BAH, HUMBUG!
A Christmas Carol turned author Charles Dickens into his own Scrooge
“Mr. Dickens stirs the gravy,” reported a rapt member of the audience at a reading of A Christmas Carol by the author in December 1867. The auditorium was packed. “(He) mashes the potatoes with something of Master Peter’s ‘incredible vigour,’ dusts the hot plates as Martha did, and makes a face of infinite wonderment and exultation when shouting, in the piping tones of the two youngest Cratchits, ‘There’s such a goose, Martha!’”
A Christmas Carol, concerning the miserly Ebenezer Scrooge and his conversion to yuletide generosity, was 24 years old by the time this particular performance took place — and a firm fixture on the British Christmas circuit. The novel, with its beautiful illustrations by John Leech, had flown from booksellers’ shelves when it first came out on Dec. 19, 1843 — its entire print run of 6,000 copies gone by Christmas Eve.
Later holiday editions sold at the same remarkable rate. It was, said one contemporary commentator, “a national benefit.” Another called it “an institution” and indeed, the Carol, as it’s known by its devotees, has haunted us ever since. It remains the most filmed and Tv-adapted of all Charles Dickens’s works. There’s yet another version coming to FX on Dec. 19, starring Guy Pearce and produced by Tom Hardy.
It’s a surprise to learn, then, that by the time Dickens was standing on that gaslit stage in 1867, he had developed a Scrooge-like aversion to Christmas, adopting a position sympathetic to the curmudgeonly character who calls for “every idiot who goes about with ‘Merry Christmas’ on his lips” to be “boiled with his own pudding, and buried with a stake of holly through his heart.”
“I fear I am sick of the thing,” Dickens wrote in 1868 to his friend, the journalist and editor William Henry Wills, in a letter featured in a new exhibition at the Charles Dickens Museum. To the actor Charles Fechter, he wrote later the same year: “I feel as if I had murdered the ghost of ... Christmas ... years ago (perhaps I did!), and its ghost perpetually haunted me.”
Dickens is often credited with inventing Christmas as we know it.
As early as the 1820s, there had been a market for “gift books” — prettily illustrated annuals of poetry and short stories bound in red silk with gilt-edged pages that came out in December, for the Christmas market. Forget Me Not and The Keepsake were two of the most successful. Dickens, along with other serious writers of the day such as Lord Byron and Mary Shelley, would contribute pieces to these gift books. In 1835, he wrote a Christmas-themed essay, brimming with goodwill, for the weekly newspaper Bell’s Life in London. “Would that Christmas lasted the whole year through (as it ought)!” he writes.
His relish for the season can be traced back to his grandparents, who were servants at Crewe Hall, a stately home in Cheshire renowned for its Christmas festivities. Later, Dickens’s father, John, would stage lively plays for the immediate family each Christmas, a tradition Dickens himself would continue, putting on his own theatrical performances — along with a Boxing Day cricket match — for friends and family at Gad’s Hill, his country house in Kent. His daughter, Mamie, recalled that the entire
household “looked forward to (Christmas) with eagerness and delight, and to my father it was a time dearer than any part of the year.”
Until he wrote A Christmas Carol, Dickens had tended to publish his books in serial, “and with good reason. It had really worked for him,” says Price. “But when he conceived of the Carol, he wanted a book that people could gift: something that was compact and really beautiful. He put his heart and soul into it.”
But hand-coloured illustrations and gilt-edged paper come at a cost. The result was a book that made far less profit for Dickens than he had hoped — just over £100, when he had envisioned something nearer to £1,000. For the four other Christmas stories that he would go on to write — The Chimes (1844), The Cricket on the Hearth (1845), The Battle of Life (1846) and The
Haunted Man (1848) — he settled for black-and-white illustrations.
For further proof Dickens’s Christmas cheer had begun to curdle, we need only look to his bleaker, later writings. In Great Expectations (1861), Pip’s Christmas consists of a terrifying encounter with an escaped convict, being forced into stealing food, followed by an excruciating Christmas dinner in which he is near-paralyzed by fear of discovery.
Dickens’s mood, at an even later stage of his life, can be gleaned from a letter sent in 1869 — the year before he died — after a turkey had failed to reach him by Christmas Eve. “WHERE/ IS/ THAT/ TURKEY?/IT/ HAS/ NOT/ ARRIVED/ !!!!!!!!!!! ” he wrote to friend and theatre manager George Dolby. He might as well have signed off “Bah! Humbug!”