Dickens and Christmas
I believe that it has done me good and will do me good: and I say, God bless it!
In 1843 two key seemingly unconnected events helped establish Merry Christmas as one of the most commonly used expressions in the English language. One was the printing of the first commercially produced Christmas card. This proved a commercial flop but excited public interest.
The other was the publication of A Christmas Carol on December 17, 1843. It sold out in a week and has been hugely popular ever since.
Merry Christmas!
“Every idiot who goes about with ‘Merry Christmas’ on his lips, should be boiled with his own pudding, and buried with a stake of holly through his heart.” A Christmas Carol (1843)
Ebenezer Scrooge could not stop ‘every idiot’ from using the phrase that infuriated him. ‘Merry Christmas’ not ‘Bah! Humbug is still the universal greeting of the season. And the enduring success of A Christmas Carol (1843) has played key role in shaping the secular elements of the modern festival.
At the time Dickens was writing, Christmas was celebrated like any other religious feast-day. Though it officially lasted twelve days (on the first day of Christmas, my true love …) most of the activities associated with it took place in church on the night of Christmas Eve and the morning of Christmas Day.
Many employers allowed their workers a second day off for Stephen’s Day (Boxing Day in the UK). Scrooge was not unusual, however, in insisting that Bob Cratchit return to his ‘dismal cell’ early on the 26th.
Was Christmas a popular festival before Dickens?
By the C17th, Christmas had become a holiday of celebration and enjoyment. {Oliver} Cromwell wanted it returned to a religious celebration where people thought about the birth of Jesus rather than ate and drank too much.
In London, soldiers were ordered to go round the streets and take, by force if necessary, food being cooked for a Christmas celebration. The smell of a goose being cooked could bring trouble. Traditional Christmas decorations like holly were banned. source
By the time Dickens wrote A Christmas Carol, Cromwell was long dead (and reburied). But while it was safe to get out the Christmas Tree — especially after Queen Victoria installed one at Windsor Castle in 1841 — not everyone approved of Christmas merrymaking.
Mr E Scrooge expresses the minority view:
Merry Christmas! Out upon merry Christmas! What’s Christmas time to you but a time for paying bills without money? For finding yourself a year older, but not an hour richer?
Fred’s spirited response is a romantic and inclusive alternative to Cromwellian puritanism.
I have always thought of Christmas time as a good time: a kind, forgiving, charitable time. I believe that it has done me good, and will do me good. I say, God bless it!
And the Victorian reading public joined Bob Cratchit in applauding Fred’s sentiments
A Christmas Carol tapped into a long-repressed hunger for what historian Ronald Hutton calls ‘a family-centred festival of generosity’ which Dickens himself defined in the aftermath of the success of a A Christmas Carol:
Christmas Day … bound together all our home enjoyments, affections and hopes… Charles Dickens What Christmas Is As We Grow Older, 1851
Christmas Chez Dickens
And therefore, Uncle, though it has never put a scrap of gold or silver in my pocket, (Fred explaining his attitude to Christmas to his Uncle Scrooge)
All his life Dickens loved Christmas. It represented everything he aspired to as a troubled, insecure child: family, fun, festivity, tradition, security and order. And according to Claire Tomalin’s biography (Charles Dickens: A Life) he never gave up on the festival.
As a young man, he hosted parties like those found at Dingley Dell or at Mr Fezziwig’s. He loved to organise riotous games and to show off his magic tricks — including a sensational one involving a flaming Christmas pudding. For Twelfth Night he wrote sketches for family members to perform, often taking the lead roles himself.
The restorative power of Christmas is a recurrent theme in Dickens work. It is there in the Boz Sketch, A Christmas Dinner, in his first novel The Pickwick Papers (1836) and the final unfinished novel The Mystery of Edwin Drood. It also plays a key role in Great Expectations.
But above all it was his most popular story, A Christmas Carol, that Dickens created the template for the modern Christmas.
Key features of Christmas popularised by Dickens
Dickens gave expression to the Victorian urban Christmas, with its return to pagan traditions of a mid-winter festival, and domestication the wilder rural tradition. His Christmas moves from the street to the family home, where celebration is built around the family unit but welcoming of the ‘less fortunate’ described by the charity collectors. Impromptu games play an important role: in the charades episode Scrooge is beside himself with the joyous excitement that his author experienced.
Much of its imagery is secular and northern European. Holly, ivy, snow and red robins did not accompany the birth of Jesus in balmy Bethlehem. A Christmas Carol, does, however, remain faithful to the core religious character of the festival. The central theme — Scrooge’s fall and redemption — has Judaeo-Christian roots. In the final Stave, the sinner repents:
I will honour Christmas in my heart and try to keep it all the year. I will in the Past, Present and the Future.
The Cratchit Christmas Dinner is an important symbol of the new mode of celebration: with the family at the centre. Goose may now be a comparatively rare menu option but we all understand that the biggest bird in the shop beats the tiny one at the initial Cratchit feast.
That said, forbearance is another Christian motif that transfers easily to a more secular world. The Cratchits celebrate their minuscule portions with yelps of approval — they are the epitome of the ‘deserving poor’. Dickens was Victorian in his understanding of charity, encouraging private generosity rather than state subsidy.
How did Dickens change the language of Christmas?
A Christmas Carol is perhaps the most quoted text outside of Shakespeare and the Bible. From the opening sentence to Tiny Tim message it has provided a short-hand so familiar that advertisers can draw upon it without explanation. Here is a short selection from Stave One:
Marley was dead, to begin with … Old Marley was as dead as a doornail.
Oh! but he was …tight -fisted
The cold within him froze his old features/He carried his own low temperature always about with him
“What’s Christmas time… but a time for paying bills without money?”
“Business!” cried the Ghost, wringing its hands again. “Mankind was my business; charity, mercy, forbearance, and benevolence, were, all, my business.”
“I wear the chain I forged in life.” replied the Ghost.
So should we blame Dickens for a full month of 24/7 Mariah Carey?
Bah Humbug! Toast the great man on the 25th. In the words of Tiny Tim who — spoiler alert — did not die: “God bless us, Every one!”
