Charles Dickens and The Spooks Who Saved Christmas

Marley's Ghost is the herald of the spirits which will haunt Ebenezer Scrooge's Christmas Eve in this illustration by Arthur Rackham for a popular 1915 edition of A Christmas Carol.

Note—A hardy perennial makes another appearance.  Is it just me, or has our culture, led by Ebenezer Trump elevated unrepentant Scrooge to icon and roll model?

To borrow a phrase from one of the author’s other books, “It was the best of times, it was the worst of times.”  I’m talking about the 1840’s in the early years of what is now recalled, usually through rose colored glasses, as the Victorian Era.  Britain mastered the world unchallenged since the final defeat of Napoleon more than 20 years before.  It presided over a world girdling Empire whose riches and treasures were pouring into the country.  It was ground zero of the industrial revolution, production of every sort of goods was on the upswing, and innovation was making consumer goods cheaper. 

The already very wealthy got wealthier.  So did a limited number of clever commoners.  A middle class, serving the administrative needs of government and corporations, was growing. 

But in the countryside tenant farmers were being evicted to make way for sheep to feed the humming textile mills.  Skilled weavers and other tradesmen found themselves replaced by whirring machines and plunged into poverty.  The displaced made their way with little hope to the teaming cities where they were crammed into unspeakable slums.  There was little chance for work for many of them and they could be—and were—disposed of immediately if they complained about 12 hour days or starvation wages.  Many turned desperately to begging, petty crime, and of course prostitution and vice of every sort.  In London tens of thousands of children lived by their wits on the street. All of these poor folks were considered dangerous, useless burdens who deserved their fate because of a lack of moral fiber, natural indolence, and sloth.  If the Crown had given up on public hangings of 12 year old pickpockets, it was only because there was a whole continent—Australia—to populate with transported prisoners.  Otherwise the jails, workhouses, and cemeteries were filled.

Characteristic of prevailing attitudes was what would happen in Ireland just a handful of years later.  When the potato crop that fed the peasantry failed, British authorities steadfastly refused relief while hundreds of thousands died because charity would “undermine the moral fiber of recipients and sap them of the will to work.”  Sound sort of familiar?

Anyway, this is the England that a successful 31 year old writer named Charles Dickens found himself in.  Once a child of the comfortably middle class when his father failed and was jailed for debt young Charles had been forced to leave his beloved studies and go to work in a shoe blacking factory at age 14.  The experience scarred him deeply and affected his whole world view. 

The slums of London and British industrial cities were filthy, wretched, crowded, and dangerous places in early Victorian England with many actually living on the streets.  The conditions moved Dickens to try to do something about them, but what?

After achieving fame and some level of modest comfort for his serialized novels, The Pickwick Papers and Oliver Twist, Dickens decided to employ his fame to decry the condition and treatment of the poor, with which he was all too familiar.  After a tour of the Cornish mines which employed child laborers in dangerous conditions, and visiting a London ragged School for street urchins, he planned to pen a pamphlet to be called An Appeal to the People of England, on behalf of the Poor Man’s Child.  But finding an audience at a speech in Manchester covering the gist of his planned opus was bored and unresponsive, Dickens abruptly changed his plans.  He would recast the appeal as a fictional story.  

Thus A Christmas Carol was born.  The author hastily scribbled the manuscript in just six weeks, barely finishing in early December 1843 in time to rush the manuscript to publication.

A youthful Charles Dickens in 1839 in the first flush of success as a writer four years before publishing A Christmas Carol.

In setting his fictional appeal at Christmas, Dickens was being doubly counter-cultural.  It seems that the holiday, once the happiest of seasons, had fallen into disrepute and was in actual danger of being officially abolished from the calendar—for the second time. 

Christmastide had once been a popular event, the official occasion of Christ’s supposed birthday folded into ancient traditions from both Druidic and Roman times marked with singing, dancing, general merry making, drinking, and a sort of social-turn-the-tables in which masters and servants switched places for at least a day.  Oliver Cromwell and the scandalized Puritans put an end to that.  They outlawed the holiday and imposed draconian punishment on those discovered trying to celebrate, even in the privacy of their own homes.

Although the Restoration had put the religious celebration back on the calendar, its association with Popery—it was after all Christ’s Mass—discouraged celebration by “loyal” Anglicans and most Protestant Dissenters.  Over the years many customs vanished or were marginalized—the hanging of greens, country dancing, and caroling.  In fact the words for many traditional carols were lost until a fad for folklore began resurrecting them in the early 19th Century.  Christmas Day was generally considered a work day.  Factories and shops were open, as were government offices and courts.  

When German born Prince Albert erected a table-top Christmas tree in the Palace for Queen Victoria and their children he helped energize Christmas as a sentimental, children oriented occasion and spread the introduction of trees on both sides of the Atlantic amid the fashion conscious middle class.  But he also stirred a backlash among powerful conservative Anglicans and most Protestant dissenters who clamored for official abolishment of the holiday because of its supposed Papist and pagan roots.

After seeing some backsliding on Christmas celebrations—Queen Victoria’s  husband Albert, a Christmas loving German princeling, had erected a Christmas Tree at the Palace and the fashionable were taking up the custom—conservative Protestant  leaders energized by new round popular evangelism  and hostility to Catholics—were once again agitating for the holiday to be officially abolished.

Dickens himself was an apostate Anglican with no interest in the religious observation of the Nativity, which had caused the final alienation of his tenuous ties to his family.  He was at this point in his life associating and worshiping with Unitarians, the most radical of all of the Dissenting sects who rejected both the divinity of Christ and miracles like those in the Christmas story as distractions from “pure” Christianity.

He was however, influenced by the stirrings of nostalgia for old time Christmas celebrations which seemed to him to be both more egalitarian and warmer in human sympathy.  Christmas had played a key part in his first success, The Pickwick Papers in which Mr. Wardle relates the tale of Gabriel Grub, a lonely and mean-spirited sexton, who undergoes a Christmas conversion after being visited by goblins who show him the past and future—obviously a seed for his new story.

Without the trappings of religious conversion on which to hang its tale of personal and social redemption, Dickens fell back on elements of spiritualism, which was widely popular, especially in the middle classes at the time and even imbued with some pseudo scientific justification.  Not that Dickens personally believed in communication with the dead, but in the spirit of old time fairy tales, the kind with pointed morals, he was quite willing to employ them as literary devises. Thus was born a Christmas ghost story, as frightening in some parts as any fashionable gothic novel.  But the terror came less from the spirits—despite Jacob Marley’s groans and chains and the fearsome, black, and silent Ghost of Christmas Yet to Come—the familiar specter of Death as depicted since the time of the great Plague—than from the poverty of the Cratchits and their bleak prospects, the alienation of family and love, and the hardening of a miserly heart.

Redemption is accomplished when Scrooge is re-united with his own humanity. 

The first edition of Dicken's privately published  A Christmas Carol.  He fussily rejected the first printing resulting in production costs so high that despite the books immediate popularity, it made the author next to no money.

With, you should pardon the expression, great expectations, Dickens arranged to have an edition printed at his own expense taking as payment from the publisher, Chapman & Hall a percentage of sales rather than the customary lump sum.  He commissioned original engravings for a fine edition, including some tinted with color, to be bound in leather and gilt edged.  He quarreled with the publisher and the book had to be re-made with new end-papers and cover to meet Dickens’s exacting specifications, delaying publication to within days of the holiday.  All of this cut deeply into the profits the author hoped to earn to support his young wife.

 

But the book was finally published on December 19, 1843 and was an immediate popular and critical success.  The first edition sold out almost immediately and seven more were printed the same year.  Pirates soon had cheap paper editions out, which the ever vigilant Dickens fought with law suit after law suit.  He authorized a stage version which premiered in February 1844.  Six other unauthorized productions were soon playing simultaneously in London.

America, except for a handful of fans, was at first cool to the book, largely because the young nation felt insulted by Dickens’s account of his first tour there a year before.  Christmas, especially in New England, was still suspect in much of the country.  But over the next decades that would change.  One after another Christmas traditions were introduced and spread.  By the time Dickens returned for a post Civil War tour, both he and the book were beloved.

Much of Dickens' income came from platform readings of his works and  A Christmas Carol was his favorite.  He staged his las reading in London in 1870 less than three months before his death at age 58.

The little book was always Dickens’ personal favorite.  He staged his first public reading with it in 1858.  Such readings were a principle income for him for the next decades.  His last reading, in ill health on March 15.1870 in London, was a final sharing of A Christmas Carol.  He died in the manor home in Kent which his literary work had earned him, on June 8, 1870 at the age of only 58.

A Christmas Carol has never gone out of print.  It is perennially popular on both sides of the Atlantic and was perhaps the main engine of Christmas becoming a popular, sentimental, and family holiday all over the English speaking world. In addition to countless stage productions there have been at least 28 film versions for theatrical or television release, the first in 1901.  Alistair Sym in the title role of Scrooge in 1951 is thought by many to be the definitive version.  Other notable versions include those with Reginald Owen in 1938, Albert Finney in a 1970 musical, George C. Scott and Patrick Stewart in two notable TV versions, and the horrible Disney disaster with Jim Carey in 2003.

Many consider Alistair Sim in Scrooge, the 1951 British film, to be the definitive performance of the part in the many film and televisions versions.

There have been multiple musical versions, three operas, notable radio broadcasts—especially one with Lionel Barrymore—and several animated versions.  In addition there have been parodies, and just about every TV sitcom that lasts a few seasons eventually does an episode in which a principle character is visited by Christmas ghosts.

Yes, A Christmas Carol, that odd seasonal tale devoid of both traditional religion on one hand and Santa Claus, magical animals, or elves on the other, maintains a grip on our imagination after all these years.  Maybe because it speaks to the real spirit of the holiday better than any other tale.

Louisa May Alcott’s Peek at Emerging American Christmas

The tree that inspired the one in Louisa May Alcott's Little Women was erected at Hillside, the home next to Ralph Waldo Emerson in the late 1840s and was like the one shown in this early illustration for the book, a small table top tree, not the enormous tree depicted in later illustrations and in all of the movie versions.

Christmas won’t be Christmas without any presents, grumbled Jo, lying on the rug.

With those words Louisa May Alcott began the much beloved children’s novel, Little Women.

Louisa Alcott laid her classic tale during the 1860’s Civil War.  In fact, the story is essentially autobiographical and describes Louisa’s own childhood in Concord, Massachusetts in the 1840’s and ‘50’s.  The real reason for the poverty in her home was not that her beloved father, Bronson Alcott was away at war.  It was because he was a starry eyed idealist and dreamer who could not make a living as a school master, the very bottom rung of middle class respectability.  Bronson Alcott was a protégé of Ralph Waldo Emerson who had invited the family to live in a home next door to his own in Concord.

Emerson, known as the Sage of Concord, was at the center of Transcendentalism, an American literary and religious movement related to the German and British Romantics with an overlay of personal mysticism borrowed from a first exposure to Hindu religious texts.   Directly or indirectly Emerson subsidized the Alcott family and kept them from starvation.   Young Louisa idolized Emerson and visited him frequently in his home.  The wealthy Mr. Lawrence, who becomes the March family benefactor in Little Women, was modeled on Emerson, although he was much younger when Louisa was a girl than the man depicted as Mr. Lawrence.

The Little Women family, minus absent Papa, as imagined in the first and finest film version in 1933--Joan Bennet as Amy, Spring Byington as Marmee, Francis Dee as Meg, Jean Parker at the foot-pump organ as Beth, and Katherine Hepburn as the indifadigable Jo, Alcott's stand in.

In Louisa’s novel, by the time the first chapter is over, Jo and her sisters have received a heartwarming lesson in the true meaning of Christmas from their mother, Marmee.  Marmee convinces the girls to gather up the delicacies of their holiday table, very special in this home mired in genteel poverty, and bring them to the hovel of an ill and starving woman and her children.

And the story will conclude several Christmas Days later with the unexpected fulfillment of Jo’s two great dreams—the publication of a novel based on her childhood and the return of the shy Professor Bhaer who had been her mentor and who she secretly loved.

Many readers will be less surprised by the character of this story, than by the revelation that Alcott in Little Women was among the first works in American literature to depict a middle-class family celebrating Christmas day.

In her only portrait as a young woman--the family was, after all impoverished and dependent on the pot boilers she wrote for its main support--Louisa May Alcott stares intently into the camera with large, piercing dark eyes.  She seems a lovely young woman who has forsaken a chance of love to support her family.  Or perhaps it was because as she wroter herself " I have fallen in love with so many pretty girls and never once the least bit with any man."  She also seems to betray her family's darkest secret--decent from Sephardic Jews.

The early Puritans who settled New England despised Christmas for being Papist—Catholic—on the one hand and pagan on the other.  In old England Christmas had devolved into debauchery, drunkenness, and street revelry so, these early Americans banned Christmas celebrations by law.

Thanksgiving, held late in November after the crops were harvested and the snow had fallen, became the New Englanders’ big holiday, not Christmas.  Even after authorities allowed private Christmas observances in homes, they required businesses to stay open and children to attend school on Christmas day.  Most people who valued the respect of the community abstained from celebrating, even privately.

By about the turn of the 19th Century, more folks, and even respectable Congregational Church people, had begun to chafe at the rigid restrictions of Puritanism.   German Romanticism had begun its “warmth-of-heart” influence.  Within the Standing Order of the established Congregationalist Churches two groups began to emerge.  Some congregations split off and became Unitarian.  The Unitarians  and the Transcendentalists who emerged from them in particular warmed to Christmas celebrations.  Whatever the causes, people began to change their attitudes about the holiday.  By the time Louisa was a girl, celebrating Christmas had become a social norm.

Charles--Karl--Follen, the German born Unitarian minister, Harvard proffesor, and intelectual who was a family freind of the Alcotts and introduced the Christmas tree to New England in 1833.  Although he died when Louisa was just eight, she was so smitten by his charisma that she modled Jo's love interest, Prof. Beher, on him.

Charles Follen, a poet and Unitarian minister, who was also a Harvard professor and an immigrant from Germany, had introduced the first Christmas tree to New England in 1832.   The custom caught on.  And he was a friend of Louisa’s family.  Although Follen died in 1840, at 44 years old when Louisa was just 8, he so impressed her that Louisa modeled the love of Jo Marsh’s life, Professor Bhaer, on Follen.

Besides mentioning the greenery and Christmas tree, Alcott made a passing reference to the children hanging their stockings and a visit from Santa Claus.    The Dutch settlers of New York had brought their celebration of St. Nicholas, or Sinterklaus, with them.  An Anglo-New Yorker named Clement Clark Moore had written a poem about St. Nick visiting a home on Christmas Eve that was first published in a Troy, New York newspaper in 1823.  By the 1830s this poem circulated widely.  

Christmas in Louisa’s time, at least in New England, had become a sentimental family holiday centered on children and was little connected to the religious celebration of Christ’s birth.  Most New England Churches still did not offer worship services on that day.

 

Christmas celebrations in the later 19th Century began to be centered more on the birth of Christ with the widespread introduction of crèche scenes and religious carols emerging through large influxes of Catholic and Lutheran immigrants of that period — people who had never had a Puritan interregnum and for whom Christmas had always been a religious festival. 

Christmas has continued to evolve in the 20th and 21st Centuries and to evolve in many different directions, some patently contradictory to others.  Movements to “Put Christ back in Christmas” and the alleged “War on Christmas” are symbolic of just one divide.  And we have both those who enjoy and those who decry its commercialism.  Our ongoing multi-ethnic, multi-national, and multi-faith evolution has caused some to embrace the variety of Festivals of Light common at this time of year in many cultures. Others see that as a threat to their cherished traditions —traditions in many cases not much older than their great grandparents.