The Man Who Invented Christmas (24 page)

An incisive portrait of Manchester and its influence on the work of Marx and Engels may be found in Boyer’s “The Historical Background of the Communist Manifesto,” in
Journal of Economic Perspectives,
Autumn, 1998: 151–74.

This author has expanded on Carnegie in
Meet You in Hell
(New York: Crown Publishers, 2005).

References to Dickens’s remarks before the Athenaeum come from Fielding’s
The Speeches of Charles Dickens
(Oxford, 1960).

6.

The process by which
A Christmas Carol
came to consume Dickens in the wake of his visit to the Saffron Hill school and to Manchester is extrapolated from
The Letters,
esp. vol. 3, and from Forster, Book 4 of
The Life,
“Chuzzlewit Disappointments and Christmas Carol.”

7.

Forster is the principal source for Dickens’s dealings with Chapman and Hall. As an adviser to both the publishing house and the author, Forster fulfilled the role of editor and agent simultaneously, and at a time long before either position had even been formalized in the industry. Despite the delicacy of such a position, both Dickens’s letters and Forster’s reminiscences suggest that he was able to carry off the dual assignment without alienating either side.

8.

The facsimile of Dickens’s manuscript of
A Christmas Carol
published by the Pierpont Morgan Library offers the next best experience to holding the original copy in one’s hands. Dickens gave his manuscript to his attorney Mitton shortly after he finished it, and Mitton sold it shortly after Dickens’s death. J. Pierpont Morgan acquired the manuscript in London in 1902 and brought it back to his library, where it has remained since, along with the original manuscript of Milton’s
Paradise Lost,
Thoreau’s journals, and much more. Commentators have noted that Dickens’s handwriting in this manuscript is smaller and more careful when compared to earlier works, with the greater number of corrections also attesting to the care with which the story was produced.

Among the many pleasures of Michael Patrick Hearn’s exhaustive companion,
The Annotated Christmas Carol,
is his description of Dickens’s relationship with illustrator Leech and the impact of the latter’s work on the finished book. The quantity and breadth of Hearn’s research on Dickens’s slender volume constitute the most significant work on the novel to date.

9.

A version of “The Story of the Goblins Who Stole a Sexton” is included, along with an adroit introduction to several other Dickens pieces, in Michael Slater, ed.,
A Christmas Carol and Other Christmas Writings.

The summary of
A Christmas Carol
is based upon Ackroyd’s edition of
The Christmas Books,
vol. 1 (London: Mandarin, 1991) as well as the Facsimile Edition from the Morgan Library (1993).

10.

History of Christmas: Everything that a reader might wish to know about the historical antecedents of the Christmas holiday is to be found in University of Massachusetts historian Nissenbaum’s
The Battle for Christmas.

An interesting discussion of Puritan influences on holiday celebration in the early United States is found in Leigh Eric Schmidt,
Consumer Rites: The Buying and Selling of American Holidays
(Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1995).

The definitive edition of Pepys’s diary is an eleven-volume set compiled by Robert Latham and William Matthews (London: Bell & Hyman, 1970–83). Highlights are collected by Latham in
The Diary of Samuel Pepys: A Selection
(New York: Penguin, 2003).

The reconstruction of the mummers’ play is by Roderick Marshall, quoted by noted actor Simon Callow in
Dickens’ Christmas.

Besides Callow’s lively account, other works linking Dickens and his literary forebears with the season include
The Lives and Times of Ebenezer Scrooge
by Paul Davis, and
Christmas and Charles Dickens
by David Parker.

Dickens’s essay “A Christmas Tree” is included in the collection compiled by Michael Slater, mentioned earlier.

The discussion of the financial pressures that impinged on Dickens is extrapolated primarily from the letters of the author and the commentary of Forster.

11.

The lines are from Wordsworth’s “My Heart Leaps Up,” published in 1807, reprinted in
The Norton Anthology of English Literature,
vol. 2 (New York: Norton, 1968).

Hearn
(The Annotated Christmas Carol)
provides an exhaustive summary of the contemporary press and magazine response at the time of publication and after.

Mrs. Carlyle’s letter of December 28, 1844, is to her cousin Jeannie Welsh, and is found in
The Collected Letters of Thomas and Jane Welsh Carlyle,
vol. 17 (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1970–93).

12.

By way of contrast to the five-shilling ($1.25) cover price of the novel, a first edition of
A Christmas Carol
today might fetch anywhere from $10,000 to $40,000, depending upon its condition.

For an informative and provocative commentary on the history of copyright law, see Harry Hillman Chartrand, “Copyright C.P.U.: Creators, Proprietors & Users,” in
Journal of Arts Management, Law & Society
30, no. 3 (Fall 2000).

The story of Dickens’s ill-fated suit against Lee & Haddock is told in engaging style by E. T. Jaques, “Solicitor of the Supreme Court,” in his
Charles Dickens in Chancery.

Ancillary to Jaques’s account is an annotated time line of the case by S. J. Rust in “At the Dickens House: Legal Documents Relating to the Piracy of A Christmas Carol,”
The Dickensian,
41–44. Rust appends a note from Talfourd to Mitton lamenting the outcome of their victory: “I hope…that some means may be found to deliver our friend [Dickens] from the penalty which will await on success—the payment of his own cost of an action against Bankrupt Robbers.”

13.

The balance sheet from Chapman and Hall that Dickens so woefully pored over is extrapolated from Patten,
Charles Dickens and His Publishers.

The Letters
and Forster’s
Life
provide the basis for the state of Dickens’s mind in the aftermath of the publication of
A Christmas Carol.

14.

The definitive account of the history of the myriad adaptations of Dickens is found in Philip Bolton,
Dickens Dramatized.

Also of note in this regard is Fred Guida,
A Christmas Carol and Its Adaptations.

John Irving’s observations on Dickens’s modus operandi are more fully drawn in his essay “The King of the Novel” (in
Trying to Save Peggy Sneed,
1996).

15.

For the discussion of the impact of Christmas on Dickens and of Dickens’s impact on the holiday, the author is indebted to a number of sources previously named. An incisive and accurate treatment of the subject is found in Christine Lalumia, “Scrooge and Albert: Christmas in the 1840s.”

Without Michelle Persell’s “Dickensian Disciple,” this writer may well have gone a lifetime without an appreciation of the works of Benjamin Farjeon, Jewish writer of Christmas.

16.

Davis’s is a most readable study of the influence of
A Christmas Carol
on contemporary culture:
The Lives and Times of Ebenezer Scrooge
(Yale University Press, 1990).

In his introduction to the first volume of
The Christmas Books,
Ackroyd points out that while Dickens intended to profit from these seasonable fables, he was anything but cynical about the enterprise. In fact, for the social themes embedded in
The Chimes
he suffered vituperative criticism from some who found him a revolutionary in a romantic’s clothing, too fond of the “felon” and the “rick-burner.”

Patten (1978) is the source of the information regarding the unsold copies of
The Haunted Mansion.

Over time, Dickens’s Christmas books not only moved away from any reference to the season but also became less tied to specific social issues and more concerned with the general nature of man. As he put it in his Preface to the first Cheap Edition published in 1852, his purpose in the stories was less “great elaboration of detail” (which he believed could not be achieved within such narrow confines) than it was the construction of “a whimsical kind of masque which the good humor of the season justified, to awaken some loving and forbearing thoughts, never out of season in a Christian land.”

17.

In his
Dickens and Popular Entertainment,
Paul Schlicke quotes one of Dickens’s advisers who estimates that the author earned as much as £45,000 from the readings he gave between April of 1858 and his death in 1870. And Forster suggests that in those later years, it was by his readings as much as by his books that the world came to know him. As any number of commentators have pointed out, however, he threw his energies into the performances to such a degree that they as much as anything can be said to have killed him.

Dickens began his readings by assuring audiences that it was quite all right to “give vent to any feeling of emotion.” Cheers or sobs would not disturb him in the slightest, he said. For the typical two-hour performance, everyone should “make themselves as much as possible like a group of friends, listening to a tale told by a winter fire.” It is testament, says Schlicke, that Dickens saw himself first and foremost as a popular entertainer.

Jane Smiley’s observations on the pleasure of reading one’s works aloud are contained within her fine short study,
Charles Dickens.
Smiley’s work is particularly valuable for the insight she brings as an accomplished novelist in her own right. Of Dickens’s later years she says, “A novelist’s late, eccentric life is analogous to his late eccentric novels. His ties to the mainstream have loosened. His primary job is no longer to be representative, as when he was a young writer looking for a publisher and an audience; it is to be still interesting.”

Perhaps the most intriguing view of Dickens’s later life comes though the lens of Claire Tomalin in her study of Ellen Ternan and her relationship with the author,
The Invisible Woman.
Tomalin (1991) is the source for the alternative version of Dickens’s passing.

18.

The anecdote of the costermonger’s lament on Dickens’s death is a favorite of biographers. Watts-Dunton, a contemporary of Tennyson and Swinburne, opened his 1898 poem with a reference to the legend, then closed with a reassurance to Londoners: “City he loved, take courage…Dickens returns on Christmas Day.” (“Dickens Returns on Christmas Day,” in
The Coming of Love and Other Poems
[London and New York: Lane, 1898].)

Robert Louis Stevenson’s comments on Dickens’s Christmas books are from an undated letter written at Bournemouth, where he was living while working on
Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde
(1886). According to a
New York Times
story of February 5, 1922 (“Stevenson Cried Over Dickens Tale”), the seven-page letter was purchased at auction by William Randolph Hearst, for $1,150. Sold at the same auction was a stuffed raven named Grip that had once belonged to Dickens, for $210.

As proof that in some quarters no good impulse or deed goes uncriticized, Simon Callow passes along accounts of mass feedings of the poor conducted by the Salvation Army in late-nineteenth-century New York, where as many as 25,000 received Christmas dinner. The
Saturday Evening Post
found such charity offensive and laid the blame on Dickens, for, in the opinion of the editors, “A great Christmas dinner, in the minds of many, cancels the charity obligations of the entire year.” Callow also quotes Lord Chesterton in response to suggestions that the practice be stopped: “Doubtless he [Dickens] would have regarded the charity as folly, but he would also have regarded the forcible removal of it as theft.”

S
ELECTED
B
IBLIOGRAPHY

Primary sources

Dickens, Charles.
A Christmas Carol: A Facsimile Edition of the Autograph Manuscript in the Pierpont Morgan Library.
New Haven: Pierpont Morgan Library/Yale University Press, 1993.

Fielding, K. J.
The Speeches of Charles Dickens.
Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1960.

House, Madeline, and Graham Storey.
The Letters of Charles Dickens,
Pilgrim Edition. 12 vols. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1965–2002.

Other editions

Dickens, Charles.
American Notes for General Circulation.
New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1985.