Dickens and Christmas Read online

  Mary Weller also reminisced about Charles and Fanny performing together with ‘Fanny accompanying the Pianoforte … A rather favourite piece for recitation by Charles at this time [around 1819] was “The Voice of the Sluggard” from Dr. Watts, and the little boy used to give it with such great effect, and with such action and such attitudes.’ The Dickens family was very fond of music, and Christmases in their household centred around music, singing and dancing.

  When the family lived in Chatham, in Kent, John and Elizabeth Dickens became friendly with Mr Tribe, the landlord of the Mitre pub. Many years later, Mr Tribe remembered the children dancing together and singing sea shanties. Charles Dickens had recollections of he and Fanny being lifted onto one of the tables in the middle of the pub, to use as their stage, and of singing a song called ‘The Cat’s Meat Man’. When Dickens became famous, regulars to the Mitre often boasted of having witnessed the Dickens children perform. As an adult, Dickens commented to his friend John Forster that he must have seemed annoyingly precocious to those adults expected to watch him, although Mary Weller described him as having been ‘a lively boy of a good, genial, open disposition, and not quarrelsome as most children are at times’.

  In his 1858 Christmas story, The Holly Tree, Dickens drew upon these childhood memories, writing:

  ‘There was an inn in the Cathedral Town where I went to school, that had pleasanter recollections about it … It has an ecclesiastical sign … the Mitre, … and a bar, that seemed to be the next best thing to a bishopric, it was so snug. I loved the landlord’s youngest daughter to distraction, – but let that pass. It was in this inn that I was cried over by my rosy little sister, because I had acquired a black eye in a fight. And though she had been, that holly-tree night, for many a long year where all tears are dried, the Mitre softened me yet.’

  “Many of the hearts that throbbed so gaily then have ceased to beat; many of the looks that shone so brightly then, have ceased to glow; the hands we have grasped have grown cold; the eyes we sought have hid their lustre in the grave; and yet the old house, the room, the merry voices and smiling faces, the jest, the laugh, the most minute and trivial circumstances connected with those happy meetings, crowd upon our mind at each recurrence of the season, as if the last assemblage had been but yesterday! Happy happy Christmas, that can win us back to the delusions of our childish days; that can recall to the old man the pleasures of his youth; that can transport the sailor and the traveller, thousands of miles away, back to his own fireside and his quiet home!

  Charles Dickens, The Pickwick Papers (1837)

  CHAPTER TWO

  Deck the Halls

  “Would that Christmas lasted the whole year through, and that the prejudices and passions which deform our better nature, were never called into action among those to whom, at least, they should ever be strangers.”

  Charles Dickens, Christmas Festivities (1835)

  There is a strangely prevalent belief that the British did not celebrate Christmas in any memorable way until after the marriage of Queen Victoria and Prince Albert (who is usually credited with bringing Germanic Christmas traditions to Britain), and the arrival of Charles Dickens’s Christmas Books in particular. Contemporary accounts from centuries before Dickens was born show this to be untrue, such as this account from a Swiss traveller, living in England in the 1720s:

  ‘Christmas day is the great festival of all Christian nations but on that day the English have many customs we do not know of. They wish each other a Merry Christmas and A Happy new Year; presents are given and no man may dispense with this custom. On this festival day churches, the entrances of houses, rooms, kitchens and halls are decked with laurels, rosemary and other greenery. Everyone from the King to the artisan eats soups and Christmas pies. The soup is called Christmas porridge and is a dish few foreigners find to their taste… as to Christmas pies everyone likes them and they are made with chopped meat, currants, beef suet and other good things. You never taste these dishes except for two or three days before and after Christmas and I cannot tell you the reason why.’

  In Regency England, the celebrating of Christmas included decorating the house with greenery, playing games, singing, dancing, eating special Christmas foods and giving gifts if the family could afford to do so. The Dickens family would not, however, have had a Christmas tree, nor would they have expected a visit from Father Christmas. The first known British Christmas tree is attributed to Queen Charlotte, the German wife of King George III, who is said to have brought a Christmas tree from Germany after her marriage in 1761. In 1800, the elderly queen held a party for the children of her court at the Queen’s Lodge, in Windsor. The tree she decorated for the children was a yew tree, onto which was attached lighted candles, and bundles of sweets, almonds and fruit. During Charles Dickens’s childhood, Christmas trees were barely known in Britain, outside the royal court.

  The figure of Father Christmas was little known in Britain before the Victorian age. A Father Christmas character could be seen in traditional mummers’ folk dances and he makes an appearance in Ben Jonson’s comedy ‘masque’ written for King James I, but he was not the same benign Father Christmas who grew out of the legend of St Nicholas and Santa Claus. Although Clement Clarke Moore’s poem ‘A Visit from St Nicholas’ (better known today as ‘’Twas the Night Before Christmas’) was published in America 1822, when Charles was ten years old, it was almost unknown in Britain. The image of a jolly, round old man with a beaming smile and thick white beard who brings presents to children on Christmas Eve did not become popular in Britain until the second half of the nineteenth century.

  During Charles’s childhood, the Christmas season lasted from Christmas Eve (24 December) until Twelfth Night (6 January). In the Christian church, 6 January is commemorated as the feast of Epiphany, the day on which the three wise men, or three kings, arrived at the stable in Bethlehem to visit the newborn baby Jesus. In 1756, during the reign of King George II, The Gentleman’s Magazine reported that ‘His Majesty, attended by the principal officers at Court … went to the Chapel Royal at St James’ and offered gold, myrrh and frankincense.’ By the nineteenth century, however, these religious celebrations on 6 January had become almost forgotten, outside of the church itself. By the time of Charles Dickens’s birth, the celebration of Twelfth Night in Britain was much more closely associated with parties and drinking, than with the original religious holiday.

  There is often debate about when Twelfth Night should fall, as the twelfth evening after Christmas Day is actually 5 January. The diaries of the seventeenth century courtier Samuel Pepys, however, show that he celebrated it on 6 January, except for in those years when it fell on a Sunday, when celebrations were deferred until the Monday. Dickens’s letters also show that his family celebrated on 6 January.

  For many centuries, it was traditional for leaders of the Twelfth Night revels to be chosen and named as the ‘King’ and ‘Queen; as such, it was in their power to dictate what the rest of the gathered party should do. Traditionally, these monarchs were chosen by chance; everyone present at a party would be given a slice of what was known as Twelfth Cake, inside which had been baked a dried bean and a dried pea. Whoever discovered these in their slice of cake became a monarch: getting the dried bean meant being the king and the dried pea meant being the queen. This quotation from Robert Herricke’s poem Twelfe Night, or King and Queene (c.1630s) shows that this was common in the seventeenth century:

  “Now, now the mirth comes

  With the cake full of plums,

  Where Beane’s the King of the sport here;

  Besides we must know,

  The Pea also

  Must revell, as Queene, in the Court here.”

  A seventeenth century recipe book, A True Gentlewoman’s Delight (1653) by Elizabeth Grey, the Countess of Kent, includes a recipe for a ‘spice cake’, the type of cake used to create a Twelfth Cake:

  ‘Take one bushel of Flower, six pound of Butter, eight pound of Currans, two pints of Cr
eam, a pottle of Milk, half a pint of good Sack, two pound of Sugar, two ounces of Mace, one ounce of Nutmegs, one ounce of Ginger, twelve yolkes, two whites, take the Milk and Cream, and stirre it all the time that it boyles, put your Butter into a bason, and put your hot seething Milk to it, and melt all the Butter in it, and when it is bloud-warm temper the Cake, put not your Currans in till you have made the paste, you must have some Ale yest and forget not Salt.’

  Samuel Pepys, a contemporary of the culinary countess, also wrote about Twelfth Night. On 6 January 1663, he recorded:

  ‘6th (Twelfth Day). Up and Mr. Creed brought a pot of chocolate ready made for our morning draft, and then he and I to the Duke’s, but I was not very willing to be seen at this end of the town, and so returned to our lodgings, and took my wife by coach to my brother’s, where I set her down, and Creed and I to St. Paul’s Churchyard, to my bookseller’s, and looked over several books with good discourse, and then into St. Paul’s Church … So to my brother’s, where Creed and I and my wife dined with Tom, and after dinner to the Duke’s house, and there saw “Twelfth Night” acted well, though it be but a silly play, and not related at all to the name or day…. This night making an end wholly of Christmas, with a mind fully satisfied with the great pleasures we have had by being abroad from home, and I do find my mind so apt to run to its old want of pleasures, that it is high time to betake myself to my late vows, which I will tomorrow, God willing, perfect and bind myself to, that so I may, for a great while, do my duty, as I have well begun, and increase my good name and esteem in the world, and get money, which sweetens all things, and whereof I have much need. So home to supper and to bed, blessing God for his mercy to bring me home, after much pleasure, to my house and business with health and resolution to fall hard to work again.’

  In 1665, Pepys wrote rather irritably in his diary that his wife and her friends had continued the Twelfth Night party long after he had decided to go to bed and that his wife didn’t go ‘to bed at all’. In 1669, Pepys wrote with relish about their Twelfth Cake and his family’s Twelfth Night revels:

  ‘… very merry we were at dinner, and so all the afternoon, talking, and looking up and down my house; and in the evening I did bring out my cake – a noble cake, and there cut it into pieces, with wine and good drink: and after a new fashion, to prevent spoiling the cake, did put so many titles into a hat, and so drew cuts; and I was the Queene; and The. Turner, King – Creed, Sir Martin Marr-all; and Betty, Mirs Millicent: and so we were mighty merry till it was night; and then, being moonshone and fine frost, they went home, I lending some of them my coach to help carry them, and so my wife and I spent the rest of the evening in talk and reading, and so with great pleasure to bed.’

  By the time of Charles’s first Christmas, in 1812, the dried bean and pea tradition had, mostly, been phased out and instead the Twelfth Night king and queen were chosen by a variety of different methods, including a lottery during which names would be chosen from a hat, or by the monarchs being voted in by their friends. Twelfth Night parties had also expanded so that everyone present had a role to play, not just the king and queen. Guests would be allotted characters and would have to dress up and act out their role, letting the other guests guess whom they were supposed to be. Entrepreneurial printers were quick to capitalise on this and posters, pamphlets and packs of cards were available to buy, often from bakers’ shops, which detailed the types of characters that could be allotted to Twelfth Night revellers.

  A description of a Twelfth Night party written by Jane Austen’s niece, Fanny Austen Knight, dates from 1809, the year in which John and Elizabeth Dickens were married:

  ‘[Aunt Louisa] who was the only person to know the characters … took [them] one by one out of the room, & having equipped them, put them into separate rooms, and lastly dressed herself. We were all conducted into the library and performed our different parts. Papa & the little ones from Lizzy downwards knew nothing of it & it was so well managed that none of the characters knew one another … we had such frightful masks, that it was enough to kill one with laughing at putting them on & altogether it went off very well.’

  Jane Austen’s novels were published during the first years of Dickens’ life and, although Christmas does not feature strongly in her books, there is a general impression of the Christmas season in the 1810s being one of parties and feasting. In Emma, published in 1815, when Charles was three years old, Mr Elton comments:

  ‘Christmas weather … Quite seasonable; and extremely fortunate we may think ourselves that it did not begin yesterday, and prevent this day’s party, which it might very possibly have done … This is quite the season indeed for friendly meetings. At Christmas every body invites their friends about them, and people think little of even the worst weather. I was snowed up at a friend’s house once for a week. Nothing could be pleasanter. I went for only one night, and could not get away till that very day se’nnight.’

  Such a snowy scene would have been reminiscent of Dickens’s own childhood Christmases, as the 1810s was the coldest decade recorded in England since the 1690s. Between 1812 and 1820 six ‘white Christmases’ were recorded (with either snow or a thick frost on the ground). This may be one reason why Dickens was so fond of writing snowy Christmassy scenes in his fiction.

  As Charles was one of eight children (two of whom died in infancy), the Christmas scenes at the Dickens family home would have been similar to a scene in Jane Austen’s Persuasion (1817), published when he was five:

  ‘On one side was a table occupied by some chattering girls, cutting up silk and gold paper; and on the other were tressels and trays, bending under the weight of brawn and cold pies, where riotous boys were holding high revel; the whole completed by a roaring Christmas fire, which seemed determined to be heard, in spite of all the noise of the others.’

  The celebrating of a festival in the middle of winter dates back millennia and has mutated, grown and shrunk, according to governments, religions and social pressures. The tradition of British people decorating their homes with greenery dates back to pagan times, the pre-Christian celebrations of the Winter Solstice and the Roman festival of Saturnalia. Long before Christianity came to Britain, it was common practice to bring greenery into the home and to burn yule logs in the hearth; a precursor of Christmas decorations and candles. It was believed to be bad luck if the yule log was allowed to burn out before the twelve days of Christmas had finished. For many centuries, it was also believed to be bad luck to decorate a home before Christmas Eve, and in Britain, it was said that leaving decorations up after the end of Twelfth Night was also a bad omen, although in many Catholic countries, Christmas decorations are habitually left in place until Candlemas on 2 February.

  The British Christmas suffered a sharp setback during the time of the Interregnum (1649-60) when the celebrating of Christmas was seen as “giving liberty to carnal and sensual delights”. The festivities were banned, traders were ordered to keep working on 25 December and people were expected to fast on Christmas Day. People who wanted to hold religious services, celebratory dinners or family parties at Christmas had to do so in secret or risk having legal penalties imposed on them. In 1660, the shortlived English republic came to an end and King Charles II – son of the executed King Charles I – was crowned. During his reign, the celebration of Christmas became important again. Not everyone was happy about this new style of celebrating Christmas, however, and many clergymen and lawmakers complained it was a time of increased drunkenness and crime. The celebrating of Christmas continued to grow in popularity over the coming centuries, although it changed as British society changed and each ageing generation complained that Christmas was not as it had been in their childhood. By the beginning of the nineteenth century, there was a feeling that too many Christmas traditions had fallen out of fashion and that a Christmas renaissance was needed.

  In Georgian England, when Dickens was a child, holly, ivy, pine needles and other greenery were used to decorate homes for Christmas, just
as they had been used in pagan times. The Christian church had appropriated many earlier traditions and declared the plants to have religious significance, such as holly being symbolic of Christ’s crown of thorns. If a family could afford it, large swags of greenery would be used to decorate rooms, staircases and windows and to frame paintings and mirrors. Many households also displayed a wreath, but these were usually made of simple greenery; it was not yet the fashion to have the more elaborate decorations which would become popular in Victorian Britain. Mistletoe had long been a popular part of Christmas decorations and Regency cartoons depict couples underneath a ‘kissing bunch’ of mistletoe – although in very religious households, mistletoe was considered scandalous and banned. In Christmas Festivities, the first Christmas story written by Dickens, in 1835, the grandfather tells his grandchildren that he kissed their grandmother under mistletoe when he was still a boy. He also included a mistletoe scene in The Pickwick Papers (1837):