Dickens – taken from Celebrating Christmas
A 2017 film about Charles Dickens was entitled The Man Who Invented Christmas. The eye-catching title is a profound exaggeration because, as this book frequently points out, there is much about Christmas festivities that goes very much further back than the Victorian period.
It’s hard to argue with the majority view that Dickens was the greatest novelist of the Victorian period, not least in the number of memorable books and characters that he created.
Born in Portsmouth in 1812, Dickens had a long encounter with poverty in early adolescence, which fuelled an anger about social injustice that runs through much of his works.
Dickens wrote numerous novels, often in instalments, with his pioneering cliff-hanger endings creating a growing readership that longed to know what was going to happen. He had a gift for humour, satire and social comment, and delighted in creating characters, some of them grotesque, who his readers either loved or hated.
He toured the United States and in doing so became one of the first authors to be popular on both sides of the Atlantic. Increasingly a public figure he undertook numerous tours, during which he read his works to large audiences. He died suddenly in 1870 at the age of 58.
Dickens wrote a number of Christmas stories, the most famous of which, A Christmas Carol, was published in 1843. He took the idea of a ghost story and turned it into a moral tale of judgement and salvation at Christmas.
At the time of the publication of A Christmas Carol the Christmas season was not greatly celebrated. Dickens, reaching back to an imagined past, delivered a vision of a perfect Christmas, full of turkey, mistletoe, snow on the ground, carol singers on the street and, amid the distant sound of church bells, cheerful families gathered around tables overflowing with food and goodwill. It was an enticing portrayal – sometimes called the Victorian Christmas – that caught on and even a century and a half later it is still possible to recognise Dickens’ vision in the popular portrayal of Christmas in Britain and elsewhere.
