The Man Who Invented Christmas (21 page)

Though he remained wedded to the concept of producing an annual Christmas book, the fall of 1845 found Dickens moved back to London, and, along with Bradbury and Evans, mired in preparations for the launch of a new morning newspaper, the
Daily News.
Dickens, lured by the thought of heading up a major liberal-voiced competitor to the
Times,
the
Morning Chronicle,
and the
Morning Post,
and by the prospect of the unlimited backing promised by a group of railway executives who partnered with Bradbury and Evans on the venture, accepted the editorship of the paper, and promised regular contributions to it.

Still, Dickens found time to write a third Christmas book, though this one,
The Cricket on the Hearth,
has nothing overtly to do with the season at all. It is the story of how a young laborer overcomes his irrational suspicions of his lovely young wife, whom he one day spots talking to a mysterious stranger. The eponymous cricket is the agency by which our good man learns the error of his ways, but that bit of surrealism is about all that links the book to its illustrious Christmas predecessor. Still, it reflected what Dickens called “Carol philosophy” in its “jolly good temper” and “vein of glowing hearty, generous, mirthful beaming reference in everything to Home and Fireside.”

As with
The Chimes,
the fact that any reference to Christmas was lacking altogether in the story did not prevent its commercial success. A staged version of
Cricket
opened at the Lyceum Theatre on December 20, 1845, simultaneously with the book’s publication, and ran for sixty performances. By January, seventeen productions of the story had been mounted in London, and sales of the book’s two editions had earned its author £1,022. For the remainder of Dickens’s life—and of the nineteenth century, for that matter—the story was adapted far more regularly than was
A Christmas Carol,
and in fact Dickens himself devised a version that he read in public on a number of occasions in the 1850s.

In 1846, while living in Switzerland and finally back to work on an extended fiction in the form of
Dombey and Son,
Dickens forced himself into the writing of a fourth holiday book,
The Battle of Life,
lamenting to Forster that his soul sank at times when he stepped back to consider what was going on in this tale. Once again, Christmas made no appearance in the story—that of a young woman who sacrifices her true love to her sister and cures their father of his cynical attitude in the process. Dickens complained of the strictures of the shortened form, the absence of any supernatural “machinery,” and the guilt of spending time away from
Dombey.
He warned his friend as early as September that there might not in fact be a Christmas book in 1846, and when he finished, he admitted to Forster, “I really do not know what this story is worth.”

Some of the critics were happy to opine on the matter: “Exaggerated, absurd, impossible sentimentality,” is what the
Morning Chronicle
had to say of his efforts in
The Battle of Life,
and the fact that most of the other reviews were equally hostile puts to rest any notion that the
Chronicle
’s editors might have been influenced by Dickens’s fling at competition with them. (Overwhelmed by the demands of editing a daily paper, Dickens had resigned his post less than three weeks after the
Daily News
began publication.) Still,
The Battle of Life
sold 23,000 copies on the day of its publication, and though there were but few dramatizations, Dickens did receive £100 for a production staged at the Lyceum by his actor friend Robert Keely (who had also produced versions of
The Chimes
and
The Cricket on the Hearth
).

His preoccupation with
Dombey and Son,
which was selling at as many as 35,000 copies per installment (issues of Thackeray’s
Vanity Fair
were selling about 5,000 copies at the same time), kept Dickens from writing a Christmas book in 1847. But, “loath to lose the money,” as he put it to Forster, he began work on his fifth and final Christmas book in October of 1848. After a month spent primarily, as he described it, “frowning horribly at a quire of paper,” he wrote Miss Burdett Coutts that the logjam had finally broken. “I have hit upon a little notion…with a good Christmas tendency,” he told his old friend, and finished
The Haunted Man
on November 30, in Brighton, and after “crying my eyes out over it.”

The story is that of Redlaw, a depressive academic who has sunk into despair over the contemplation of his many past losses and betrayals, including memories of a miserable childhood. On Christmas Eve, Redlaw receives a visit from a spirit, who not only grants him relief from all his painful memories but also endows Redlaw with the power to do the same for others in turn. The gift proves to be a curse, however, for Redlaw comes to understand that without the memory of painful experiences, human beings have no way to judge what pleasure is by contrast.

When he begs for release, the spirit is indifferent and decrees that he will first have to meet with Milly, wife of the college’s lodging house master. Milly, the kindest person Redlaw knows, proves more than capable of resisting his evil powers, and the encounter transforms Redlaw back into a fully balanced human, capable of gratitude and compassion.

While some modern commentators have praised the psychological accuracy and artistry (and the absence of melodramatic contrivance that marked the middle Christmas books), the darkness and complexity of the tale—with its focus on the inner world and not the outer—was hardly the stuff to set the likes of Mr. Fezziwig and Pickwick and their families into a holiday jig. Dickens wrote bravely to a friend that
The Haunted Man
had sold 18,000 copies upon its December 19 debut, but that number was down nearly a quarter from the sales of
The Battle of Life.
In fact, there were still unsold copies of
The Haunted Man
warehoused at the time of Dickens’s death, more than twenty years later.

Dickens never commented on why he never wrote another Christmas book, but there is evidence for speculation. Since he had taken the year off to stay focused on
Dombey
in 1847, and spoke of the “grind” of trying to get moving on
The Haunted Man
in 1848, it is possible that he had simply exhausted himself on the subject and realized that it was more practical to stay focused on the longer works. The sales of the first four installments of
Dombey
were enough to bring him finally out of debt, and, as Forster says, “all embarrassments connected with money” were put to rest.

But there might have been a more provocative reason as well. By the fall of 1849, he was well along on
The Personal History of David Copper
fi
eld,
the first number of which had appeared on May 1 of that year, and he would continue publishing installments of that novel until November of 1850. In the story of a young man who survives a miserable and abusive childhood to become a parliamentary reporter and then a novelist, Dickens is clearly making use of autobiographical elements.

In addition, it was just prior to beginning the writing of
Copper
fi
eld,
that most commentators believe that Dickens made an attempt to deal directly with the traumatic events of his own childhood, laying them out in that “autobiographical fragment,” which he shared only with Forster. And, in both
The Haunted Man
and
David Copper
fi
eld,
we see a preoccupation with the power of childhood unhappiness upon adult life; the glimpse of a young Ebenezer, abandoned at his boarding school, is one of the many touches that transform the miser from stereotype to sympathetic figure, and which in turn gives
A Christmas Carol
such power.

Thus, the common notion that Dickens may have exhausted himself on the subject of Christmas might be replaced by the speculation that beginning with
A Christmas Carol
and culminating in
David Copper
fi
eld,
Dickens had finally dragged up the powerful demons of his past and wrestled them away, to the extent that successful literature allows, at least. If that is true, then the engine that had driven him down this path in the first place was at last stilled.

In any case, while sales of its installments dropped down to 20,000 or so, the critical response of his peers to
David Copper
fi
eld
was universally positive, and to this day, some find it the very best of all his works. Dickens himself proclaimed the book to be “a very complicated interweaving of truth and fiction,” and was happily consumed by the writing of it. As Forster put it, “Once fairly in it, the story bore him irresistibly along…and he was probably never less harassed by interruptions or breaks in his invention.”

Whatever the reasons, Dickens would go to his grave calling
David Copper
fi
eld
his own “favorite child.” In his preface to the 1867 edition, he said, “Of all my books, I like this the best.”

At the same time that he was consumed with
David Copper
fi
eld,
Dickens was also involved in another significant undertaking, one that would in its own way lead him back to Christmas. In late March of 1850, he had begun—in partnership with Bradbury and Evans, who took a quarter-share, and Forster, who held an eighth—the publication of a weekly magazine called
Household Words.
A collection of journalism, sketches, poetry, and short stories, the publication, with Dickens as its editor, would continue until he died.

Priced at tuppence, and with an editorial by Dickens in every issue and contributions from himself and his friends—the leading literati of the day—the magazine, which was aimed at what might be described as
The New Yorker
audience of its day, became a resounding success. The first issue sold 100,000 copies, and though those were not the numbers of a penny rag for the masses, which could reach as high as 300,000, Dickens and his partners were quite happy.
Household Words
settled in at around 40,000 thereafter, and the magazine would provide Dickens with a stable income (he received a yearly salary of £500 as well as his half-share in the profits) and a satisfying ancillary focus for the rest of his life and career.

But if the editorship of the magazine, combined with the race to finish
David Copper
fi
eld
in November, made the writing of a Christmas book practically impossible, his new undertaking also allowed Dickens to do the next best thing. If he could not publish a Christmas book, at the very least he could bring out a holiday-themed issue of his new magazine, and he would of course contribute something to it.

The first Christmas issue of
Household Words
was published on December 21, 1850, and among the nine pieces included was Dickens’s masterwork of nonfiction, “A Christmas Tree.” In this blend of essay and reminiscence and pure paean to life, Dickens sets down the great depth of his feeling for the season directly and without pretense. He manages, without a false note and in essay form, to convey the same blend of childhood wonder, fantasy, humor, celebration, and solemnity that distinguishes
A Christmas Carol
in narrative form.

Dickens closes his piece with a reminder of the tree as the centerpiece of the season’s celebratory nature: “Now, the tree is decorated with bright merriment, and song, and dance, and cheerfulness. And they are welcome. Innocent and welcome be they ever held, beneath the branches of the Christmas Tree, which cast no gloomy shadow!”

And while he might have left it there, with a reminder of good cheer and goodwill and fellowship that marked the season so indelibly for him, he adds a postscript—“But, as it sinks into the ground, I hear a whisper going through the leaves. ‘This, in commemoration of the law of love and kindness, mercy and compassion. This, in remembrance of Me!’”—and in this reference to the words of Jesus and the Eucharist, he ties together the holy reason for the celebration and the act of celebration itself. Though the clergy of the Anglican Church might be troubled by the concept of a Christmas tree as sacrament, for Dickens it was the perfect union of the cloister and the hearth.

17.

E
ven if it is true that, from the inception of
A Christmas Carol
through the completion of
David Copper
fi
eld,
Dickens was unconsciously wrestling with the demons from his childhood, and even if the publication of “A Christmas Tree” in 1850 was the final punctuation mark in that process, there was much to come from Dickens, both in life and art, and also as regards his beloved holiday.

Sales of the 1850 Christmas issue of
Household Words
soared to 80,000, and subsequent holiday numbers of the magazine published through 1858 would hold steady at that number. And such halcyon days might have continued for the magazine, save for the fact that in that year, Dickens separated from his wife, Catherine, with whom he had raised ten children and from whom he had grown increasingly estranged over the decade. The dissolution of this marriage of twenty-two years became so acrimonious that, in an attempt to discredit rumors floated by the Hogarth family that he was having an illicit affair, Dickens used the front page of
Household Words
to print a statement protesting his innocence.

The action might seem mind-boggling enough—imagine Benjamin Bradlee taking over the front page of the
Washington Post
to explain some delicate matter from his personal life—but Dickens compounded the awkward situation by asking Bradbury and Evans to reprint his statement in
Punch,
which they had published since its inception. When Bradbury and Evans suggested that this was perhaps not the sort of thing to be published in a magazine of social commentary and satire, Dickens exploded and tried to force the publishers from their quarter-share of
Household Words.