Dickens and Christmas Read online

  R.L.Stewart in The Dickensian (1907)

  Over the next few years, the Dickens family continued to struggle with John’s inability to handle his finances. In 1827, when Charles was fifteen and Fanny was seventeen, John Dickens was arrested again, although this time he was not imprisoned as he managed to borrow enough money to pay off his debts. Both Charles and Fanny left school and started work. Fanny became a teacher at the Royal Academy of Music and Charles was found a job as a clerk with a firm of solicitors named Ellis and Blackmore. In the same year, Elizabeth Dickens gave birth to her final child, Augustus – known in the family as Boz. Some years later, when Charles Dickens was in need of a pen name, he would choose his baby brother’s nickname.

  Charles Dickens spent eighteen months working as a legal clerk, but he was determined to move into a different world. He visited the theatre as frequently as possible and still dreamt of becoming an actor; he also took the practical step of learning shorthand before leaving his job to become a freelance journalist. He became renowned for his accuracy in reporting speeches and found regular working writing for radical newspapers, including the True Sun and the Mirror of Parliament. In 1830, he fell in love with Maria Beadnell, the daughter of a banker and his wife. Maria was two years older than Dickens and her parents thought a struggling writer with ambitions of going on the stage an unprepossessing suitor.

  One of Dickens’s friends at this time, was a bank clerk, Henry Kolle, who was engaged to Maria’s sister, Anne Beadnell and colluded with Charles by taking secret messages between him and Maria. On 20 December 1832, Dickens wrote to Kolle, ‘How are you engaged on Christmas Day? – If you do not join any family party of your own, will you dine with us – It will I need hardly say give us all the greatest pleasure to see you.’ A couple of weeks later, on 5 January 1833, Dickens wrote to him again, postponing a proposed party to which Kolle and his brother had been invited. The letter gives us a glimpse into the Dickens family’s domestic life at this date, as they prepared to move house. One of Charles Dickens’s chief preoccupations is with his sister Fanny’s piano and the impossibility of having a party without it:

  ‘Will you excuse my postponing the pleasure of seeing yourself and Brother until Sunday week? – My reason is this:- we are having coals in at the new place, cleaning &c we cannot very well remove until Tuesday or Wednesday next. The piano will most likely go to Bentinck St. to-day & I have already said we cannot accompany it – so that the Piano will be in one place and we in another. In addition to this, we shall all be in a bustle, and I fear should impress your Brother with a very uncomfortable idea of our domestic arrangements …’

  Dickens’s hopes of marrying Maria Beadnell were firmly quashed in February 1833, when he told her he loved her and she rejected him. Shortly afterwards, her parents sent her abroad, in an attempt to get over what they saw as an unsuitable romance. Perhaps the heartbreak made Dickens more determined to succeed, and by the end of the year he had some very exciting Christmas news to share with Henry Kolle, who was now Maria’s brother-in-law. Dickens wrote to Henry suggesting he buy a copy of the Monthly Magazine, because it had published his very first work of fiction. On 3 December 1833, Dickens wrote to Kolle, ‘look for the Article. It is the same that you saw lying on my table but the name is transmogrified from “A Sunday out of town” to “A dinner at Poplar Walk” … I am so dreadfully nervous, that my hand shakes to such an extent as to prevent my writing a word legibly.’

  He was not paid anything for the story and he wrote again to Kolle a week later, to say his story had been plagiarised and reprinted by a magazine with the appropriate title of The Thief. The Monthly Magazine asked him to write more stories, although, as he noted wryly, ‘they are “rather backward in coming forward” with the needful’. Dickens was longing for this news of his success to make its way to the ears of Maria Beadnell. He lost contact with her until 1855, by which time he was a world-famous author, married with ten children, and she was the rather lonely wife of Mr Henry Winter, the manager of a saw-mill in North London, with children of her own. It was only when they met again, over two decades after she had rejected him, that he realised at last that he was no longer in love with her.

  Dickens wrote nine stories that were published in the Monthly Magazine, although he was not paid for any of them. Their success made him determined to make money as a writer, having failed in his mission to become an actor. In 1832, he had applied for an audition at the Covent Garden Theatre company. The manager, George Bartley, arranged an audition for April 1832, but on the day he was supposed to attend, Dickens was ill with ‘a terrible bad cold and an inflammation of the face’ and missed his chance. Although thwarted in his theatrical dreams, he was doing well in his journalistic career and, just before the Christmas of 1834, he moved out of the family home and into his first bachelor lodgings. This was an apartment at 13, Furnival’s Inn, a newly reconstructed lodgings on the site of a medieval Inn of Court. He took his younger brother Fred with him, to ease some of the financial burden on his parents, and to try and encourage Fred not to follow their father’s example of living in debt.

  Through his work on the Morning Chronicle, Charles Dickens began a lifelong friendship with Thomas Beard, a fellow journalist. Many of his letters to Beard survive, including one dated 16 December 1834, from Furnival’s Inn. Dickens writes about a proposed party (which he describes as a ‘flare’) and the chaos he is in since moving house:

  ‘As I have no dishes, no curtains, and no french polish, I think we had better, for all our comforts, defer the projected flare until Saturday … Pray tell your father, that I place implicit reliance upon him; and be kind enough to remember on your own account that I have got some really extraordinary french brandy.’

  A few days later, Dickens was still suffering from the vagaries of his new home, complaining to his friend Henry Austin that he has been unable to find anyone to clean for him on a Sunday:

  ‘Dear Henry,

  I am obliged to give you the very ridiculous notice that if you come and see me tomorrow we must go out and get our dinner. I think the best way will be to walk somewhere; the fact is that I have had an explosion with nineteen out of the twenty Laundresses [the general term for female servant] in the Inn already, and can’t get “done for” Some Methodistical ruffian has been among ’em, and they have all got the can about “profaning the Sabbath” – and wiolating that commandment which embraces within its scope not only the stranger within the gates, but cattle of every description, including Laundresses.

  ‘Tomorrow is my Mother’s birth day, so I have promised on behalf of yourself and Beard that we will go from here, and the spend the Evening there. If you will be down her as early as you can tomorrow morning – shall we say to breakfast; for I don’t take that meal until half past ten? – we can walk to Norwood, or some pretty place where we can get a chop, and return here to our grog.’

  It is possible that, by the Christmas of 1834, Charles Dickens had already met the woman who was to become his wife. She was Catherine Hogarth, the eldest daughter of George Hogarth, editor of the Evening Chronicle, the man who first paid him to write some of the short stories which later became known as Sketches by Boz. The date of their first meeting is not recorded, but in February 1835, Dickens felt he knew Catherine well enough to invite her to his twenty-third birthday party. After the party, she wrote to a cousin, ‘Mr Dickens improves greatly on acquaintance’. By the following December they were preparing for their wedding. It was at that Christmas of 1835 that Charles Dickens wrote his very first Christmas story. It was entitled Christmas Festivities and was published in the weekly newspaper Bell’s Life in London, on 27 December. A few weeks later it was published as part of Sketches by Boz, under the new title of A Christmas Dinner. The story begins with the words, ‘Christmas time! That man must be a misanthrope indeed, in whose breast something like a jovial feeling is not roused – in whose mind some pleasant associations are not awakened – by the recurrence of Christmas.’ In th
e story, Dickens describes a family party, at which prejudices and resentments are all healed by the spirit of Christmas. It ends with the words:

  ‘And thus the evening passes, in a strain of rational good-will and cheerfulness, doing more to awaken the sympathies of every member of the party in behalf of his neighbour, and to perpetuate their good feeling during the ensuing year, than half the homilies that have ever been written, by half the Divines that have ever lived.’

  ‘The Christmas family-party ... is an annual gathering of all the accessible members of the family, young or old, rich or poor; and all the children look forward to it, for two months beforehand, in a fever of anticipation. Formerly, it was held at grandpapa’s; but grandpapa getting old, and grandmamma getting old too, and rather infirm, they have given up house-keeping, and domesticated themselves with uncle George; so, the party always takes place at uncle George’s house, but grandmamma sends in most of the good things, and grandpapa always WILL toddle down, all the way to Newgate-market, to buy the turkey, which he engages a porter to bring home behind him in triumph, always insisting on the man’s being rewarded with a glass of spirits, over and above his hire, to drink “a merry Christmas and a happy new year” to aunt George. As to grandmamma, she is very secret and mysterious for two or three days beforehand, but not sufficiently so, to prevent rumours getting afloat that she has purchased a beautiful new cap with pink ribbons for each of the servants, together with sundry books, and pen-knives, and pencil-cases, for the younger branches; to say nothing of divers secret additions to the order originally given by aunt George at the pastry-cook’s, such as another dozen of mince- pies for the dinner, and a large plumcake for the children.’

  Charles Dickens, Christmas Festivities (1835)

  That year, Dickens worked throughout the twelve days of Christmas, trying to earn as much money as possible before getting married. He ended the year and began the new one by writing another sketch entitled The New Year, which was also published in Bell’s Life in London. It was written on New Year’s Eve itself, as he explained in a note to his friend Thomas Mitton, ‘Dear Tom, I am at home to-night and alone. I am writing as I was when I last saw you, but Fred is disengaged for a rubber at Cribbage, and I shall be very happy to see you.’

  ‘The New Year’ begins with the words:

  ‘Next to Christmas-day, the most pleasant annual epoch in existence is the advent of the New Year. There are a lachrymose set of people who usher in the New Year with watching and fasting, as if they were bound to attend as chief mourners at the obsequies of the old one. Now, we cannot but think it a great deal more complimentary, both to the old year that has rolled away, and to the New Year that is just beginning to dawn upon us, to see the old fellow out, and the new one in, with gaiety and glee.’

  The next twelve months in Charles Dickens’s life were to prove extraordinarily successful: he would become known as the author of Sketches by Boz and The Pickwick Papers and would write a ‘comic burletta’, The Strange Gentleman and the words for an opera, The Village Coquettes.

  In preparation for his marriage, Charles moved into 15, Furnival’s Inn, a larger apartment, where there was room for him and Catherine, as well as for Fred Dickens and Catherine’s younger sister, Mary Hogarth. The wedding took place on 2 April 1836 at the Hogarth family’s parish church, St Luke’s, in Chelsea. It was, according to the best man, Thomas Beard, ‘altogether a very quiet piece of business’. Henry Burnett, who would later marry Fanny Dickens, wrote of the wedding, ‘… all things passed off very pleasantly, and all seemed happy, not the least so Dickens and his young girlish wife. She was a bright, pleasant bride, dressed in the simplest and neatest manner.’

  Their first child was conceived on the honeymoon and, by Christmas, Catherine was due to give birth. While she prepared for the baby, her husband must have reflected on the past year; he had married, was about to become a father, had become recognised as an author and had entered the world of the theatre, when The Strange Gentleman and The Village Coquettes were performed at the St James’s Theatre. That December, as he worked towards his deadlines with an awareness of impending fatherhood, he declined an invitation with the words, ‘I am so engaged with my respectable friend Pickwick (on whom I have only just commenced) that I cannot get out this week, even to the Theatre.’

  At the end of December 1836, Dickens wrote to Thomas Beard:

  ‘We propose giving the Turkey until 4 tomorrow, in order that he may be well done. Be punctual .... I arrived home at one oClock this morning dead drunk, & was put to bed by my loving missis. We are just going to Chapman’s sisters’ quadrille party, for which you may imagine I feel remarkably disposed.’

  Charles Culliford Boz Dickens was born on 6 January 1837, and both of his grandmothers rushed to Furnival’s Inn to help the new mother. Mary Hogarth wrote to a cousin that her brother-in-law was ‘kindness itself to [Catherine], and is constantly studying her comfort’. For Catherine, this was a very difficult time as she suffered – and would continue to do so following the births of their future children – from what would be recognised today as postnatal depression. Charley (as the baby quickly became known) was to be the eldest of ten children. Between 1837 and 1852, Catherine would give birth to seven sons and three daughters (as well as suffering at least two miscarriages).

  That Charley was born on Twelfth Night, made the holiday even more special in the Dickens family. Although in most households the celebrating of Twelfth Night diminished steadily throughout Queen Victoria’s reign, the Dickens family held a party every year for the double celebration of Twelfth Night and Charley’s birthday. Mamie Dickens, Charley’s younger sister, recalled these children’s parties in her memoirs:

  ‘Miss Coutts, now the Baroness Burdett Coutts, was in the habit of sending my brother, on this his birthday anniversary, the most gorgeous of Twelfth-cakes, with an accompanying box of bonbons and Twelfth Night characters. The cake was cut, and the favors and bonbons distributed at the birthday supper, and it was then that my father’s kindly, genial nature overflowed in merriment.’

  In 1849, the Illustrated London News gave a lavish description of the royal household’s Twelfth Night celebrations, beginning with a visit to the theatre, followed by eating an enormous Twelfth Cake:

  ‘... designed and carried out by her Majesty’s confectioner, Mr. Mawditt. The Cake was of regal dimensions, being about 30 inches in diameter, and tall in proportion: round the side the decorations consisted of strips of gilded paper, bowing outwards near the top, issuing from an elegant gold bordering. The figures, of which there were sixteen, on the top of the Cake, represented a party of beaux and belles of the last century enjoying a repast al fresco, under some trees; whilst others, and some children, were dancing to minstrel strains.’

  Yet despite enjoying such celebrations, it was alleged that Queen Victoria felt the celebrating of Twelfth Night encouraged drunkenness and debauchery and wanted the emphasis on public celebration to be shifted from Twelfth Night to Christmas Day. By the end of her reign, the Christmas season had been reduced from twelve days down to three; Christmas Eve, Christmas Day and Boxing Day (26 December). Although, as The Times reported in 1877, the change was not effective in ending antisocial behaviour:

  ‘Christmas is threatened by the multitude that choose to honour and observe it in their own way … Christmas for a large part of the people recalls the pagan Saturnalia without even the picturesque forms and social graces of paganism. The devotees reel about the streets, make nights hideous, turn their houses upside down, and crowd the police court …’

  Perhaps it is fortunate that Dickens was no longer alive by the time that the government attempted to crush the celebrating of Twelfth Night. In 1871, a year after his death, the Bank Holidays Act was passed, which gave official recognition to four bank holidays, on which everyone was permitted the day off work. The four holidays were: Easter Monday; the Monday in Whitsun week (May); the first Monday in August; and Boxing Day, unless 26 December fell at a w
eekend, if so, the holiday would be the first weekday after that day. This Act made it mandatory for employers to give their workers paid holidays for four days of the year, and was seen as a step forward in workers’ rights, especially for those who had bad employers attempting not to permit their workers any time off. Although this new Act did not prohibit celebrating Twelfth Night celebrations, it did not include the holiday in the official British Calendar, and this contributed to the decline of Twelfth Night celebrations. On 5 November 1873, the London Evening Standard mourned this and other changes:

  “A curious history might be written of our old English holidays, of their origin, of the period of their full glory, and of their final disappearance …There was once, for instance, a time when every red-letter day in the Calendar was a holiday; and even now Michaelmas-day still has its recognised place in our business books, although as a festival it has long since disappeared. May-day would be entirely forgotten were it not for the fact that in some of our larger towns and cities the chimney-sweepers make it the occasion of an annual appeal to their customers for a gratuity. Twelfth-night would have long since faded from our list of Christmas gatherings did not the memory of its ancient glories still survive in the custom of Twelfth-cakes for the children. Indeed, almost all our old holidays have been, to all intents and purposes, superseded by the modern institution of Bank Holidays.’

  In many parts of the British Isles, Boxing Day was the day on which the servants were given time off, after working very hard on Christmas Day. The name ‘Boxing Day’ comes from the tradition of servants and other workers, such as rubbish collectors and chimney sweeps, being given ‘Christmas boxes’; sometimes these were presents, but more usually they were parcels of money. Boxing Day was also the day on which the charity boxes (or ‘alms boxes’), placed in churches, were opened and the money was given out to the poor of the parish. For working-class people who were not domestic servants, Christmas Eve and Boxing Day were normal working days and, as Dickens would emphasise in A Christmas Carol, many working people were also expected to work on Christmas Day. Ebenezer Scrooge berates Bob Cratchit for wanting Christmas Day as a holiday and claims the practice of giving workers a paid day was a form of ‘picking a man’s pocket every 25th of December’.