"I will hold Christmas in my heart,
and try to keep it all the year."
- Charles Dickens
and try to keep it all the year."
- Charles Dickens
Charles Dickens has probably had more influence on the way that we celebrate Christmas today than any single individual in human history except One. At the beginning of the Victorian period the celebration of Christmas was in decline. The medieval Christmas traditions which combined the celebration of the birth of Christ with the ancient Roman festival of Saturnalia, a pagan celebration for the Roman god of agriculture, and the Germanic winter festival of Yule, had come under intense scrutiny by the Puritans under Oliver Cromwell. The Industrial Revolution, in full swing in Dickens' time, also allowed workers little time for the celebration of Christmas. The romantic revival of Christmas traditions that occurred in Victorian times had other contributors: Prince Albert brought the German custom of decorating the Christmas tree to England, the singing of Christmas carols, which had all but disappeared at the turn of the century began to thrive again, and the first Christmas card appeared in the 1840's. But it was the Christmas stories of Dickens, particularly his 1843 masterpiece A Christmas Carol, that rekindled the joy of Christmas in Britain and America.
Dickens' description of the holiday as "a good time: a kind, forgiving, charitable, pleasant time: the only time I know of in the long calendar of the year, when men and women seem by one consent to open their shut-up hearts freely, and to think of other people below them as if they really were fellow-passengers to the grave, and not another race of creatures bound on other journeys" is the very essence of Christmas today, not at the greedy commercialized level, but in people's hearts and homes. Dickens' name had become so synonymous with Christmas that on hearing of his death in 1870 a little costermonger's girl in London asked, "Mr. Dickens dead? Then will Father Christmas die too?"
In the December 1992 issue of the American Journal of Diseases of Children Dr. Donald Lewis, an assistant professor of pediatrics and neurology at the Medical College of Hampton Roads in Norfolk, Virginia, theorized that Tiny Tim, Bob Cratchit's ailing son in Charles Dickens' classic A Christmas Carol, suffered from a kidney disease that made his blood too acidic. Dr. Lewis studied the symptoms of Tim's disease in the original manuscript of the 1843 classic. The disease, distal renal tubular acidosis (type I), was not recognized until the early 20th century but therapies to treat its symptoms were available in Dickens' time.
Dr. Lewis explained that Tim's case, left untreated due to the poverty of the Cratchit household, would produce the symptoms alluded to in the novel.
According to the Ghost of Christmas Present, Tim was supposed to die within a year. The fact that he did not die, due to Scrooge's new-found generosity, means that the disease was treatable with proper medical care. Dr. Lewis consulted medical textbooks of the mid 1800's and found that Tim's symptoms would have been treated with alkaline solutions which would counteract the excess acid in his blood and recovery would be rapid.
While other possibilities exist, Dr. Lewis feels that the treatable kidney disorder best fits "the hopeful spirit of the story."
In the opening stave of A Christmas Carol Dickens describes Ebenezer Scrooge:
Oh! But he was a tight-fisted hand at the grind- stone, Scrooge! a squeezing, wrenching,
grasping, scraping, clutching, covetous, old sinner! Hard and sharp as flint, from which no
steel had ever struck out generous fire; secret, and self-contained, and solitary as an oyster.
The cold within him froze his old features, nipped his pointed nose, shriveled his cheek,
stiffened his gait; made his eyes red, his thin lips blue and spoke out shrewdly in his grating
voice. A frosty rime was on his head, and on his eyebrows, and his wiry chin. He carried his
own low temperature always about with him; he iced his office in the dogdays; and didn't thaw
it one degree at Christmas.
External heat and cold had little influence on Scrooge. No warmth could warm, no wintry weather chill him. No wind that blew was bitterer than he, no falling snow was more intent upon its purpose, no pelting rain less open to entreaty. Foul weather didn't know where to have him. The heaviest rain, and snow, and hail, and sleet, could boast of the advantage over him in only one respect. They often "came down" handsomely, and Scrooge never did.
Nobody ever stopped him in the street to say, with gladsome looks, "My dear Scrooge, how are you? When will you come to see me?" No beggars implored him to bestow a trifle, no children asked him what it was o'clock, no man or woman ever once in all his life inquired the way to such and such a place, of Scrooge. Even the blind men's dogs appeared to know him; and when they saw him coming on, would tug their owners into doorways and up courts; and then would wag their tails as though they said, "No eye at all is better than an evil eye, dark master!"
But what did Scrooge care? It was the very thing he liked.
Dickens' cherished little Christmas story, the best loved and most read of all of his books,
began life as the result of the author's desperate need of money. In the fall of 1843 Dickens
and his wife Kate were expecting their fifth child. Requests for money from his family, a large
mortgage on his Devonshire Terrace home, and lagging sales from the monthly installments of
Martin Chuzzlewit, had left Dickens seriously short of cash.
As the idea for the story took shape and the writing began in earnest, Dickens became engrossed in the book. He wrote that as the tale unfolded he 'wept and laughed, and wept again' and that he 'walked about the black streets of London fifteen or twenty miles many a night when all sober folks had gone to bed'.
At odds with his publishers, Dickens paid for the production cost of the book himself and insisted on a lavish design that included a gold-stamped cover and four hand-colored etchings. He also set the price at 5 shillings so that the book would be affordable to nearly everyone.
The book was published during the week before Christmas 1843 and was an instant sensation but due to the high production costs, Dickens' earning from the sales were lower than expected. In addition to the disappointing profit from the book Dickens was enraged that the work was instantly the victim of pirated editions. Copyright laws in England were often loosely enforced and a complete lack of international copyright laws had been Dickens' theme during his trip to America the year before. He ended up spending more money fighting pirated editions of the book than he was making from the book itself.
Despite these early financial difficulties, Dickens' Christmas tale of human redemption has endured beyond even Dickens' own vivid imagination. It was a favorite during Dickens' public readings of his works late in his lifetime and is known today primarily due to the dozens of film versions and dramatizations which continue to be produced every year.
A CHRISTMAS CAROL
to raise the Ghost of an Idea,
which shall not put my readers out of humour
with themselves, with each other,
with the season, or with me.
May it haunt their houses pleasantly ..."
Their faithful Friend and Servant,
C. D.
December, 1843.
The Cratchit family drew round the hearth, in what Bob Cratchit called a circle, meaning
half a one; and at Bob Cratchit's elbow stood the family display of glass. Two tumblers,
and a custard-cup without a handle.
These held the hot stuff from the jug, however, as well as golden goblets would have done; and Bob served it out with beaming looks, while the chestnuts on the fire sputtered and cracked noisily. Then Bob proposed:
`A Merry Christmas to us all, my dears. God bless us.'
Which all the family re-echoed.
`God bless us every one.' said Tiny Tim, the last of all.
The famous plum pudding that Mrs Cratchit makes to crown the Cratchit Christmas dinner was not made of plums, but raisins. The 'copper' used to boil the pudding was used the rest of the year for the Cratchit family laundry thus the Cratchit children help Tiny Tim to the 'wash-house that he might hear the pudding singing in the copper'.
A Plum Pudding Recipe:
1 c. finely chopped beef suet
2 c. fine bread crumbs
1 c. sugar
1 c. milk
1 pint flour
1 c. seedless raisins
1 c. dried currants
1 c. chopped almonds
1/2 c. citron, sliced thin
1 tsp. salt
1 tsp. cloves
2 tsp. cinnamon
1 tsp. nutmeg
4 well-beaten eggs
1 tsp. of baking soda dissolved in 1 T. warm water
Flour the fruit thoroughly.
In a large bowl, mix the eggs, sugar, spices, and salt in the milk.
Stir in the fruit, nuts, bread crumbs, and suet. Then stir in the dissolved baking soda. Then add in the flour. Boil or steam for 4 hours.
To flame pudding, warm 1/4 cup of brandy. Make a small depression in the top of the pudding and pour brandy over it. Light with a match.
It is good to be children sometimes, and never better than at Christmas, when its mighty Founder was a child himself A Christmas Carol
