The Man Who Invented Christmas (23 page)

Then back to the desk he went, and by June 8—and though one suspects he would have rather been playacting at Sykes slaying Nancy—he managed to complete the sixth installment of his new tale-in-progress.
The Mystery of Edwin Drood
was conceived as a murder mystery inspired by the works of his friend Wilkie Collins, concerning the exploits of one John Jasper, pious choirmaster of Cloisterham Cathedral, who wakes up one morning to find himself, unaccountably, in a London opium den.

The generally accepted account of what happened next says that on that evening of June 8, during dinner, Dickens began to complain that he felt out of sorts. Quickly his speech began to slur, then turned to gibberish, and his frantic housekeeper rushed to help him to the floor.

As became clear, he was suffering a massive stroke, and was soon unconscious. Doctors were summoned and Ellen Ternan was called, but it was all to no avail. By the following morning, Charles Dickens was dead at the age of fifty-eight.

It might be said, however, that there is an alternative version to the story of Dickens’s last hours. In it, Dickens finishes his day’s work on
Edwin Drood
and takes a carriage to Peckham, where Ellen Ternan lives. It is at Ellen Ternan’s home that Dickens falls ill, and it is she who cradles him to the floor, much as her sister did on a stage in Manchester nearly fourteen years before.

And there is in fact some evidence for this scenario, as impossibly pat as it might seem. A Ternan family caretaker has sworn that—to avoid the scandal that Dickens had spent years steadfastly avoiding—he carried the unconscious Dickens from the Ternan house and bore him back to Gad’s Hill, where Dickens lived at the time. Adding some credence to this account is also the fact that Dickens cashed a check for a considerable sum earlier on the day that he collapsed, yet he was found with almost nothing in his pockets when he died. Since his housekeeper had to seek funds for necessities from his attorneys in the wake of Dickens’s passing, it is certain that the money was not given to her.

All is speculation, of course, but there seems little doubt which version of his passing that Dickens, as a novelist, would have favored. Students of history will simply have to choose for themselves.

18.

N
o one was more intensely fond than Dickens of old nursery tales,” his friend Forster would write, “and he had a secret delight in feeling that he was here only giving them a higher form. The social and manly virtues he desired to teach were to him not less the charm of the ghost, the goblin, and the fairy fancies of his childhood.”

This description of the nature and the intent of Dickens’s efforts explains as well their enduring charm. The Naturalists who would follow in Dickens’s footsteps—Crane, Dreiser, the later Twain—came to sneer at his hopefulness. The thought that a real-life Scrooge could be changed by four ghosts or a thousand—were there such things as “ghosts”—was balderdash. And as for the Deconstructionists who came along in the later part of the next century, any meaning to be found in such a fable as
A Christmas Carol
was as relative to the reader, and as illusory, as the messages in tea leaves.

Yet, despite such cynicism, Dickens and his oeuvre persist. Doubt shadows the contemporary psyche, to be sure, but it might be pointed out that there are few living nihilists. And, for the most part, the only place where readers consume fictions that do not stir their emotions is in a high school or college classroom.

In an elegy, Theodore Watts-Dunton, English poet and critic and a contemporary of the generation of writers following Dickens, illustrates the profound impact of the great writer on his times. In an epigraph to his poem, Watts-Dunton relates the story of a Cockney produce vendor who had just been given the news of Dickens’s passing: “Dickens dead?” the young woman cried. “Then will Father Christmas die too?”

She needn’t have worried, of course, for the holiday has only burgeoned in the wake of Dickens’s passing. Next Christmas, Anytown Elementary and thousands of its counterparts, great and small, will stage their “re-originations” of
A Christmas Carol,
and perhaps the new Hollywood version and the one after that will have been completed too.

M
illions of ordinary people continue to experience Scrooge’s impossible transformation in one form or another. Some of them will learn of the story of the industrialist who heard Dickens deliver one of his public readings and ran out of the hall on the spot to purchase turkeys for all his employees for Christmas. Odd, a few might think, I got a turkey from my boss just today.

Such tales abound of Dickens’s power to suggest and to prod to action. Another factory owner was said to proclaim—in the wake of a Dickens reading—that Christmas would ever after be a holiday in his shop. Today, the Grinch who volunteers to work on Christmas will often enjoy double and triple time for his trouble.

In 1874 Robert Louis Stevenson would write of his great affection for Dickens and his Christmas books: “I feel so good after them and would do anything, yes, and shall do anything, to make it a little better for people.” Some modern critics have faulted books that arouse these positive but aimless impulses in readers—the very desire to be charitable makes one feel good about oneself, the argument goes, and once one feels good, the need to do anything more is dispensed with. And it is true that the world awaits the publication of the study that will prove any direct correlation between the number of times experiencing
A Christmas Carol
and annual household giving.

Still—for all the melodrama and the unlikely plot development, and for the impossible notions of goodwill toward men that seem so quaint in an era of mushroom clouds and airport screenings—on any given December 25, when we gather with our families, rich or poor, in homes huge or humble, in an orgy of big-ticket gift-giving or a modest homemade something, with a prize-winning turkey on a groaning table or the best we can manage under the circumstances, there is no gain-saying those words of Nephew Fred to his uncle Scrooge as to the nature of Christmastime: “the only time…in the long calendar of the year, when men and women seem by one consent to open their shut-up hearts.”

The house on Devonshire Terrace where Dickens wrote those words is gone, as is the blacking house where he tied tops to tiny pots of boot polish. Dickens too is long gone. But still with us, as the turn of every season proves, is the immutable, eternal story.

Eliminate ignorance, Dickens dreamed in his
Carol.
Eliminate want. A tall order then, and a tall order now. But one does not need to be a social scientist to know that he identifies the true sources of misery in this world. And it is a mark of Dickens’s genius that we return eagerly to his hopeful vision—millions of us now—year after year. And vow to do the best we can.

N
OTES

Many before me have been compelled to write of Dickens, of the Christmas season, and of
A Christmas Carol
in particular. My intent in writing this book has not been to catalog, analyze, or chronicle a life—but rather to weave some rather familiar, if sometimes disparate, elements into a narrative that might enliven the historical facts attendant to it.

And though I have made use of the same research techniques here that I have employed for many years in academic pursuits, I intend this volume to be a fireside pleasure of the Fezziwigian type, and not a formal work of scholarship. Thus, I have set aside the typical convention of footnotes.

Where I have included information that seemed to me the unique contribution of an individual, I have endeavored to give the credit due, either in the text or in the notes that follow.

For the reader who may be interested in tracing an inquiry along some line I have opened in this book, I am hopeful that these notes and the list of sources that were of great interest and help to me as I wrote will be of value to the reader in turn.

Nativity

The particulars of young Dickens’s time at Warren’s blacking factory have been reported and analyzed by many commentators. But the essential details in this re-creation of his experience are drawn from the autobiographical fragment composed by Dickens sometime in the 1840s—prior to the writing of
David Copper-
fi
eld,
according to the author—later shared with Forster and first published in the latter’s intimate and informative biography,
The Life of Charles Dickens,
four years after the author’s death.

One of those to rank Dickens’s tale at the penultimate position of readership is J. H. McNulty, writing nearly a century after the book’s publication. In “Our Carol” (
The Dickensian
34: 15–19) McNulty describes
A Christmas Carol
as “the one perfect short story Dickens wrote,” and goes on to add—as Macaulay said of Boswell—“Eclipse is first and the rest nowhere.”

1.

The career-context of Dickens’s invitation to Manchester is discussed by Forster in Book 4 of
The Life,
“The First Year of Martin Chuzzlewit.”

The general course of Dickens’s career comes from Forster, Peter Ackroyd’s
Dickens,
and the invaluable twelve-volume Pilgrim Edition of
The Letters of Charles Dickens,
edited by House and Storey (Oxford, 1965–2002). A quick and authoritative tour is available in Paul Schlicke’s encyclopedic
Oxford Reader’s Companion
(1999).

Sales figures for Dickens’s work cited throughout this volume are drawn from Robert C. Patten’s exhaustive study of the subject,
Charles Dickens and His Publishers.

For more on Wellerisms, see George B. Bryan and Wolfgang Mieder, “As Sam Weller Said, When Finding Himself on the Stage,”
De Proverbio
3, no. 1 (1997).

An interesting history of British publishing in general, including the transformation attendant to the rise of the novel in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, with Dickens’s part in the latter, may be found in John Feather’s
A History of British Publishing
(New York: Routledge, 1991).

2.

Walter C. Phillips describes the Victorian era as witnessing a complete remaking of the trade in printed matter and the transformation of the earning power of popular writers. “No single figure was more influential in this revolution than Dickens,” he adds. In
Dickens, Reade and Collins: Sensation Novelists.

For a contemporary view of Victorian publishing and the nature of the reading public of the day, see the final volume of Charles Knight’s illustrated
The Popular History of England
(London: Warne, 1856–62). Knight, the son of a bookseller and publisher, published his comprehensive eight-volume set, he said, in an effort to tie up social history with the standard account of the country’s political history.

The tenor and the details of Dickens’s 1842 visit to the United States are of course best rendered in the author’s own words—in his letters to friends and in
American Notes for General Circulation.
The edition of the latter referred to here is from St. Martin’s Press, 1985.

3.

The edition of
Martin Chuzzlewit
cited here is Penguin, 1986.

4.

Watkin’s account of Dickens’s 1843 visit to Manchester, “Peeps at Dickens,” is collected in
The Dickensian
34: 37–39.

A discussion of Dickens’s associates in Manchester, along with a summary of all his visits to the city, is found in F. R. Dean’s “Dickens and Manchester,” in
The Dickensian
34: 111–18.

5.

For more on Cobden, see Nicholas C. Edsall,
Richard Cobden: Independent Radical
(Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1987).

Sorrentino’s quite lovely story is “The Moon in Its Flight”(1971), collected recently in a volume of the same name (Minneapolis: Coffee House Press, 2004).