Charles Dickens, Christmas Chronicler

In his 1852 preface to the first one-volume edition of his Christmas Books, Charles Dickens explained what he had originally set out to achieve: “My purpose was, in a whimsical kind of masque which the good humour of the season justified, to awaken some loving and forbearing thoughts, never out of season in a Christian land.”

Dickens’s five “masques” had appeared a decade earlier in single, stand-alone editions. Each one arrived in time for Christmas — and yet not all had a connection with the festival. The Chimes (1844) unfolds on New Year’s Eve. The Cricket on the Hearth (1845) — which as “a fairy tale of home” is indeed “whimsical” — has only a vague winter setting. The Battle of Life (1846), the black sheep of the group, plays out at various points in the year, with its one short snowy scene smacking of at best a token gesture and at worst an afterthought on Dickens’s part.

Only two Christmas Books live up to their name. The Haunted Man (1848) has a well-defined Yuletide backdrop and revolves around a man who sees the error of his ways and recognises the plight of the poor after intervention from a “Phantom”. Sound familiar? For this last Christmas Book, Dickens recycled tried-and-tested features from his first and most accomplished festive offering, A Christmas Carol.

Written feverishly over six weeks and published in December of 1843, the book tells the tale of Ebenezer Scrooge, a misanthropic skinflint who believes that “every idiot who goes about with ‘Merry Christmas’ on his lips, should be boiled with his own pudding, and buried with a stake of holly through his heart.” Over the course of Christmas Eve he is visited by four ghosts who show him where he went wrong and how he might end up. By Christmas Day, Scrooge has turned into a kind and generous man, ready to bestow goodwill to all men and one in particular — his previously browbeaten clerk Bob Cratchit.

The book was a runaway success. All 6,000 published copies were snapped up in one week, and it went through a further five printings in five months. One critic proclaimed it “a national benefit to every man and woman who reads it.” It featured regularly in Dickens’s public readings, including the very last one he gave on 15 March 1869. Now an evergreen classic, it has been widely translated, regularly adapted for stage and screen, and it continues to enchant new readers.

But despite selling well, Dickens made far less money from A Christmas Carol than he might have hoped. His initial disappointment soon curdled into near-hysteria: “Such a night as I have passed!” he wrote to his close friend and biographer John Forster. “I shall be ruined past all mortal hope of redemption.”

Dickens didn’t follow in his father’s footsteps and end up in a debtor’s prison. Instead he kept writing. Each successive Christmas Book might not have dealt directly with Christmas but all were linked by an emphasis on certain themes and values, from family love to home comforts to consideration for those less fortunate. As Dickens wrote in The Haunted Man: “Christmas is a time in which, of all times in the year, the memory of every remediable sorrow, wrong and trouble in the world around us, should be active with us.” The books cemented Dickens’s reputation as a Christmas storyteller. In addition they honed his skill at constructing a narrative and sharpened his social criticism.

First editions of all five Christmas Books can be seen at a fascinating exhibition at the Charles Dickens Museum. “Beautiful Books: Dickens and the Business of Christmas” explores how the author contributed to Christmas in his day, both culturally and commercially, and how his Christmas writings continue to have an impact on the festival. It also examines the new currents and dramatic changes in Victorian society which enabled the public to celebrate the season in new ways — and which allowed Dickens to feed, and corner, the Christmas market.

Unfolding over several floors of Dickens’s Doughty Street townhouse — the London residence where he wrote Oliver Twist and Nicholas Nickleby and began or completed various other works — the exhibition boasts a diverse range of material. The books on display are indeed beautiful: expertly produced reading matter for what was a new consumerist society. The Christmas Books are compact, cloth-bound, blind-stamped and blocked in gold with gilt edges. Their design was important to Dickens. Before starting work on The Battle of Life in 1846, he wrote that he had “already begun to look the little Christmas volume in its small red face.”

Highly decorative both inside and out, Dickens’s Christmas Books were examples of gift books: perfect presents, ideal stocking-fillers. The other nineteenth-century gift books in the exhibition are just as eye-catching. These comprise detailed almanacs, illustrated annuals of short stories and poetry, plus artfully bound and elaborately tooled editions of Pride and Prejudice and Washington Irving’s Sketch Book.

These books, and many of the other non-Dickens-related exhibits, do more than stimulate interest and elicit aesthetic appreciation: they also serve to disabuse us of the belief that Dickens invented Christmas. Instead, he was a canny operator who tapped into the nation’s appetite for seasonal traditions, many of which had originated years earlier. It was back in the eighteenth century that booksellers starting publishing special ranges for purchase over the festive period. The same century saw the rise of children’s books, each one religious or moralistic, and all, according to newspaper advertisements, “very proper for Christmas and New-Year’s Gifts”. The inclusion of the Washington Irving book in the exhibition is apt: the Christmas tales within the Sketch Book — published in 1819-1820 — helped inspire the stories Dickens went on to write in the 1840s.

One of the standout items on show is the world’s first printed Christmas card. As with the publishing world, the printing trade seized an opportunity to capitalise on the purchasing power of Britain’s rapidly expanding middle classes. In 1843, Henry Cole and John Calcott Horsley were tasked with creating a simple but effective hand-coloured greetings card. It featured a family around a table and the message: “A merry Christmas and a happy new year to you” — 1,000 copies were printed and the framed card on display is one of only twenty-one remaining.

Elsewhere in Doughty Street we view memorable artwork, whether exquisitely decorated Christmas envelopes or the Christmas Books’ striking illustrations by Daniel Maclise, Clarkson Stanfield and the brilliant Punch artist John Leech. Taking up a whole wall is a stunning collage of advertisements from the bumper Christmas issue of the Publishers’ Circular, a trade journal for the publishing industry that ran from 1836 to the 1950s.

Certain rooms provide insight into how Dickens celebrated Christmas with his family. The halls are decked with boughs of holly. A sprig of holly adorns the desk in Dickens’s study, as requested each year. The dining room is festooned with ivy and mistletoe, the table lavishly decorated and elegantly set — a faithful imitation of Dickens’s eldest daughter Marnie’s handiwork.

Upstairs we find the drawing room — or what Dickens called “the smallest theatre in the world” — all ready for another session of carols, fireside readings and amateur theatricals. Downstairs in the washhouse we see the “copper” used for boiling clothes, but also, once a year, for boiling Christmas puddings. In Great Expectations Pip tells how he was made to “stir the pudding for next day, with a copper-stick, from seven to eight by the Dutch clock.” In A Christmas Carol, Mrs Cratchit removes from the copper a “speckled cannon-ball” of a pudding which has the smell of “an eating-house, and a pastry cook’s next door to each other, with a laundress’s next door to that!”

In one of the exhibited letters, Dickens writes to his editor in 1868 from his country house in Kent, bewailing a lack of inspiration for his annual Christmas article and what he considers a saturated market: “I can see nothing with my mind’s eye which would do otherwise than reproduce the old string of old stories in the old inappropriate bungling way, which every other publication imitates to death.”

In his later years, Dickens worked hard to say something new about Christmas. But there are no signs of strain in his earlier Christmas writings. In the best of them, Dickens takes pleasure in tickling our ribs and tugging at our heart-strings. He knew how to chronicle Christmas. He also knew how to celebrate it. At the end of A Christmas Carol, we are told that the reformed Scrooge “knew how to keep Christmas well.” Just like his creator.

Beautiful Books: Dickens and the Business of Christmas is exhibited at the Charles Dickens Museum London, until April 19