How Charles Dickens’s “A Christmas Carol” Rescued His Career and Revived Our Holiday Spirits
By Les Standiford
241 pp. Crown Publishers. $19.95
From the NYT's Book Review:
“The Man Who Invented Christmas” is a good title, too catchy to resist, perhaps, as Standiford admits that the public’s extraor[wash my mouth]dinary and lasting embrace of Dickens’s short novel is but one evidence of the 19th century’s changing attitude toward Christmas. In 1819, Washington Irving’s immensely popular “Sketch Book of Geoffrey Crayon, Gent” had “glorified” the “social rites”of the season. Clement Moore’s 1823 poem “The Night Before Christmas” introduced a fat and jolly St. Nick whose obvious attractions eclipsed what had been a “foreboding figure of judgment” as likely to distribute canings as gifts. Queen Victoria and her Bavarian husband, Albert, “great boosters of the season,” had installed a Christmas tree in Windsor Castle each year since 1840, encouraging a fad that spread overseas to America by 1848. In “The Descent of Man” (1871), Charles Darwin announced that celebrants of the season had a more tangible relationship to apes than to annunciations, further secularizing what the Christian church hadn’t conceived but poached (along with Yule logs and stockings to stuff) from German pagan practices.
What is true is that Christmas, more than any other holiday, offered a means for the adult Dickens to redeem the despair and terrors of his childhood.
The months leading up to the publication of “A Christmas Carol” in December 1843 were not happy ones for Dickens. The most popular writer in England — in the world — was falling further into debt as he struggled to support a large family that included his spendthrift father.
Standiford, the author of four other non fiction books, tidily explains the appeal of “A Christmas Carol,” its readership “said at the turn of the 20th century to be second only to the Bible’s.” Replacing the slippery Holy Ghost with anthropomorphized spirits, the infant Christ with a crippled child whose salvation waits on man’s — not God’s — generosity, Dickens laid claim to a religious festival, handing it over to the gathering forces of secular humanism. If a single night’s crash course in man’s power to redress his mistakes and redeem his future without appealing to an invisible and silent deity could rehabilitate even so apparently lost a cause as Ebenezer Scrooge, imagine what it might do for the rest of us!
The popularity of “A Christmas Carol” inspired Dickens to commit himself to writing another and another holiday book, but “The Chimes,” “The Cricket on the Hearth” and “The Battle of Life” couldn’t reproduce the alchemy of their prototype.
By Les Standiford
241 pp. Crown Publishers. $19.95
From the NYT's Book Review:
“The Man Who Invented Christmas” is a good title, too catchy to resist, perhaps, as Standiford admits that the public’s extraor[wash my mouth]dinary and lasting embrace of Dickens’s short novel is but one evidence of the 19th century’s changing attitude toward Christmas. In 1819, Washington Irving’s immensely popular “Sketch Book of Geoffrey Crayon, Gent” had “glorified” the “social rites”of the season. Clement Moore’s 1823 poem “The Night Before Christmas” introduced a fat and jolly St. Nick whose obvious attractions eclipsed what had been a “foreboding figure of judgment” as likely to distribute canings as gifts. Queen Victoria and her Bavarian husband, Albert, “great boosters of the season,” had installed a Christmas tree in Windsor Castle each year since 1840, encouraging a fad that spread overseas to America by 1848. In “The Descent of Man” (1871), Charles Darwin announced that celebrants of the season had a more tangible relationship to apes than to annunciations, further secularizing what the Christian church hadn’t conceived but poached (along with Yule logs and stockings to stuff) from German pagan practices.
What is true is that Christmas, more than any other holiday, offered a means for the adult Dickens to redeem the despair and terrors of his childhood.
The months leading up to the publication of “A Christmas Carol” in December 1843 were not happy ones for Dickens. The most popular writer in England — in the world — was falling further into debt as he struggled to support a large family that included his spendthrift father.
Standiford, the author of four other non fiction books, tidily explains the appeal of “A Christmas Carol,” its readership “said at the turn of the 20th century to be second only to the Bible’s.” Replacing the slippery Holy Ghost with anthropomorphized spirits, the infant Christ with a crippled child whose salvation waits on man’s — not God’s — generosity, Dickens laid claim to a religious festival, handing it over to the gathering forces of secular humanism. If a single night’s crash course in man’s power to redress his mistakes and redeem his future without appealing to an invisible and silent deity could rehabilitate even so apparently lost a cause as Ebenezer Scrooge, imagine what it might do for the rest of us!
The popularity of “A Christmas Carol” inspired Dickens to commit himself to writing another and another holiday book, but “The Chimes,” “The Cricket on the Hearth” and “The Battle of Life” couldn’t reproduce the alchemy of their prototype.
