and significant in the other two. In the Carol and The Haunted Man such a process is shown to require an imaginative retreat into childhood, where Dickens shows much damage to have been done.
The necessary retreat into the past as part of a process of healing in the present indicates the importance of memory as a
theme in these two of the Christmas books. Scrooge, returning to his schooldays in the first ghostly vision of the Carol, is reminded of himself as a lonely child whose father leaves him to languish at school during the vacation period. The idea
that ‘the child maketh the man’ is very Wordsworthian, based as it is on a Romantic conception of childhood. Redlaw, in The Haunted Man, broods on the lack of parental care in his past: his parents, we learn, were ‘of that sort whose care soon ends’, and he
was, he reflects, all too soon ‘an alien from my mother’s heart’ (ch. 1). His lack of nurturing in childhood, coupled with
his fiancée’s infidelity, has embittered Redlaw, who is a morose, sombre man. But both Redlaw and Scrooge are made to learn,
in the respective tales, not to become morally embittered through suffering, not to suppress the sorrows of the past, but
to allow themselves emotionally to grow through their memories of pain.
Redemption through suffering is a significant Christian trope in these two books, and is central to what in Louis Cazamian’s
phrase has become known as the ‘philosophie de
Noël’.
8 Dickens brought this same philosophy to the readership of his two periodical magazines,
Household Words and
All the Year Round between 1850 and 1867, with special Christmas editions. Only the first two were actually about Christmas: in subsequent Christmas
editions he included stories that were linked by their shared
commitment to demonstrating humanity’s ability to overcome suffering and loss and to promote goodness and well-being.
In Dickens’s later fiction, Christmas celebrations tend to serve a somewhat more ironic purpose. In Great Expectations, for example, Christmas dinner in the Gargery household, overseen by the pompous and overfed Pumblechook, is presented as
an occasion that does anything but promote goodwill and happiness from the perspective of the downtrodden orphan, Pip. The
dinner scene is ironically contrasted with the meal Pip takes out to Magwitch, the convict, on the marshes: it is this second,
unorthodox meal that encapsulates true compassion and generosity, a much more highly valued ‘Christmas dinner’ than the more
formal one that Pip has to endure in his sister’s cheerless household. In The Mystery of Edwin Drood, Dickens describes Christmas for the last time. In this unfinished novel it would seem that an uncle has murdered his nephew
on Christmas Day, and an intended marriage is also broken off during the season of ‘good will’. Here, as is generally the
case in Dickens’s later fictions, the Christmas trope is deployed ironically, its spiritual dimensions eclipsed by the harshness
of the social and moral vision of Dickens’s later work.
Notwithstanding his darkening vision of Christmas and a waning of his belief in the efficaciousness of Christian goodwill
in his later novels, Dickens’s Christmas stories continued to celebrate Christmas according to the ‘philosophie de Noël’ that he had established in the Christmas books of the 1840s: the final Christmas edition of All the Year Round appeared in 1867, with Dickens’s original conception of Christmas still alive and well. It is this warm-hearted, forgiving,
benevolent and revel-making ideal of Christmas that has become associated with Dickens, and that has continued to influence
yuletide celebrations in England ever since.