The Battle for Christmas (39 page)

The performance put on by these deaf and dumb children represented one end of the spectrum of New York’s Christmas season in 1844. Like an increasing number of New Yorkers, Horace Greeley found it considerably more satisfying than what was still going on—and would continue to go on—at the other end of that same spectrum. Writing a week later, another
Tribune
reporter commented on what the streets of the city were actually like on New Year’s Day:

This reporter had even seen one 18-year-old youth “loading and firing a fowling-piece through the streets at midday!” And he concluded with a sentence that expressed the behavioral concerns of one culture in terms of the generational assumptions of another: “The mother of that boy has much to answer for.”
⁷⁴

T
HE YEAR
1853 marked two important achievements in the life of young Charles Loring Brace. The first achievement was practical: Brace helped establish the Children’s Aid Society, a New York charitable institution that would become, within his lifetime and due chiefly to his unceasing efforts, the most important charitable organization in the city and probably the entire United States. Brace’s other achievement was literary: the publication of a book. That book,
Home-Life in Germany
, would soon be forgotten, overshadowed both by Brace’s subsequent literary work and, more important, by his labors with the Children’s Aid Society itself. But it is of interest here, if only because of the light it casts on Brace’s subsequent charitable work with children, and also on his enduring interest in Christmas.

Home-Life in Germany
was a travelogue of sorts, the account of an extended visit Brace had made to that country two years earlier, at the age of 25. During his visit Brace was struck by several important contrasts between Germany and his native United States. For example, Germans tended to be far less individualistic and self-reliant than Americans were. On the other hand, family life—the main subject of Brace’s book—was far more important in Germany than it was in America.

The contrast between the home life of the two cultures came to a
head at Christmas. Brace devoted an entire chapter of
Home-Life in Germany
to an account of the Christmas celebration in that country. Here, too, the graciousness of German culture contrasted with the emptiness Brace found in the United States:

Brace acknowledged that there was a certain “compensation” for this failing: In the United States “a boy is an independent, self-reliant man …, when he is [still] in leading-strings in Germany.” But for the most part, that compensation was inadequate, because self-reliance alone was no asset at all—unless it was softened by unselfish geniality. Otherwise, it would only intensify the hollowness of American home life. And that was just what was happening in the United States, where the acquisitive spirit was destroying family values:

What was needed was an antidote to raw materialism, and such an antidote was provided by the domestic Christmas. “Any family-festivals of this kind,” Brace wrote—“anything which will make home pleasanter, which will bind children together, and make them conscious of a distinct family-life, is most strongly needed.” For Brace (as for so many Americans), Christmas was now above all a domestic idyll, an opportunity to produce and foster family values as an antidote to materialism and selfishness. Once again, Germany offered an object lesson for Americans:

Christmas in Germany was an occasion of unforced, spontaneous mutuality. Brace connected this domestic Christmas with authentic religious piety: “Good people are to recognize that there is a religion in Christmas feasts, as well as in prayer-meetings; that a father who has made his home gloomy, has done quite as great a wrong to his children, perhaps, as he who made it irreligious. We want these German habits—these birth-day and Christmas festivals—this genial family life …”
¹
It is difficult to imagine a better definition of what modern historians have taken to calling the “religion of domesticity.”

There was more. Brace reported that in Germany such close-knit, nurturing families were to be found much further down the social ladder than they were in America—indeed, down nearly to the bottom of the working class. Like so many Americans of this period, Brace saw Germany as the one place in the world where true family values had permeated almost the entire society. And the consequences were even apparent in public—for example, the German working class was far more polite and deferential than its American (or English) counterpart. Brace cited a vivid example. He had once “asked an English groom for directions in the streets of London, and was told in answer, “How the h—11 should I know?’” An American laborer, he added, would be almost as rude. But in Germany things were different: “A German stands—says to you with a half bow,
‘Be good enough
to take the second street,’ etc., and touches his hat as he goes.” (Brace added that such a response might “perhaps” be “a little too much” for a Yankee to take, but he added that it was still “a very pleasant thing.”) Brace attributed that difference to a single point: the lessons in the natural “expression of any feeling” that almost all German children learned from their families; the kind of feelings that were “laughed at in childhood” by the parents of their American counterparts. (Brace added that in the United States such feelings were “pruned” away.)
²
In other words, Brace attributed working-class rudeness in the United States to a home life that was “cold, unsocial, disagreeable.”

In a way, this was what most impressed Brace about the German Christmas itself: how far down the social ladder it reached. That was just how he introduced his chapter on the German Christmas. The Berlin lodging house at which Brace had been staying over the holidays was owned by a man who was “hopelessly in debt;” nonetheless, Brace watched this man “bringing home an armful of presents.” Then there was the local shoemaker, whose family lived in the basement of Brace’s lodging house; the family was so poor that the children often seemed to go hungry. But, sure enough, Brace spotted “through the low window, a green
Christmas tree, and the children are tying on the bits of candle.” Brace summed up his point by asserting that in all of Berlin, “There are not a dozen families so poor, as not to have their [Christmas] tree.”
³

Brace did not need to add the obvious: Men who celebrated Christmas like the Berlin shoemaker who lived in the basement were the kind of men who would never talk back to their betters, who would never say, “How the h-11 should I know?” They were, on the contrary, precisely the kind of men who were likely to answer a stranger’s question with a polite half bow and a deferential touch of the hat. And they would raise their children to do the same.

There is a very famous fictional family of the mid-nineteenth century—and a British family, at that—which resembles that of Brace’s real-life shoemaker. It is the Cratchit family, the central household in Charles Dickens’s classic 1843 novella
A Christmas Carol
. Too poor to provide adequate medical care for their children (the youngest of whom, Tiny Tim, is for that reason a cripple), the Cratchits are intensely genial, close-knit, and nurturing—everything that Bob Cratchits employer, Ebenezer Scrooge, is not. For Dickens, as for Brace, the social warmth of the Cratchit family achieves its apotheosis at Christmas. Despite their poverty, the Cratchits have a merry time of it. And their merriment is a celebration of domesticity itself. What Brace wrote of German families at Christmas makes for an apt summary of the scene Dickens paints. The Cratchits’joy has nothing to do with a “duty to be cheerful.” Rather, “they are cheerful, because they cannot help it, and because they all love one another.” They are “happy, because they had been making one another happy.”

There is another characteristic of what Brace considered to be “German” culture that applies to the Cratchits. They are polite and well-mannered to their superiors, even in the face of incessant provocation (in their case, provocation by Ebenezer Scrooge). It is impossible to imagine Bob Cratchit snarling to Scrooge, “How the h-11 should I know?” Even in private, at the family’s Christmas dinner, Bob Cratchit refuses to say a mean word about his employer.

To be sure, the Cratchits are fictional creations. But as social types, even though they are surely exaggerated, they are not altogether unreal. To begin with, they are not really members of the British working class.
Every bit as much as Braces shoemaker, they are integrated into the larger society. (The shoemaker was an independent artisan, and he lived in a respectable neighborhood, in the same boardinghouse as Brace himself.) The actual working classes of mid-nineteenth-century Britain (and America) were composed chiefly of industrial laborers—men and women who worked in textile mills or coal mines. But Ebenezer Scrooge was apparently not an industrial capitalist, but rather a merchant. (We learn almost nothing about the nature of Scrooge’s line of work, except that he owns a warehouse.) Nor was Bob Cratchit an industrial laborer; he was a clerk. He worked not on an assembly line but in an office, an office of his own (however ill heated it may have been in the winter). Indeed, as far as we can tell, Cratchit was Scrooge’s
only
employee, and a trusted one at that. In modern parlance, he was (albeit barely) a white-collar worker, more like a bank teller than a coal miner or a mill operative. However badly Cratchit was treated by Scrooge, he was not apt to be laid off in hard times, as many industrial workers would have been. And however badly Scrooge treated Cratchit, the two men maintained a close working relationship (Cratchit’s office was located right next to Scrooge’s). Again, this stands in sharp contrast to the conditions of most industrial workers, whose employers would not even have been able to identify them, by either name or face.

Cratchit is literate, too (indeed, that is one of the requirements of his job), and so is at least one of his sons. One reason for the literacy may be that Cratchit’s wife and their children all stay at home; unlike their counterparts in most working-class families of the time, they do not labor for wages to help support the family. Cratchit exhibits none of the behavior that respectable people of the time associated with working-class culture: He does not drink to excess, he does not spend all his wages on payday; he is not (we must assume) sexually promiscuous. In modern parlance, he is the head of a stable, child-centered family. All this is not to deny that Bob Cratchit is an exploited worker, but only to observe that he is hardly a realistic symbol of the industrial proletariat. It would be more accurate to identify him (in nineteenth-century terms) as a man who is struggling to become part of the respectable—and respectful—petite bourgeoisie.

A Christmas Carol
is often read today (and it was often read in the nineteenth century) as if it painted a vivid picture of alienated class relations in the period of the Industrial Revolution, and as if it evoked ways of bridging the vast gulf that had emerged between the top and bottom strata of society—through the kind of fellow feeling that Ebenezer Scrooge comes to experience after his conversion. But that is not the case.
The vast and depressing face of the Industrial Revolution scarcely appears in this book. The poor themselves never make any demands of Scrooge, and for that matter he never encounters them. (We never see him approached by a beggar, for example.) In fact, the only contact Scrooge has with the poor is in his vision—a dream, as it turns out, that unfolds in the safety of his own bed. And even in that dream, none of the poor ever curse or threaten him. The most horrible vision Scrooge has—a vision evoked by the Ghost of Christmas Future—is the indifference expressed by his business acquaintances when they learn of his death.
⁴

In other books Dickens addressed other kinds of social relationships: the gap between bourgeois and proletarian in
Hard Times
, for example, or the inadequacy of institutionalized charity in
Oliver Twist
. What
A Christmas Carol
deals with, in a practical way, is something less vast but in its own way equally troubling. In
A Christmas Carol
Dickens addressed not the great social divisions among classes estranged from one another by wealth, distance, and occupation but the daily, intimate class differences among people who were much closer to one another on the social scale.