A hundred and seventy one years and two days ago, Charles Dickens first published A Christmas Carol. Like many others, my Christmas always starts with him. People say Dickens invented Christmas: he didn’t – though he aided its revival. Britain’s newly urban population didn’t have much energy or opportunity to celebrate it, thanks to the extremely un-festive combination of long hours of unregulated industrial toil and displacement from the rural communities they’d grown up in. Dickens was the most successful of numerous cultured Victorians keen to revive the season, both out of nostalgia for the (more fondly than accurately) remembered country Christmases of yore and a sense of social conscience.
Many of our ideas about what makes a merry Christmas (including the phrase itself) were his first. Dickens placed charity at the heart of the season and made us hope for snow. In his imagination Christmas was always white, which his biographer Peter Ackroyd puts down to the eight unusually cold, happy winters of his boyhood, before his father, John, ended up in debtor’s prison.
A Christmas Carol was an instant hit. It didn’t make Dickens rich (the author’s fault – he insisted on the idealistic combination of top-spec packaging and a low price. It was the Blue Monday of its day) but it forever tied him to the season. He wrote four further Christmas books and many festive essays in his journal All The Year Round. Not all of Dickens’s ideas about Christmas stuck, though, so while it’s always a pleasure to pinpoint the origin of traditions we now consider non-negotiable, his assertions that didn’t take fascinate me even more. Here are a few of my favourites.
Dickens was insistent that Christmas necessitated ghost stories. In fairness, it’s hard to think of a more famous ghost story than A Christmas Carol, but Marley and the spirits are the only spooks that are truly synonymous with the season.
Death in general was integral to the Dickensian Christmas concept. He first covered the topic in The Pickwick Papers. Then in 1851, when he lost his father (whose strengths and failings inspired many of his heroes, from Scrooge to Micawber), his daughter Dora, his sister and her son with disability all in the same year, he wrote the poignant and beautiful What Christmas Is As We Grow Older (I highly recommend it if you’re having a crappy Christmas of any sort). In it he insists we remember the dead on this day more than any other.
It’s pretty hard not to remember the dead at Christmas, but Dickens goes further. He is adamant that we should use the day to celebrate other losses, like our failures, abandoned plans and ruined relationships. In the same essay he says: “Welcome, old aspirations, glittering creatures of an ardent fancy… Welcome, all that was ever real to our hearts; and for the earnestness that made you real, thanks to Heaven!” Every time I read it I wonder why we don’t do more of that. We love the idea of Scrooge’s transformation, but this kind of self-acceptance and equanimity is probably more useful to most people.
Finally, as well as death and failure, there are goblins. We have elves, but they’re way cuter and a lot more helpful. The Story of the Goblins Who Stole a Sexton inspired A Christmas Carol, and The Chimes (the Christmas novella Dickens followed up with the year after) is quite goblin-heavy, too. Interestingly goblins are part of festive lore in Scandinavia, south-eastern Europe and Anatolia. There, the “kallikantzaros” live underground, but emerge during the 12 days of Christmas to wreak havoc upon mankind. You have to leave a colander on your doorstep to keep them away.
So if you want to experience the authentic Dickensian Christmas don’t forget to include some death, a little failure and a goblin or two along with your partridge in a pear tree. Man, Christmas is weird.
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