~ by Marie Robinson
Happy Holidays, everyone! Christmas is drawing ever near… There are
some people who just love Christmas. Perhaps the most famous literary
Christmas-lover was the great Charles Dickens.
Not only did he
adore the holiday, he was a huge influence on it. I’m not kidding, this
guy shaped Victorian Christmas. Tell me of a person who has never seen,
read, or heard of A Christmas Carol and I will personally slap them. It
was first published on December 17th, 1843 and sold over 5,000 copies by
Christmas Eve. Over fifty film, theatre and television adaptations have
been made. It is no wonder that Dickens considered A Christmas Carol to
be his greatest achievement.
Before A Christmas Carol, Christmas
in the mid-Victorian era was all about the Christ. And the mass. Come
on, let’s be honest, no one wants to sit in church all fucking day. Of
course, people were thrilled when Dickens came along and brought some
secular fun to the season. He believed Christmas was all about being
with family, dancing, laughing, giving to charity, and of course,
telling stories.
If you don’t believe me that Dickens influenced
Christmas, listen to Professor Hubert Lamb’s argument on the matter. He
says that Dickens birthed the popular notion of a “white Christmas”. He
went so far to prove his point and documented that a white Christmas
occurred for the first eight straight years of Dickens’ life. Our
bibliophile climatic researcher says that white Christmases are actually
uncommon, but we have come to cherish them because of Dickens’ classic.
After
the release of A Christmas Carol, the quintessential Christmas ghost
story, Dickens decided to write a handful of others. He penned what were
titled, “The Christmas Books” which included the short stories The
Chimes (1844), The Cricket on the Hearth (1845), The Battle of Life
(1846), and The Haunted Man (1848). Some are these are more supernatural
than others, and most are hardly terrifying but he was determined and
inspired to keep up the tradition. A few other Christmas ghost stories
Dickens wrote are The Haunted House, Christmas Ghosts, The Trail for
Murder and The Signal-Man which was adapted for the 1970 BBC mini-series
A Ghost Story for Christmas. In reference to these tales author Peter Straub
calls them, “A lively mixture of comedy, pathos, and the supernatural.”
A
prototype of sorts to A Christmas Carol is The Story of the Goblins who
Stole a Sexton. Released in December of 1836 it tells of a man named
Grub, who is near identical to Scrooge, and chooses to go mope around in
the graveyard on Christmas Eve. There he meets a ghostly figure who
tells him how much his life is gonna suck if he doesn’t cheer up. If you
wanted to take a simple moral from these stories it would be “Christmas
is awesome!” But we know that Dickens was trying to say a little more
than that. We get the Scrooge archetype yet again in A Haunted Man,
where a grouchy old man is forced by a frightful apparition to reexamine
his life. Dickens used this plot device to encourage a reassessment by
his characters and his audience. He believes that the Christmas season
is not only for nostalgia but also for change.
“…for we are
telling Winter Stories—Ghost Stories, or more shame for us—round the
Christmas fire; and we have never stirred, except to draw a little
nearer to it.” –Charles Dickens, Christmas Ghosts
2 comments:
Merry Christmas Christine, have a great time little darlin`.
Thank you, JBH. You do the same ;)
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