The Man Who Invented Christmas (20 page)

The first commercially available Christmas trees appeared in Philadelphia markets in 1848, and by the mid-nineteenth century, as Dickens’s rhapsodic essay on the subject made its way across the Atlantic, trees were being cut by the mountain-side in the Catskills and trucked to busy lots in Manhattan. In 1856 the first Christmas tree went up at the White House, though it would not be until 1923 that the practice of the annual lighting of the National Christmas Tree began. Today there is a National Christmas Tree Association in the United States, an organization that claims some 21,000 registered tree growers, who provide the majority of the 35 million or so sold each year.

Mention might be made of one final major Christmas icon, a figure that is generally attributed to the work of American author and Columbia University professor Clement Clark Moore. In 1822 Moore published his legendary poem “A Visit from St. Nicholas,” also known as “The Night Before Christmas,” which featured a character from Dutch legend whom Washington Irving had discussed at some length in his Knickerbocker sketches. Moore, however, transformed St. Nicholas from a somewhat foreboding figure of judgment who might show up at almost any time of year to deliver gifts to good boys and girls and a spirited caning to their less obedient counterparts, into a jolly old elf whose appearance was scheduled each year for the night before Christmas, in houses where none stirred, “not even a mouse.” Over time,
Sinter-klaas,
the Dutch contraction for Sint (Saint) Nicholas, became Anglicized as Santa Claus.

Over time, “Santa” morphed from the gaunt-looking dwarf Moore had found in his sources into the jovial, red-robed rotund elf popularized by
Harper’s Magazine
illustrator Thomas Nast in the 1860s, and finally into the familiar bearded and overweight department-store Santa that we know today. This latter image is attributable to an illustration done by Haddon H. Sundbloom in 1931 for the Coca-Cola Company’s seasonal promotion. While modern Santas were often shown holding a pipe, an affectation that dates back to Irving’s day, this accoutrement generally dropped away following the release of the U.S. Surgeon General’s report of 1964 connecting smoking and lung cancer.

Certainly, Dickens was quite familiar with the work of his American friend Irving (as
Parley
hack Hewitt argued), and Moore’s poem had also made its way to England by 1843. And while the heartiest of the three Christmas spirits portrayed in
A Christmas Carol
is of a somewhat different provenance than his American counterpart, there are some interesting parallels. The Ghost of Christmas Present appears before Scrooge seated atop a mound of plenty, by a roaring fire in a room bedecked with fir boughs, holly, mistletoe, red berries, and ivy,

clothed in one simple green robe, or mantle, bordered with white fur. This garment hung so loosely on the figure, that its capacious breast was bare, as if disdaining to be warded or concealed by any artifice. Its feet, observable beneath the ample folds of the garment, were also bare: and on its head it wore no other covering than a holly wreath, set here and there with shining icicles. Its dark brown curls were long and free: free as its genial face, its sparkling eye, its open hand, its cheery voice, its unconstrained demeanor, and its joyful air.

This is, of course, no elf, but a robust and vital representation of Father Christmas, the spirit of the season, a secular figure often portrayed by Dickens’s forebears as elderly, frail, and feeble, his spirit eroded by the indifference of a forgetful public and the antipathy of zealous Puritans. It is interesting to note how, in their respective Christmas tales, both Moore and Dickens transformed a traditional character with complex moral baggage (being equally quick with the cane and the candy) into their figures of unmistakable power and beneficence. Britons, in fact, were as eager to fold Santa Claus into their own mythos of the season as Americans were to welcome Scrooge and Cratchit and Tiny Tim into theirs. Father Christmas and Santa Claus have become virtually synonymous in contemporary England, and it is difficult to watch a modern dramatic presentation of
A Christmas Carol
on either side of the Atlantic without thinking of jolly Santa when Scrooge encounters his second Christmas ghost.

No individual can claim credit for the creation of Christmas, of course—except, perhaps, the figure that the day is named for. But Charles Dickens, given his immense and lasting influence and his association with all things Victorian, played a major role in transforming a celebration dating back to pre-Christian times, revitalizing forgotten customs and introducing new ones that now define the holiday. Peter Ackroyd and other modern commentators have credited Dickens with having singlehandedly created the modern idea of Christmas, and if that is a grand claim, it is grounded in the facts. If Dickens did not invent Christmas, he certainly reinvented it.

Considered against the backdrop of an era when the British Empire expanded to its zenith and when advancement in science and industry suggested that Western man was truly the master of his own fate, the themes of
A Christmas Carol,
the real reasons for its vast appeal and influence, seem evident: with the support of a tight-knit family, with education and charity and the expenditure of goodwill from one to all—with time out for celebration not neglected—such problems as Ignorance and Want could be banished from the world.

Such notions could not only be applauded in an era that Dickens saw opening before him, but they could also be believed. And it is testament to the power of his vision that even to this day, when audiences experience his little
Carol
—his “sledge-hammer”—they dare to share in his dream.

16.

T
he Dickens scholar Paul Davis points out that
A Christmas Carol
inverts the traditional folktale process. Instead of beginning as an oral story that is finally written down and formalized, Dickens’s story has worked the other way. His story entered the world as a fully formed “perfect” work, says Davis, and in the century and a half since its arrival, its original self has exploded like a sun into a supernova. Its hundreds and thousands of adaptations and productions—all those retellings and “re-originations”—have transformed a work of literature into part of the DNA of Western culture. “Disguised as Lionel Barrymore or Mister Magoo,” Davis says, “Scrooge has become common cultural property and is as deeply embedded in our consciousness as George Washington or Dick Whittington, Merlin or Moses.”

It is probably the secret dream of many writers to produce a work with such enduring power, and it is one of the several conundrums of the writing life that one can never live to see how it all turns out. Dickens knew that he had produced something very good when he wrote
A Christmas Carol,
but he had no way of knowing it would become his most-loved book. In early November of 1844, he wrote to Mitton from Genoa certain that he could surpass what he had achieved with
A Christmas Carol.

He was already hard at work on a new holiday book for Bradbury and Evans, he explained. “The cause of my not having written to you, is too obvious to need any explanation. I have worn myself to Death, in the Month I have been at Work.” He told his solicitor that he had not been able “to divest myself of the story—have suffered very much in my sleep, in consequence—and am so shaken by such work in this trying climate that I am nervous as a man who is dying of Drink: and as haggard as a Murderer.”

To Forster he wrote of waking up for a cold bath at seven, and after a bit of breakfast, would “blaze away, wrathful and red-hot, until three o’clock or so.” He was “fierce to finish,” Dickens told his friend, “and to shame the cruel and the canting,” referring to readers who would profit by its lessons. When he finally finished, a few weeks later, he wrote joyously to Mitton: “I believe I have written a tremendous Book; and knocked the
Carol
out of the field. It will make a great uproar, I have no doubt.”

Though the contemporary reader probably will not recognize
The Chimes
as having achieved that goal, the follow-up volume to
A Christmas Carol
was not exactly a disappointment in Dickens’s own time. The book appeared on December 16, 1844, and—because they were distributing the books for Bradbury and Evans—the title page listed Chapman and Hall as publishers. The book carried the subtitle
A Goblin Story of Some Bells that Rang an Old Year Out and a New Year In,
and included illustrations by Leech as well as by Richard Doyle, scenarist Clarkson Stanfield, and Dickens’s close friend Daniel Maclise (whose 1839 oil of Dickens hangs today at the National Portrait Gallery).

The book tells the story of a porter named Toby (“Trotty”) Veck, who has come more and more to feel that his laborer’s life is inconsequential and meaningless—even the arrival of his daughter Meg on New Year’s Eve, announcing that she and her longtime fiancé Richard will be married on the next day, fails to rouse Trotty from his gloom. Later that night he wanders to the steps of the nearby church, and is drawn up the steps of the bell tower by an uncanny premonition. In the tower, he encounters the goblins who are the embodied spirits of the bells, creatures who promptly tell him that he has actually fallen from the tower to his death.

The spirits then carry him through a series of ever more dour visions of the future, culminating in a scene in which his daughter Meg, despairing over the ruin of her marriage to a now-alcoholic Richard, is about to drown herself and her child. Trotty had been certain that the poor and unfortunate were doomed by their own natures to their sad fates, but now realizes that what has happened to Meg and Richard is the result of the avarice and oppression of others, and not any inborn mark of weakness. All men and women have the capacity to succeed. As a distraught Trotty confesses to the goblins the error of his thinking and proclaims the innate virtue of all mankind, the vision ends. When he wakes, Trotty finds himself in his bed on New Year’s morning, and, as a result of his encounter with the goblins, resolves to make merry at the wedding of his daughter later that day.

Dickens, who had written Forster from Genoa on October 6 to complain that he could not get himself going on the new Christmas book, owing in part to the infernal, never-ending clanging of church bells in the city, wrote only two days later to announce that he had found his title and the “machinery” of his novel at last. “I am in regular, ferocious excitement with the
Chimes,
” he told Forster, and proclaimed that he saw “in this little book, a great blow for the poor…and if my design be anything at all, it has a grip upon the very throat of time.”

He finished the book on November 3, and following his last dot, as he told Forster, had “a real good cry!” He traveled to London in early December to oversee the correction of page proofs and to read the story to groups of friends, including the actor and producer William Charles Macready who—according to the author, at least—burst into tears during Dickens’s performance.

There was a stage play mounted at the Adelphi Theatre concurrent with the book’s publication on December 16, and most of the first edition of 20,000 copies flew immediately off the shelves. Though it was handsomely packaged, with a gold-stamped red cover, Dickens and his new publishers took a lesson from the
Carol
and omitted the hand coloring and colored type. As a result, Dickens earned even a bit more than the quick £1,000 he had hoped for on
A Christmas Carol:
£1,065 8s. 2d., to be exact. But there were signs from the beginning that
The Chimes
would not long keep its grip on time’s throat. The critical response was decidedly mixed, and the general audience—though drawn to buy the book on the strength of his first holiday tale—found the story far grimmer and more downbeat than its holiday predecessor. An urchin on crutches was one thing, but a mother about to drown herself and her
baby
?

There were other miscalculations as well: the nondescript goblins of
The Chimes
are far less singular and evocative than the memorably distinct quartet of ghosts who haunt Scrooge’s chambers; and Trotty himself is not nearly as swept up by his amazing adventures as was his predecessor. His inclination is to stand at some remove from what is going on around him, and it sometimes seems as if it is the author himself instructing readers on just what to make of it all.

Perhaps most significant, however, was the decision to leave Christmas out of the proceedings. Dickens understandably wanted to achieve the same emotional effect in his audiences without appearing to produce an outright copy of his first holiday tale, but proud as he was to have found the “machinery” of
The Chimes,
he did not take into account the effect of cutting himself off from some two thousand years of mythic power and buried emotion by leaving Christmas behind. In contrast to Christmas, even a Christmas dimmed by the fervor of the Puritans and the need of factory owners to keep their furnaces blazing, the New Year’s holiday was a pale afterthought.