Isherwood column: The man who invented Christmas
By Justin Isherwood
“The Man Who Invented Christmas” is a movie, a book, and a scholarly essay, followed after by a flotilla of articles on the Englishman named Charles John Huffam Dickens, he who invented Christmas.
Charles Dickens as an orator carried a studious appearance, a narrow face surmounted by a mound of curly black hair, the impression being of a misplaced crow’s nest. Dickens carried on a beard, a fashion of the time with clean shaven jowls and an elongated goatee, also nest-like.
Dickens, at the height of his fame, read to audiences around the world posed by his waist-high book stand. Behind him a heavy drape and elaborate gas lights brightly illuminating the center stage. While he appeared to be reading to the audience, Dickens was most extemporaneous, having memorized the narratives in a performance that lasted two hours.
A young Mark Twain heard Dickens at Steinway Hall in NYC on New Year’s Eve 1867, describing Dickens as a bad reader – doesn’t enunciate his words, doesn’t cut his syllables. On this particular occasion, Twain was on his first date with Olivia Langdon, whom he would marry two years later.
Dickens earned some two million dollars on his abbreviated second American tour, abruptly ending in Boston, telling his audience, “In this brief life of ours, it is sad to do almost anything for the last time.”
Dickens would die two years later.
The world circumstance of the Christian Christmas, circa 1800, was defined and refined by social Calvinism, a distinct sort of mood inherited from Puritans, Pilgrims, and Cromwellians, whose curt recognition of Christmas was fear-motivated, from some 300 years’ worth – 1347 to 1654 – and the instance of a maelstrom variously labeled: the Black Death, the Plague, the Bubonic Plague.
All these the result of Yersinia pestis, a bacterium carried by fleas and in turn black rats. The name bubonic from the bubo as formed on the groin after the disease’s inoculation. The disease cycle ran 7-21 days, full health at one end to stone dead at the other; with no discrimination, young to old, man, or woman. In the vague vicinity of 70-200 million died in the span of these 300 years. A disease commonly thought the wrath of God, so vengeful as to predict the motives of the Puritans, Calvinists, including the Pilgrims, who did not wish to provoke Providence with excess joy, over-loud carols or too-glad a feasting. Long distant and dangerous were the regales of the Madrigal, lest they too soon join the 60 percent of humanity that died so easily, so mysteriously.
English Christmas circa 1800, pre-Dickens, was a restrained holiday. A low-key affair, perhaps a few muffled carolers, after all they too could be contagious. With the coming of the industrial age the role of the aristocracy had lost its rule. Replaced by entrepreneurs, middle-class business men, industry, shipping, banking; enter from stage left Ebenezer Scrooge. Good Englishman as ghost–haunted Puritans who did not keep or tend Christmas out of an old and well-grounded fear it might provoke God. The poor were some bit inoculated as the poor have always been, because whether God is provoked or not, they suffered, whether by the Black Death or more common starvation.
Whether Charles Dickens invented Christmas is debatable. What is not is that Dickens released Christmas from the gloom of the Plague. Whether Dickens knew it or not, “A Christmas Carol” came as something of a new scientific bargain with the world and maybe God, that the underpinning motive of disease, poverty, bad air, bad water were conquerable. Humankind did not have to tremble before the wrath of a God too easily insulted by Christmas joy and dance. Perhaps Dickens also waged A Christmas Carol with a new and humanizing theological message, that God doesn’t do dirty tricks if disease and poverty might.
Did Dickens invent Christmas? A Christmas Carol published on December 19, 1843, first edition of 6000 copies sold out before Christmas Eve at 5 shillings each or $20. In the year following, five editions would also sell out. In 1844, Charles Dickens took his Christmas Carol and his other invention, the urban novel, on the road; a practice he didn’t cease until 1870, the year he died.
Perhaps it was that Christmas Carol only revived Christmas, less invented than reinvented Christmas. Dickens writing at the same time, same place, same circumstance as Karl Marx, expressed humanitarian hopefulness against the common oppressions of poverty, education, and disease. A Carol singlehandedly dispelled the lingering religious gloom of the Great Death.
Dickens contemporary,William Makepeace Thackery, of the Christmas Carol said, “the story occasioned immense hospitality throughout England, was the means of lighting up hundreds of kind fires at Christmas time.” Adding “at the awful slaughter of Christmas turkeys.”
We might add, credit-card debt.