Les Standiford (11 page)

In
Dickens's Christmas,
the noted British actor Simon Callow describes the character of Father Christmas in mummers' plays as the prototype of the modern Santa: typically fat, with his backside and belly stuffed with straw, and, though old and bearded, nonetheless vigorous. He distinguishes himself from his current counterpart by carrying a sword and dragging a tail, attributes that suggest the roots of the character in the Devil figure in medieval morality plays, and to the Devil's own predecessor, Pan, the libidinous font of vitality in pagan myth.

Still, if a few remnants of the pre-Puritan celebration of Christmas had survived, by the late 1700s the holiday had become a pale shadow of its former self, cloaked in piousness, sometimes celebrated in public, but rarely at home, shorn of domestic application almost entirely. Traces of the “old” tradition survived, but in tiny villages and distant corners of the English countryside, where enlightenment had not found its way, and among common folk who were not all that anxious to shed every vestige of faith and superstition.

And yet there were also a few literary figures who thought that such traditions deserved reexamination by a modern world, a world that—in its pursuit of progress and the almighty pound—was becoming increasingly sterile, mechanized, and soulless. With the publication of such historical romances as
Waverly
(1814),
Rob Roy
(1818), and
Ivanhoe
(1819), Scotland's Sir Walter Scott had done yeoman's work in resurrecting an appreciation for his country's legendary past and its heroes. The books may seem clumsy and overly earnest to modern readers, but they were enormously popular in their day, and Scott's death in 1832 left a void in the public consciousness that was waiting for someone like Dickens to fill.

Working this sentimental vein at more or less the same time as Scott was the American-born author Washington Irving, who had moved to England to help salvage his family's business fortunes after the War of 1812 was settled. Irving proved a far better writer than a businessman. He stayed in Europe from 1815 to 1832, touring the nooks and crannies of the Continent and producing a series of stories, observations, and sketches that transformed local customs, legend, and folktales into literary gold. He had similar success with material illustrating traditional folkways in the United States.
The Sketch Book of Geo
ff
rey Crayon,
published in 1819–20, contained the stories “Rip Van Winkle” and “The Legend of Sleepy Hollow” and proved enormously popular.

One of Irving's major subjects in
Geo
ff
rey Crayon
is Christmas, and he begins one chapter with the declaration, “Nothing in England exercises a more delightful spell over my imagination, than the lingerings of the holiday customs and rural games of former times.” Those vestiges of a bygone era, Irving continues, “recall the pictures my fancy used to draw in the May morning of life, when as yet I only knew the world through books, and believed it to be all that poets had painted it; and they bring with them the flavor of those honest days of yore, in which, perhaps, with equal fallacy, I am apt to think the world was more homebred, social, and joyous than at present.”

Irving posits that it is a false progress indeed that robs mankind of its deeper sources of contentment: “Many of the games and ceremonials of Christmas have entirely disappeared, and, like the sherris sack of old Falstaff, are become matters of speculation and dispute among commentators,” he says. “They flourished in times full of spirit and lustihood, when men enjoyed life roughly, but heartily and vigorously; times wild and picturesque, which have furnished poetry with its richest materials, and the drama with its most attractive variety of characters and manners.”

It is a damnable place his contemporaries found themselves in, Irving suggests: “The world has become more worldly. There is more of dissipation, and less of enjoyment.” And yet there is hope to be found in the celebration of Christmas, with its emphasis on family love, gift-giving, and festivity: “The preparations making on every side for the social board that is again to unite friends and kindred; the presents of good cheer passing and repassing, those tokens of regard, and quickeners of kind feelings; the evergreens distributed about houses and churches, emblems of peace and gladness; all these have the most pleasing effect in producing fond associations, and kindling benevolent sympathies.”

In Irving's works, excited descriptions of Christmas Eve parties and Christmas dinners abound, most of them in comfortable rural settings where there are still hints of the libidinous tomfoolery that was said to swell the birthrate of every September in England until the Puritans toppled the throne and put their collective foot down: “The mistletoe is still hung up in farmhouses and kitchens at Christmas; and the young men have the privilege of kissing the girls under it, plucking each time a berry from the bush. When the berries are all plucked, the privilege ceases.”

Irving's sentiments regarding the joy and fellow-feeling brought about by Christmas could not have fallen on any ears more predisposed to hear them than those of Charles Dickens. In an essay, Dickens once wrote of how the sight of one of those “new German toys,” i.e., a Christmas tree—freshly popularized by Queen Victoria's Bavarian husband, Prince Albert—surrounded by a crowd of excited children aroused in him the veritable reexperience of his own childhood celebrations of the season. “I begin to consider,” Dickens says, “what do we all remember best upon the branches of the Christmas Tree of our own young Christmas days, by which we climbed to real life.”

And what he remembers of his own early days is not always pleasurable. Though there were toys enough scattered throughout his earliest recollections, some of them had a demonic effect on the imagination of the youthful Dickens, including a jack-in-the-box that particularly troubled him: “[an] infernal snuff-box, out of which there sprang a demoniacal Counsellor in a black gown, with an obnoxious head of hair, and a red cloth mouth, wide open, who was not to be endured on any terms, but could not be put away either; for he used suddenly, in a highly magnified state, to fly out of Mammoth Snuff-boxes in dreams, when least expected.”

But in the main, Christmas for the young Dickens was a time that encouraged his imagination to soar, when, as he puts it, the most significant of the “decorations” of the holidays of his youth were the books and legends that he came to read and hear at that time. At Christmas, it seemed to him, “Oh, now all common things become uncommon and enchanted to me. All lamps are wonderful; all rings are talismans.”

Judging from his recollections, the Christmas season itself accounts in large part for his development as an artist. At this time of year, he says, “Any iron ring let into stone is the entrance to a cave which only waits for the magician, and the little fire, and the necromancy, that will make the earth shake.”

For Dickens it was a time when the mundane world could be put aside, “school-books shut up; Ovid and Virgil silenced; the Rule of Three, with its cool impertinent inquiries, long disposed of; Terence and Plautus acted no more.”

This cessation of serious endeavor was necessary, Dickens said, defending his abiding interest in the holiday: “And I do come home at Christmas. We all do, or we all should. We all come home, or ought to come home, for a short holiday—the longer, the better—from the great boarding-school, where we are for ever working at our arithmetical slates, to take, and give a rest.”

Much of Dickens's enthusiasm for the season transcended religiosity. He was appreciative of the benevolence associated with the example of the Christian savior and embodied in the star atop the tree: “In every cheerful image and suggestion that the season brings, may the bright star that rested above the poor roof, be the star of all the Christian World.” But it was the tree that enraptured him: “Encircled by the social thoughts of Christmas-time, still let the benignant figure of my childhood stand unchanged!”

D
ickens was surely banking that in
A Christmas Carol
he could convey his own enthusiasm for the Christmas holidays to his readers; but, oddly enough, the pleasure that he found in the season as an adult may well have derived from the terrible upset that he suffered when his family's fortunes collapsed. Given what that experience had done to his childhood, it is possible to see his glowing portrait of an idealized, Edenic Christmas as an attempt to compensate for all that he had lost.

Dickens may have been distressed enough by his father's imprisonment, but perhaps as devastating was his mother's suggestion to him when the family was finally released from the poorhouse: in fact, it might be a good thing if he kept up his employment there at Warren's despite the fact that the rest of them were free, she told young Charles, for the family still needed the money.

And he did remain there for many months after his family had been released, standing near a window as he worked “for the sake of the light,” and feeling “inexpressible grief and humiliation” when pedestrians gathered to watch. Imagine the day, in fact, when young Dickens glanced out to see his own father—free and easy on a London street corner—staring up along with the other gawkers as he worked.

In time, Dickens's perspective on the chief misfortune of his childhood would change. The twelve-year-old boy who might have gone to work for Jonathan Warren in resignation, to help his father struggle out of debt, became the adult who looked back with bitterness upon a kind of betrayal.

An older Dickens began to ask himself how his father could have ended up in such a position, anyway. Naval pay clerks were not paid like princes, of course, but the fact is that John Dickens was making about £350 in 1820, far more than the £40 or so that a poor wretch like Cratchit made, and certainly enough to live comfortably on. In time, Dickens became aware that his father and mother were poor managers of their money all their adult lives, and, along with his shame at what he had been forced to do, he came to feel resentment toward his parents as well.

At the time of the writing of
A Christmas Carol,
in fact, as Forster points out, Dickens was not only having trouble meeting his own financial obligations: “Beyond his own domestic expenses necessarily increasing, there were many, never-satisfied, constantly-recurring claims from family quarters, not the more easily avoidable because unreasonable and unjust.”

Dickens had, in essence, been paying his parents' expenses for a number of years, with his father's stay in the Marshalsea debtors' prison—if the most distressing—only the first in a string of financial embarrassments. John Dickens had been released from Marshalsea, in fact, only after declaring himself bankrupt, giving up any item in his possession worth more than £20, and agreeing to discharge his debts—which totaled £700—as soon as he was able.

As it turned out, he inherited £450 from his mother, who died only a few days after his release, but even with this wind-fall, and the annual pension of £146 granted him upon his subsequent discharge from service to the navy, it was more than two years before his debts were finally cleared.

Despite this, John Dickens was buoyed by his release from prison, and soon embarked upon a second career as a journalist for the
British Press.
He was able to remove Charles from Warren's Blacking and send him back to school, and to enroll Charles's sister Fanny in the Royal Academy of Music. For a time it seemed that the family's fortunes were on the upswing.

Disaster struck again, however, when the
British Press
failed in 1827, and the loss of income forced the family's eviction from their rented house. Once again, Charles—now fifteen—was removed from school, and Fanny was forced to give up her studies at the academy. Charles would end up in his law clerkship, and Fanny would teach music to a series of her own pupils, helping to keep the family afloat.

John Dickens continued an erstwhile career as a journalist, squeaking by on that spotty income, the contributions of his children, and his pension from the Admiralty, though the fact that he was sued for debt in 1831, 1834, and 1835 testifies to the difficulties he faced all his adult life.

In 1834 Charles—then twenty-two, and beginning to establish himself in his own right—moved out of the family home. Not long thereafter his earnings grew to the point where he could, and did, assume chief responsibility for his parents' support. John Dickens, however, proved able to spend his son's money as easily as he spent his own, and in 1839 the frustrated Charles hit upon a solution. He rented a cottage for his parents in Devon, far from the London shops and pubs that seemed to siphon off so much money, and John and his wife, Elizabeth, lived there until 1842. The fact that his parents had no ostensible vices—no gambling, no shoddy investment practices, no particular fondness for jewels—was likely to account for the extraordinary patience that Charles displayed in providing for them. They simply were and always had been the sort of people who earned seven pounds a week and spent eight.