Les Standiford (12 page)

But by 1842, things were beginning to deteriorate once again. John Dickens had taken to selling scraps of manuscript he'd pilfered from his son's dustbin, and was offering up the odd document containing Charles's signature as well. He even wrote Dickens's publishers and friends, complaining of one financial embarrassment and another, and seeking loans to set himself right. “Contemporaneous events of this nature place me in a difficulty,” went such a letter to Miss Burdett Coutts, “[one] from which, without some anticipatory pecuniary effort, I cannot extricate myself.” If only he could avail himself of twenty-five pounds, he told her, things might be set aright.

His father's actions led Dickens to place advertisements in the London papers declaring himself unaccountable for the debts of anyone other than himself. In April of 1842, he wrote to his lawyer, Thomas Mitton, of his exasperation with his father's irresponsible behavior, saying that he had decided to bring his parents back from Devon so that he might keep a better eye on them.

Despite that move, the troubles continued. “The thought of him besets me, night and day,” Dickens wrote early in 1843, “and I really do not know what is to be done with him.” By September of that year, with his own outlook bleak, he was reaching the end of his rope. His father had gone so far as to write to Chapman and Hall, asking if the publishers might provide him with a ticket for passage on the Thames riverboat so that he could visit the British Museum. Otherwise, “I must doze away the future,” John Dickens complained, “in my armchair in re-reading the works of Boz.”

Charles was more than embarrassed by such petty, bald-faced begging. “He, and all of them,” he wrote, “look upon me as something to be plucked and torn to pieces for their advantage.” Such intrusions were one more thing that led the beleaguered author to consider a flight to France or Italy. “My soul sickens at the thought of them,” he wrote. “I am amazed and confounded by the audacity of his ingratitude. Nothing makes me so wretched.”

Indeed, the ability to immerse himself in the writing of
A Christmas Carol
had provided a much-needed respite for Dickens's psyche. It was as if, in writing the book, he could will into existence a world of universal charity, empathy, and family harmony that he had not experienced in his life. The writing had been a tonic to his spirits, all right. Now if only its reception could offer a similar remedy to his pocketbook, he might just stay sane yet.

11.

Y
ou fear the world too much,” Ebenezer Scrooge's fiancée tells him when she breaks off their engagement. “All your other hopes have merged into the hope of being beyond the chance of its sordid reproach.”

More than one commentator has suggested that in this fictional exchange Dickens is also speaking obliquely of himself and his own fears and doubts. Though an outside observer might have thought that a person of Dickens's accomplishments would have left behind such feelings forever, he was clearly still burdened with quite ordinary concerns. Given his current uncertainties—both artistic and economic—
A Christmas Carol
could easily be read as an allegory for his own life: a once-successful man receives a final opportunity to redeem himself.

Certainly, Dickens was well aware of how the deprivations of a childhood, monetary or otherwise, could have profound effects later in life. While the works of William James and Sigmund Freud were still a half-century away, Wordsworth's lines had been around since 1802:

So was it when my life began;

So is it now I am a man;

So be it when I shall grow old…

The Child is father of the Man….

Though Dickens was not himself a miserly person, his correspondence makes it clear that he was more than a little preoccupied with his own monetary affairs and with the desire to earn as much money as possible. He had once asserted to one of his brothers, regarding his potential for greed, that “there is not a successful man in the world who attaches less importance to the possession of money,” but as he was laying out his publication plan for
A Christmas Carol,
he was also capable of writing, “I hope to get a great deal of money out of the idea.”

Certainly, one of the principal themes of
A Christmas Carol
is avarice, and Scrooge's only hope of salvation is to learn the concept of charity. But if Scrooge's arc of development from miser to benevolent merrymaker can be viewed as a theoretical reminder from the author to himself, Dickens also had practical concerns on the line. He was placing his hopes for a resuscitation of his own finances upon a cautionary tale that he had written about money.

If asked, Dickens would likely have shrugged it off. He had never been a rich man, he once wrote, “and never was, and never shall be,” but he had a wife and four children, with a fifth on the way, and on the morning of December 19, he was not thinking so much about getting rich—as he wrote to Thomas Mitton, he was simply hoping to keep his personal enterprise afloat:

“For on looking into the matter this morning, for the first time these 6 weeks, I find (to my horror) that I have already overdrawn my account. This month's money I have paid [out]. Next month's is bespoke. And therefore I must anticipate the Christmas Book, by the sum I mention, which will enable me to keep comfortable.”

In that same letter, he begged Mitton for a loan of £200 to put off some of his creditors, closing with the gloomy observation that Chapman and Hall were not doing their part to help the book's prospects: “Can you believe that with the exception of Blackwood, the
Carol is not advertized in One of the Magazines
?”

It was a bit of an exaggeration on the author's part. In truth,
A Christmas Carol
had been advertised in the November 18 issue of the weekly literary review the
Examiner,
as well as in the November 25 editions of several other weekly papers, and it was also featured by Chapman and Hall, who—foreshadowing the practice of placing similar advertisements for forthcoming works in an author's current paperback editions—folded into the December installment of
Martin Chuzzlewit
a full-page announcement:

A New Christmas Book by Mr. Dickens.
In December will be published…with Four Coloured Etchings and Woodcuts by Leech A CHRISTMAS CAROL In Prose.
Being a Ghost Story of Christmas.

The ads in the weeklies and in
Blackwood's Monthly,
and the announcement in
Chuzzlewit
would have been welcome, of course, but Dickens was rightly concerned that the book would not be given wide placement in the holiday issues of the monthly magazines. Still, Chapman and Hall might be forgiven for holding back on advertising a book that was not fully their enterprise. While they would receive a commission on sales, this was Dickens's project, after all.

William Bradbury, who printed Dickens's works for Chapman and Hall, had told Dickens that he, for one, could not believe this omission. “And he [Bradbury] says that nothing but a tremendous push can possibly atone for such fatal negligence,” an anxious Dickens wrote to Mitton.

Mitton, who had already received a copy of the proofs of
A Christmas Carol,
came through with the loan and wrote back to buck up the spirits of his friend and client, assuring Dickens that it was excellent work indeed. Dickens responded graciously, “I am extremely glad you
feel
the Carol,” he told him. “For I knew I meant a good thing.” Still, there was a hint of desperation in the postscript of this letter to his solicitor: “Bradbury predicts Heaven knows what. I am sure it will do me a great deal of good; and I hope it will sell, well.”

Along with the proofs to Mitton, Dickens is known to have presented pre-publication copies of
A Christmas Carol
to at least eleven others, including Miss Burdett Coutts, Thomas Carlyle, Forster, Walter Savage Landor, and William Makepeace Thackeray, whose copy is inscribed, “To W. M. Thackeray from Charles Dickens (Whom he made very happy once, a long way from home).” While the source of the sentiment of this inscription is uncertain, and while Thackeray was known to be somewhat patronizing even when approving of Dickens's work, the reference is probably to a scathing review Thackeray wrote the year before for
Fraser's Magazine,
a condemnation of a bastardized French stage production of
Nicholas Nickleby.
(“Of the worthy Boz,” Thackeray said, “he has no more connection with the geniuses who invested this drama than a peg has with a gold-laced hat.”) Dickens also sent off a presentation copy to the poet Samuel Rogers. “If you should ever have inclination and patience to read the accompanying little book,” he told Rogers, who was then in his eighties, “I hope you will like the slight fancy it embodies.”

While Forster, Mitton, and others had written encouraging replies to Dickens regarding
A Christmas Carol,
it is fortunate for the author that he didn't know what Rogers thought of it. Rogers's nephew wrote to an acquaintance that when Dickens's new book was mentioned, his uncle “said he had been looking at it the night before; the first half hour was so dull it sent him to sleep, and the next hour was so painful that he should be obliged to finish it to get rid of the impression. He blamed Dickens's style very much, and said there was no wit in putting bad grammar into the mouths of all his characters, and showing their vulgar pronunciation by spelling ‘are' ‘air', a horse without an
h
: none of our best writers do that.”

What Dickens did hear in the form of the first public pronouncement upon his book came in the
Morning Chronicle
on December 19. Charles Mackay began his review in that paper by declaring, “Mr. Dickens here has produced a most appropriate Christmas offering and one which, if properly made use of, may yet we hope, lead to some more valuable result…than mere amusement.”

Mackay, a subeditor at the paper, went on to say, “It is impossible to read this little volume through, however hastily, without perceiving that its composition was prompted by a spirit of wide and wholesome philanthropy—a spirit to which selfishness in enjoyment is an inconceivable idea—a spirit that knows where happiness can exist, and ought to exist, and will not be happy itself till it has done something toward promoting its growth here. If such spirits could be multiplied, as the copies of this little book we doubt not will be…what a happy Christmas indeed should we yet have this 1843!” Mackay closed his review by assuring readers, “We heartily recommend this little volume as an amusing companion, and a wholesome monitor, to all who would enjoy in truth and in spirit ‘A merry Christmas and a happy New Year.'”

On the twenty-second, the reviewer for the
Sun
urged the book upon its readers, and added, “[D]o not suppose because it is a ghost-story that it is a mere frivolous exercise of the fancy.” And the
Atlas
cautioned its readers not to mistake the book for some trivial piece of seasonal fluff. Anyone “who perhaps took it up in the expectation of finding some careless trifle thrown off for the occasion…like the contribution to an annual, will find himself agreeably mistaken. A glance at the first page or two will convince him that only Boz in his happier vein could have penned it.”

On December 23 the
Athenaeum
pronounced that
A Christmas Carol
was “[a] tale to make the reader laugh and cry—open his hands, and open his heart to charity even towards the uncharitable—wrought up with a thousand minute and tender touches of the true ‘Boz' workmanship—is indeed—a dainty dish to set before a King.” The reviewer describes the story as “capitally
caroled
in prose by Mr. Dickens and will call out, we hope a chorus of ‘Amens'…from the Land's End to John o'Groat's house.”

Fellow essayist and friend Leigh Hunt opined on that same day in the
Examiner
that the slender volume would soon be in “everyone's hands,” praising its vivid and hearty style and predicting that “thousands on thousands of readers” would find it the excuse to raise a chorus of praise to Christmas.

Meanwhile, along with such glowing reports, what Dickens heard principally over those first halcyon days of his “little project” was the jingling of coins into booksellers' tills. In four short days, every one of the 6,000 copies that Dickens had printed were sold.

Such an unqualified commercial and critical reception of the book was enough to send its author into a paroxysm of joy and a celebration of the season unlike any before: As he wrote his American friend Felton, “Such dinings, such dancings, such conjurings, such blind man's huffings, such theatre-goings, such kissings-out of old years and kissings-in of new ones, never took place in these parts before.” In the space of only hours, many of the cares that had oppressed him for nearly two years seemed to evaporate.

Jane Carlyle, wife of the noted satirist and herself among the most attractive and lively members of the London literary set, wrote a letter to a friend the day after she attended a children's Christmas party where the rejuvenated Dickens was also a guest, suggesting something of the effect his success had produced in him:

“It was the very most agreeable party that ever I was at in London,” she gushed. “Dickens and Forster above all exerted themselves till the perspiration was pouring down and they seemed
drunk
with their efforts. Only think of that Dickens playing the
conjuror
for one whole hour—the best conjuror I ever saw.”

Mrs. Carlyle described how Dickens, with Forster serving as his assistant, boiled a plum pudding in someone's top hat, transformed ladies' handkerchiefs into candies, and a boxful of bran into a squealing guinea pig. It was all done quite professionally, Mrs. Carlyle thought, enough so that Dickens might think of taking up that line of endeavor should the book trade ever let him down.

“Dickens did all but go down on his knees to make
me
—waltz with
him,
” she added, “but I thought I did my part well enough in talking the maddest nonsense with him, Forster, Thackeray and Maclise—without attempting the Impossible.”

Mrs. Carlyle's account suggests that what had begun as a children's party ended by approaching the level of a Roman Saturnalia: “In fact the thing was rising into something not unlike the rape of the Sabines!” she said, “when somebody looked [at] her watch and exclaimed ‘twelve o'clock!' Whereupon we all rushed to the cloak-room—and there and in the lobby and up to the last moment the mirth raged on—Dickens took home Thackeray and Forster with him and his wife ‘to finish the night there' and a royal night they would have of it I fancy!”

Indeed, Dickens now seemed to embody the very spirit of generosity he had written about in
A Christmas Carol.
He wrote at once to Mackay at the
Morning Chronicle
to express his gratitude for that first glowing review, saying, “Believe me that your pleasure in the Carol, so earnestly and spontaneously expressed, gives me real gratification of heart. It has delighted me very much…your praise is manly and generous; and well worth having. Thank you heartily.”

With every copy of
A Christmas Carol
sold, his doubts about his ability diminished; and the same critics who had dismissed him for his recent dreary stories were now stumbling over themselves to praise his uplifting message. If Dickens had ever believed the old maxim that he was only as good as his next book, then suddenly he was very good indeed. Chapman and Hall rushed through a second printing, and then, before the passing of the New Year, ordered up a third.

Inevitably, not all the reviews were entirely favorable. While the
Dublin Review
grumbled that the book might have strayed a bit too far from the holy antecedents that gave the season its true meaning, nonetheless, the editors admitted, “It is long since we read prose or poetry which pleased us more.” The
Morning Post
weighed in with certain reservations as well, noting that the book “has all Mr. Dickens's mannerisms, and is so far (to us) displeasing and absurd; but it has touches of genius too, mixed up with its huge extravagance, and a few of those little happy strokes of simple pathos,” attributes that, the editors rather astutely noted, were also those that accounted for “his great popularity.”