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Thursday – Christmas
Allow me the parental privilege of recommending an hour-long interview about Dickens’s Christmas Carol with my son Tobias Wilson-Bates, a Victorian literature professor at Georgia Gwinnett College. Bill Nigut of Atlanta’s public radio station WABE talked to Toby about why the story was so popular and why it has remained so. He also asked whether Dickens really did invent Christmas. (You can listen to the interview here.)
Part of Christmas Carol’s popularity, Toby says, lies in how it combined two popular topics of the day, time and ghosts. Toby wrote his dissertation on 19th century time travel literature, and while H.G. Wells’s Time Machine may be the first work that comes to mind, Christmas Carol also involves going backward and forward in time. Toby explains that 19th century Europe was obsessed with time, with railway time, factory time, and business time changing the way people saw themselves. Suddenly people started organizing their lives around pocket watches rather than the sun.
Also, whereas time had once varied from one locale to the next, universal time—necessary so that trains wouldn’t run into each other—prompted people to think of time as tyrannical. Lewis Carroll’s Mad Hatter talks of quarreling with and being bullied by time in Alice in Wonderland.
Ghost stories, meanwhile, were popular around Christmas, it being the darkest season of the year. Toby points out that the ghosts in Christmas Carol show up promptly at various appointed times, as if their wages would be docked if they were late (which almost happens to Bob Cratchit).
In the interview Toby also discusses how shrewd Dickens was in marketing his book, binding it beautifully and having it lavishly illustrated so that it had the look and feel of a present. He also priced it low so that people could buy it for friends. It sold out quickly and, as he self-published, he didn’t have to share the proceeds with a publisher.
While Dickens didn’t invent Christmas with Christmas Carol and, earlier, with The Pickwick Papers, Toby says that he could be said to have reinvented it for the modern industrial age. Although British celebrations of Christmas go back centuries, in the past they were more associated with the landed estates, which up until the 18th century were the largest source of British wealth. The lord of the manor would bring the community together to burn a yule log and engage in games and feasting. We see such a celebration in Shakespeare’s Twelfth Night (1601), and Robert Herrick’s 17th century poem “Ceremonies for Christmas” captures the spirit:
Come, bring with a noise,
My merry, merry boys,
The Christmas Log to the firing;
While my good Dame, she
Bids ye all be free;
And drink to your heart’s desiring.
With the last year’s brand
Light the new block, and
For good success in his spending,
On your Psaltries play,
That sweet luck may
Come while the log is a-tinding.
Drink now the strong beer,
Cut the white loaf here,
The while the meat is a-shredding;
For the rare mince-pie
And the plums stand by
To fill the paste that’s a-kneading.
There were rumblings of discontent, however. Malvolio complains of the merrymaking in Shakespeare’s play, and there were times when celebrations got out of hand. Although the aptly named Sir Toby Belch chastises Malvolio—“Dost thou think because thou art virtuous, there shall be no more cakes and ale?”—and although Sir Andrew Aguecheek calls him “a kind of puritan”—for a while the Puritans would get the last word. When they came to power in 1642, along with closing the theaters they also banned traditional Christmas celebrations.
We can see why from Henry Vaughan’s “The True Christmas.” While no Puritan, Vaughan worried that the religious meaning of the season was getting lost. “The True Christmas” begins with a sarcastic reference to people that wish to restore pagan practices, beginning with Christmas greenery:
So stick up ivy and the bays,
And then restore the heathen ways.
Green will remind you of the spring,
Though this great day denies the thing.
And mortifies the earth and all
But your wild revels, and loose hall.
Could you wear flowers, and roses strow
Blushing upon your breasts’ warm snow,
That very dress your lightness will
Rebuke, and wither at the ill.
My rector recently informed me that there are two approaches to Advent, penitential and anticipatory. Do we emphasize our present sinful condition, as one does in Lent, or (as we do in our church) on the promise of God come to earth? Vaughan feared that, by focusing so much on the spring, we don’t give enough attention to our current state.
Vaughan objects to the celebrations the way people today complain about the commercialization of Christmas. Christ, he says, came to earth to “provide a check to pomp and mirth”:
Not unto music, masque, nor show:
Nor gallant furniture, nor plate;
But to the manger’s mean estate.
His life while here, as well as birth,
Was but a check to pomp and mirth;
And all man’s greatness you may see
Condemned by His humility.
Even Herrick, though a fan of Christmas revels, expresses a similar sentiment in “A New Year’s Gift.” If we all followed his advice, we would ruin businesses reliant on Christmas sales:
Let others look for pearl and gold,
Tissues, or tabbies manifold:
One only lock of that sweet hay
Whereon the blessed Baby lay,
Or one poor swaddling-clout, shall be
The richest New-year’s gift to me.
So how should we celebrate instead? Vaughan concludes his poem by recommending quiet prayerfulness (like “the poor shepherd’s watchfulness”) and by sharing our wealth (“what you abound with”) with “those that want.” We ease our load when we empty ourselves like this:
Then leave your open house and noise,
To welcome Him with holy joys,
And the poor shepherd’s watchfulness:
Whom light and hymns from heaven did bless.
What you abound with, cast abroad
To those that want, and ease your load.
Who empties thus, will bring more in;
But riot is both loss and sin.
Dress finely what comes not in sight,
And then you keep your Christmas right.
Vaughan is not wrong here, providing a necessary corrective to Christmas excess and consumer decadence. But Puritan fundamentalism went too far, as fundamentalism often does, and Charles II would restore some of the old traditions (and also reopen the theaters) when the Puritan interregnum collapsed. Christmas, however, would not regain its old footing until Dickens.
Toby notes that Dickens didn’t do it alone. With industrialization’s assault on nature, it made sense to “stick up ivy and the bays” at this time of year, and Victoria and Albert imported the Christmas tree tradition from northern Europe’s winter solstice celebrations. Dickens’s ghost of Christmas present, meanwhile, is brought to you by the color green:
It was his own room. There was no doubt about that. But it had undergone a surprising transformation. The walls and ceiling were so hung with living green, that it looked a perfect grove; from every part of which bright gleaming berries glistened. The crisp leaves of holly, mistletoe, and ivy reflected back the light, as if so many little mirrors had been scattered there; and such a mighty blaze went roaring up the chimney as that dull petrification of a hearth had never known in Scrooge’s time, or Marley’s, or for many and many a winter season gone.
Herrick and Sir Toby would be pleased with the outlay:
Heaped up on the floor, to form a kind of throne, were turkeys, geese, game, poultry, brawn, great joints of meat, sucking-pigs, long wreaths of sausages, mince-pies, plum-puddings, barrels of oysters, red-hot chestnuts, cherry-cheeked apples, juicy oranges, luscious pears, immense twelfth-cakes, and seething bowls of punch, that made the chamber dim with their delicious steam. In easy state upon this couch there sat a jolly Giant, glorious to see; who bore a glowing torch, in shape not unlike Plenty’s horn, and held it up, high up, to shed its light on Scrooge as he came peeping round the door.
This jolly giant hearkens back to the pagan Green Man. He is introduced as a figure of peace on earth:
[The Spirit] was clothed in one simple deep green robe, or mantle, bordered with white fur. This garment hung so loosely on the figure, that its capacious breast was bare, as if disdaining to be warded or concealed by any artifice. Its feet, observable beneath the ample folds of the garment, were also bare; and on its head it wore no other covering than a holly wreath, set here and there with shining icicles. Its dark-brown curls were long and free; free as its genial face, its sparkling eye, its open hand, its cheery voice, its unconstrained demeanor, and its joyful air. Girded round its middle was an antique scabbard: but no sword was in it, and the ancient sheath waseaten up with rust.
While the description functions as a reproof of those who want an austere and purely Christian Christmas, Dickens’s own religious sentiments are obscure. Tiny Tim may declare, “God bless us everyone,” but Jesus never gets mentioned in Christmas Carol. Dickens’s parable is successful, Toby says, largely because it is partly secular, partly religious, with the religious part hard to pin down. It proved to be unobjectionable to Catholics, Anglicans, and Methodists alike.
Dickens also makes a central part of Christmas’s message a concern for “those that want,” an important message at a time when London’s slum population was exploding. Our modern day Scrooges, meanwhile, need to hear its message as they insist on taxes for themselves while slashing the social safety net and affordable healthcare for the less fortunate. Imagine if they had a Scrooge-like conversion and insisted that they be taxed at a level that would afford a decent standard of living for all.
Now that would be a Christmas Carol worth singing.
