On Dec 4, 7:26 am, Jack Linthicum <***@earthlink.net> wrote:
December 7, 2008
Holiday Books
Father Christmas
By KATHRYN HARRISON
THE MAN WHO INVENTED CHRISTMAS
How Charles Dickens’s “A Christmas Carol” Rescued His Career and
Revived Our Holiday Spirits
By Les Standiford
241 pp. Crown Publishers. $19.95
Creamed turkey. Curried turkey. Turkey à la king. Turkey potpies.
Turkey macaroni casserole. . . . If only Ebenezer Scrooge had not, in
the excitement of his transformation from miser to humanitarian,
diverged from the traditional Christmas goose to surprise Bob Cratchit
with a turkey “twice the size of Tiny Tim.” But — alas — he did, and
as “A Christmas Carol” approaches its 165th birthday, a Google search
answers the plaint “leftover turkey” with more than 300,000 promises
of recipes to dispatch it. As for England’s goose-raising industry, it
tanked.
Scrooge. Tiny Tim. Bah, Humbug! “A Christmas Carol” may no longer
effect the “sledgehammer blow” its author intended to bring down “on
behalf of the poor and unfortunate,” but more than a century and a
half after its publication in 1843 it remains one of the rare novels
to have infiltrated popular culture, leaving the impress of its
characters and language and choice of appropriately celebratory fowl
even on those who have never read it or seen one of its countless
stage and film adaptations. Scrooge and his edifying ghosts are so
much a part of Christmas that the idea their creator might actually
have “invented” the holiday as we know it is neither new nor original
to Les Standiford.
“The Man Who Invented Christmas” is a good title, too catchy to
resist, perhaps, as Standiford admits that the public’s extraordinary
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. A writer and his era’s zeitgeist
may be “animated by the same energy and faith,” as Peter Ackroyd
observes in his 1990 biography of Scrooge’s creator, but the idea of
Dickens’s responsibility for what has become an orgy of tinsel and
spending is one he dismisses as humbuggery, the suggestion of “the
more sentimental of his chroniclers.”
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. In 1824, after a series of financial embarrassments drove
his family to exchange what he remembered as a pleasant country
existence for a “mean, small tenement” in London, the 12-year-old
Dickens, his schooling interrupted — ended, for all he knew — was sent
to work 10-hour days at a shoe blacking factory in a quixotic attempt
to remedy his family’s insolvency. Not even a week later, his father
was incarcerated in the infamous Marshalsea prison for a failure to
pay a debt of £40 to a baker. At this, Dickens’s “grief and
humiliation” overwhelmed him so thoroughly that it retained the power
to overshadow his adult accomplishments, calling him to “wander
desolately back” to the scene of his mortification. And because
Dickens’s tribulations were not particular to him but emblematic of
the Industrial Revolution — armies of neglected, unschooled children
forced into labor — the concerns that inform his fiction were shared
by millions of potential readers.
A Dickens novel (“Oliver Twist,” “Little Dorrit,” “Bleak House”)
announces more than cloaks its agenda to reveal social injustice,
especially the plight of those two “abject, frightful, hideous,
miserable” children peering out from under the robe worn by the Ghost
of Christmas Present. “This boy is Ignorance. This girl is Want,” the
Ghost tells the quaking Scrooge. “No perversion of humanity . . . has
monsters half so horrible and dread.” Dickens intended to make the
sufferings of the most vulnerable of the underclass so pungently real
to his readers that they could not continue to ignore their need, not
so much for charity as for the means to save themselves: education. At
least this was his conscious purpose — his rationalization. The deeper
truth is that even genius of the magnitude of Dickens’s can’t free an
artist from his demons; it can only offer him an arena for engaging
them.
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. Sales for the currently serialized “Martin Chuzzlewit” had
been disappointing; “American Notes for General Circulation” had been
received with indifference; his wife, Catherine, had made the
unwelcome announcement of a fifth pregnancy. Having accepted an
invitation to speak, on Oct. 5, at a fund-raiser for the Manchester
Athenaeum, Dickens was obliged to return to the city that had, in
1838, “disgusted and astonished” him. Considered “the world’s first
modern industrial city,” Manchester presented the kind of success that
pricked even the most phlegmatic social consciousness, a portrait of
such squalor among factory workers that the two years Friedrich Engels
spent observing its citizens may well have altered history.
DICKENS, galvanized by the response of his Athenaeum audience — “rapt”
— and by a renewed vision of the cost of disdaining the plight of
children, returned to London having conceived what would be the first
project he completed as a whole rather than in serial parts. For six
weeks he worked feverishly, delivering a manuscript to the printer in
late November, for publication a few days before Christmas.
Standiford, the author of four other nonfiction 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. Too grim, too redux, too
calculated. It was tempting to recreate the success of their
predecessor, but hardly necessary. “The Man Who Invented Christmas”
may not be necessary, either, not with regard to the juggernaut of
Dickens scholarship, but it’s a sweet and sincere addition. A stocking
stuffer for the bookish on your holiday list.
http://www.nytimes.com/2008/12/07/books/review/Harrison-t.html?ref=books&pagewanted=print