Les Standiford (20 page)

Patten (1978) is the source of the information regarding the unsold copies of
The Haunted Mansion.

Over time, Dickens's Christmas books not only moved away from any reference to the season but also became less tied to specific social issues and more concerned with the general nature of man. As he put it in his Preface to the first Cheap Edition published in 1852, his purpose in the stories was less “great elaboration of detail” (which he believed could not be achieved within such narrow confines) than it was the construction of “a whimsical kind of masque which the good humor of the season justified, to awaken some loving and forbearing thoughts, never out of season in a Christian land.”

17.

In his
Dickens and Popular Entertainment,
Paul Schlicke quotes one of Dickens's advisers who estimates that the author earned as much as £45,000 from the readings he gave between April of 1858 and his death in 1870. And Forster suggests that in those later years, it was by his readings as much as by his books that the world came to know him. As any number of commentators have pointed out, however, he threw his energies into the performances to such a degree that they as much as anything can be said to have killed him.

Dickens began his readings by assuring audiences that it was quite all right to “give vent to any feeling of emotion.” Cheers or sobs would not disturb him in the slightest, he said. For the typical two-hour performance, everyone should “make themselves as much as possible like a group of friends, listening to a tale told by a winter fire.” It is testament, says Schlicke, that Dickens saw himself first and foremost as a popular entertainer.

Jane Smiley's observations on the pleasure of reading one's works aloud are contained within her fine short study,
Charles Dickens.
Smiley's work is particularly valuable for the insight she brings as an accomplished novelist in her own right. Of Dickens's later years she says, “A novelist's late, eccentric life is analogous to his late eccentric novels. His ties to the mainstream have loosened. His primary job is no longer to be representative, as when he was a young writer looking for a publisher and an audience; it is to be still interesting.”

Perhaps the most intriguing view of Dickens's later life comes though the lens of Claire Tomalin in her study of Ellen Ternan and her relationship with the author,
The Invisible Woman.
Tomalin (1991) is the source for the alternative version of Dickens's passing.

18.

The anecdote of the costermonger's lament on Dickens's death is a favorite of biographers. Watts-Dunton, a contemporary of Tennyson and Swinburne, opened his 1898 poem with a reference to the legend, then closed with a reassurance to Londoners: “City he loved, take courage…Dickens returns on Christmas Day.” (“Dickens Returns on Christmas Day,” in
The Coming of Love and Other Poems
[London and New York: Lane, 1898].)

Robert Louis Stevenson's comments on Dickens's Christmas books are from an undated letter written at Bournemouth, where he was living while working on
Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde
(1886). According to a
New York Times
story of February 5, 1922 (“Stevenson Cried Over Dickens Tale”), the seven-page letter was purchased at auction by William Randolph Hearst, for $1,150. Sold at the same auction was a stuffed raven named Grip that had once belonged to Dickens, for $210.

As proof that in some quarters no good impulse or deed goes uncriticized, Simon Callow passes along accounts of mass feedings of the poor conducted by the Salvation Army in late-nineteenth-century New York, where as many as 25,000 received Christmas dinner. The
Saturday Evening Post
found such charity offensive and laid the blame on Dickens, for, in the opinion of the editors, “A great Christmas dinner, in the minds of many, cancels the charity obligations of the entire year.” Callow also quotes Lord Chesterton in response to suggestions that the practice be stopped: “Doubtless he [Dickens] would have regarded the charity as folly, but he would also have regarded the forcible removal of it as theft.”

S
ELECTED
B
IBLIOGRAPHY

Primary sources

Dickens, Charles.
A Christmas Carol: A Facsimile Edition of the Autograph Manuscript in the Pierpont Morgan Library.
New Haven: Pierpont Morgan Library/Yale University Press, 1993.

Fielding, K. J.
The Speeches of Charles Dickens.
Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1960.

House, Madeline, and Graham Storey.
The Letters of Charles Dickens,
Pilgrim Edition. 12 vols. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1965–2002.

Other editions

Dickens, Charles.
American Notes for General Circulation.
New York: St. Martin's Press, 1985.

______.
The Christmas Books,
vol. 1, edited by Peter Ackroyd. London: Mandarin, 1991.

______.
A Christmas Carol and Other Christmas Writings,
edited by Michael Slater. New York: Penguin, 2002.

______.
Martin Chuzzlewit.
New York: Penguin, 1986.

Biographies

Of the many biographies of Dickens's life, three distinguish themselves: Forster's for being the first and coming from a friend and lifelong associate; Ackroyd's for its comprehensiveness; and Smiley's for its incisiveness.

         

Ackroyd, Peter.
Dickens.
New York: HarperCollins, 1990.

Forster, John.
The Life of Charles Dickens.
3 vols. London: Chapman and Hall, 1872–74.

Smiley, Jane.
Charles Dickens.
New York: Viking, 2002.

Tomalin, Claire.
The Invisible Woman: The Story of Nelly Ternan and Charles Dickens.
New York: Knopf, 1991.

Encyclopedia
(sketches of all things pertaining to Dickens, A–Z)

Oxford Reader's Companion to Dickens,
edited by Paul Schlicke. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1999.

Dickens adaptations and editions

Bolton, Philip H.
Dickens Dramatized.
Boston: G. K. Hall, 1987.

Feather, John.
A History of British Publishing.
New York: Routledge, 1991.

Patten, Robert C.
Charles Dickens and His Publishers.
Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1978.

Dickens and
A Christmas Carol
and the Christmas season

Callow, Simon.
Dickens' Christmas: A Victorian Celebration.
New York: Abrams, 2003.

Davis, Paul.
The Lives and Times of Ebenezer Scrooge.
New Haven: Yale University Press, 1990.

Guida, Fred.
A Christmas Carol and Its Adaptations.
Jefferson, NC: McFarland, 1999.

Hearn, Michael Patrick.
The Annotated Christmas Carol.
New York: W. W. Norton, 2004.

Nissenbaum, Stephen.
The Battle for Christmas.
New York: Knopf, 1997.

Parker, David.
Christmas and Charles Dickens.
New York: AMS, 2005.

And other valuable sources

Baker, William, and Kenneth Womack, eds.
A Companion to the Victorian Novel.
Westport, CT: Greenwood Press, 2002.

The Dickensian.
Journal of the Dickens Fellowship. 1902–present.

Fielding, K. J.
Charles Dickens: A Critical Introduction.
London: Longmans, Green, 1958.

Glavin, John.
After Dickens: Reading, Adaptation, and Performance.
Cambridge, England: Cambridge University Press, 1999.

Hutton, Ronald.
Stations of the Sun: A History of the Ritual Year in Britain.
Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1996.

Irving, John. “The King of the Novel,” in
Trying to Save Peggy Sneed.
New York: Little Brown/Arcade, 1996.

Jaques, E. T.
Charles Dickens in Chancery.
London: Longmans, Green, 1914.

Knight, Charles.
The Popular History of England,
vol. 8:
From the Peace with the United States, 1815, to the Final Extinction of the Corn-Laws, 1849.
London: Warne, 1890.

Lalumia, Christine. “Scrooge and Albert: Christmas in the 1840s.”
History Today,
December 2001: 23 et seq.

Persell, Michelle. “Dickensian Disciple: Anglo-Jewish Identity in the Christmas Tales of Benjamin Farjeon.”
Philological Quarterly
73.4 (1994): 451 et seq.

Phillips, Walter C.
Dickens, Reade and Collins: Sensation Novelists.
New York: Columbia University Press, 1919.

Rogers, Byron. “The Man Who Invented Christmas.”
Sunday Telegraph
(London), December 18, 1988: 16.

Schlicke, Paul.
Dickens and Popular Entertainment.
London: Unwin Hyman, 1988.

A
CKNOWLEDGMENTS

Very special thanks are due to several individuals who helped make this book possible: If I could not find what I was looking for, Addis Beesting, Educational Reference Librarian at Florida International University, could, and in a trice; James W. Hall, my ever-patient friend and literary compass, encouraged me and—as usual—helped me stay on track; bless Rachel Klayman, my editor, for carrying the flag for this book at Crown, and Lucinda Bartley, also at Crown, for her close eye and many helpful suggestions, and Kim Witherspoon, at Inkwell Management, for helping me collect my thoughts and battle plan. And, as always, many thanks to my wife, Kimberly, for her support and understanding—these days I am coming to dinner when it is called.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

L
ES
S
TANDIFORD
is the author of ten novels, as well as the critically acclaimed
Last Train to Paradise, Meet You in Hell,
and
Washington Burning.
Recipient of the Frank O'Connor Award for Short Fiction, he is director of the Creative Writing Program at Florida International University in Miami, where he lives with his wife and three children. Visit his website at
www.les-standiford.com
.

O
THER
N
ONFICTION BY
L
ES
S
TANDIFORD

W
ASHINGTON
B
URNING

How a Frenchman's Vision for Our Nation's Capital

Survived Congress, the Founding Fathers, and the Invading British Army

M
EET
Y
OU IN
H
ELL

Andrew Carnegie, Henry Clay Frick, and the Bitter

Partnership That Transformed America

L
AST
T
RAIN TO
P
ARADISE

Henry Flagler and the Spectacular Rise and Fall of the Railroad That Crossed an Ocean

M
IAMI

City of Dreams

Copyright © 2008 by Les Standiford

All rights reserved.

Published in the United States by Crown Publishers, an imprint of the Crown Publishing Group, a division of Random House, Inc., New York.

www.crownpublishing.com

C
ROWN
and the Crown colophon are registered trademarks of Random House, Inc.

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Standiford, Les.

The man who invented Christmas : how Charles Dickens's A Christmas Carol rescued his career and revived our holiday spirits / Les Standiford.—1st ed.

Includes bibliographical references.

1. Dickens, Charles, 1812–1870. Christmas carol. 2. Christmas stories, English—History and criticism. 3. Christmas—England—History—19th century. 4. Christmas in literature. I. Title.

PR4572.C69S73 2008

823'.8—dc22                                                                                                             2008014978

eISBN: 978-0-307-44973-3

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