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Dickens Influence on Christmas Traditions

Back to: Dickens A Christmas Carol and the Bible


Taken from “A Christmas Carol: The Influence of Charles Dickens on Christmas Traditions” by Kristin Wood, “Dickens and the Construction of Christmas  Geoffrey Rowell, “Dickens’ Christmas Carol didn’t invent the holiday, but it did help revive it” by Lauren Laverne, and “7 Holiday Traditions Owed to Charles Dickens and “A Christmas Carol” by Charlotte Ahlin

“While Christmas celebrations were often elaborate during the Middle Ages, by the Victorian era, enthusiasm was in decline. Some Christian leaders had become skeptical of the pagan traditions that persisted in their religious holiday, and many families lacked the resources to celebrate as they had in years past.

“The Industrial Revolution had caused a decline of Christmas celebrations in the cities though less so in the countryside.    As Lauren Laverne writes “Britain’s newly urban population didn’t have much energy or opportunity to celebrate it, thanks to the extremely un-festive combination of long hours of unregulated industrial toil and displacement from the rural communities they’d grown up in.”   When Charles Dickens’ novel A Christmas Carol was published, it revived much of the nostalgia and tradition we associate with Christmas today. 

Charlotte Ahlin writes – “Most businesses did not allow time off for the holiday, and most of England was so extremely poor and overworked at the end of the Industrial Revolution that there was little money or energy for merrymaking, anyway. Child labor was common. Workhouses with brutal conditions were a popular “solution” to poverty. The dominant political ideology of the rich was that the poor should be made miserable in order to motivate them to stop being poor, or else they should be allowed to starve to “decrease the surplus population.”

“A Christmas Carol was not his only book to touch on the subject of Christmas. He wrote four further Christmas books and many festive essays in his journal All The Year Round.

Lauren Laverne writes “Death in general was integral to the Dickensian Christmas concept. He first covered the topic in The Pickwick Papers. Then in 1851, when he lost his father (whose strengths and failings inspired many of his heroes, from Scrooge to Micawber), his daughter Dora, his sister and her son with disability all in the same year, he wrote the poignant and beautiful What Christmas Is As We Grow Older (I highly recommend it if you’re having a crappy Christmas of any sort). In it he insists we remember the dead on this day more than any other.

“It’s pretty hard not to remember the dead at Christmas, but Dickens goes further. He is adamant that we should use the day to celebrate other losses, like our failures, abandoned plans and ruined relationships. In the same essay he says: “Welcome, old aspirations, glittering creatures of an ardent fancy… Welcome, all that was ever real to our hearts; and for the earnestness that made you real, thanks to Heaven!” Every time I read it I wonder why we don’t do more of that. We love the idea of Scrooge’s transformation, but this kind of self-acceptance and equanimity is probably more useful to most people.”

“Dickens’ A Christmas Carol both reflected and contributed to the Victorian revival of Christmas.   During a time when financial hardships were commonplace for many American and British households, A Christmas Carol delivered just the right message to bring families back to a holiday that often becomes a celebration of wealth and consumerism. Dickens reminded his readers that a joyful Christmas morning does not require Ebenezer Scrooge’s gold, as much as it needs the heart of the poor Cratchit family.

“Dickens likely saw himself in the character of family man Bob Crachit. Like Crachit, Dickens was a husband and father of a large family. His wife was pregnant with their fifth child while he penned the novel, and they were struggling to make ends meet. Dickens previous writings were not earning very much, and their living expenses were too high.

“In October 1843, Charles Dickens began the writing of one of his most popular and best- loved books, A Christmas Carol.  He began writing A Christmas Carol as a desperate attempt to earn more money and provide for his family.  He desperately wanted to use his clout to help impoverished children. So he started writing a stirring political pamphlet, titled An Appeal to the People of England, on behalf of the Poor Man’s Child, set to be published near the end of the year.  But Dickens was worried that no one was going to care about his passionate social justice rants. He decided to re-brand his pamphlet as a ghost story

“It was written in six weeks and finished by the end of November, being fitted in the intervals of writing the monthly parts of Martin Chuzzrlewit, a work which was causing him some financial anxiety because the public did not seem to have taken to it as readily as to his earlier serials. A Christmas Carol would, he hoped, bring a better financial return.

“While financial gain may have been Dickens’ original motivation, he quickly found himself swept away by the story. When describing the writing process, he said he “wept and laughed, and wept again,” and he “walked about the black streets of London fifteen or twenty miles many a night when all sober folks had gone to bed.” He believed in his work so passionately that, despite his financial situation, he paid for production of the book out of his own pocket after disagreements with his publishers. Hoping to make his work more affordable to the masses, he also lowered its cost to only five shillings.

“He kept Christmas that year with an extraordinary zest; ‘such dinings, such dancings, such conjurings, such blind-man’s buffings, such theatre-goings, such kissing-out of old years and kissing-in of new ones, never took place in these parts before’. Savoring the atmosphere of Christmas in London became part of Dickens’ annual routine. Every Christmas Eve he went to visit the Christmas markets in the East End between Aldgate and Bow, and he liked to wander in poor neighborhoods on Christmas Day, ‘past the areas of shabby genteel houses in Somers or Kentish Towns, watching the diners preparing or coming i

“The brightness of the shops where holly sprigs and berries crackled in the lamp-heat of the windows, made pale faces ruddy as they passed. Poulterers’ and grocers’ trades became a splendid joke: a glorious pageant, with which it was next to impossible to believe that such dull principles as bargain and sale had anything to do.

“The Spirit of Christmas Present takes Scrooge into the city streets, mired with mud and sooty snow, and the same scene is evoked:

The poulterers shops were still half-open, and the fruiterers were radiant in their glory. There were great, round pot-bellied baskets of chesnuts, shaped like the waistcoats of jolly old gentlemen, lolling at the doors, and tumbling out into the street in their apoplectic opulence. There were ruddy, brown- faced, broad-girthed Spanish Onions, shining in the fatness of their growth like Spanish Friars, and winking from their shelves in wanton slyness at the girls as they went by, and glanced demurely at the hung-up mistletoe. There were pears and apples, clustered high in blooming pyramids; there were bunches of grapes, made in the shop- keepers’ benevolence to dangle from conspicuous hooks, that people’s mouths might water gratis as they passed; there were piles of filberts, mossy and brown, recalling in their fragrance, ancient walks among the woods, and pleasant shufflings ankle deep through withered leaves; there were Norfolk Biffins, squab and swarthy, setting off the yellow of the oranges and lemons…

 

The grocers’ shops are redolent with the rich scents of tea and coffee, almonds, cinnamon, figs and candied fruits. And Dickens’ skill in conjuring up the richness of Christmas fare is used to good effect in his description of the goose, and stuffing, and gravy of the Cratchits’ Christmas dinner, not to mention the sharply observed mingled smells of laundry, eating- house and pastry-cook, as the Christmas pudding is unrolled from its pudding cloth and set alight with its sprig of holly on top.

“Dickens does not only give us a vivid portrayal of Christmas feasting, he is also concerned to make his story the vehicle of Christian truths. The theme of A Christmas Carol is not simply Christmas feasting; it is a story of conversion, of release from the imprisoning chains of grasping covetousness worn by Marley’s Ghost into the freedom of compassion and generosity. The smog-filled streets of the city in which Scrooge sees the ghosts of avaricious, selfish and grasping contemporaries (‘some few [they might be guilty governments] were linked together’), are suffused on Christmas Day with the light of heaven:

No fog, no mist; clear, bright jovial, stirring, cold; cold, piping for the blood to dance to; Golden sunlight; Heavenly sky; sweet fresh air; merry bells. Oh, glorious! Glorious!

 “Dickens links the Christmas worship in the churches and the cooking Christmas dinners with their smoking pavements, when he writes of the Spirit taking the covers off the dinners as they are carried to the ovens, and sprinkling incense upon them from his torch – a strange torch for it also sprinkles water (an image of baptism) on quarrelsome dinner-carriers. ‘Their good humor was restored directly. For they said it was a shame to quarrel on Christmas Day. And so it was, God love it, so it was.’ The bells of Christmas move from dream to reality as Scrooge wakes on Christmas Day:

“He was checked in his transports by the churches ringing out the lustiest peals he had ever heard. Clash, clang, hammer; ding, dong, bell. Bell, dong, ding; hammer, clang, clash. Oh, glorious! Glorious!

“The marvelous onomatopoeic evocation of change-ringing, serves as symbol of the grave revealed in the incarnation and now in Scrooge’s life. That new reality is summed up in the final sentences of the story, when Dickens writes that Scrooge now knew ‘how to keep Christmas well, if any man alive possessed the knowledge. May that be truly said of us, and all of us. And so, as Tiny Tim observed, God bless Us, Every One’.

“Dickens in his will urged his children to ‘try to guide themselves by the teaching of the New Testament in its broad spirit, and to put no faith in any man’s narrow construction of its letter here or there’, echoing a letter he wrote to the Reverend R.H. Davies at Christmas, 1856:

There cannot be many men, I believe, who have a more humble veneration for the New Testament, or a more profound conviction of its all-sufficiency, than I have, [but] I discountenance all obtrusive professions and tradings in religion, as one of the main causes why real Christianity has been retarded in this world; and because my observation of life induces me to hold in unspeakable dread and horror, those unseemly squabbles about the letter which drive the spirit out of hundreds of thousands.

“There is no doubt that “A Christmas Carol is first and foremost a story concerned with the Christian gospel of liberation by the grace of God, and with incarnational religion which refuses to drive a wedge between the world of spirit and the world of matter. Both the Christmas dinners and the Christmas dinner-carriers are blessed; the cornucopia of Christmas food and feasting reflects both the goodness of creation and the joy of heaven. It is a significant sign of a shift in theological emphasis in the nineteenth century from a stress on the Atonement to a stress on the Incarnation, a stress which found outward and visible form in the sacramentalism of the Oxford Movement, the development of richer and more symbolic forms of worship, the building of neo-Gothic churches, and the revival and increasing centrality of the keeping of Christmas itself as a Christian festival.

“Although Christmas was a time of festivity its church celebration in the nineteenth century owed much to the Oxford Movement. A significant feature of the concerns of the Tractarians was the revival and enrichment of the Prayer Book forms of service, and a proper observance of the seasons and festivals of the church calendar. It was no accident that John Keble’s influential book of poems of 1827 entitled The Christian Year, providing verses and meditations on the Prayer Book services and on the Sundays and holy days observed by the Church of England. At St Saviour’s, the church built by Dr Pusey in the slums of Leeds, a midnight Eucharist was celebrated on Christmas Eve in contrast to Leeds Parish Church where W.F. Hook had begun a mid- night Eucharist on New Year’s Eve, as an Anglican response to Methodist watch-night services. J.H. Pollen, who served as a curate in the parish, wrote of the St Saviour’s Christmas in 1849. The church was decked with boughs, banners and flowers:

Large brass candelabra were placed before the altar full of lights; three tapers were put in the place of one in the sconces of the chancel; red hangings on the walls, a rich carpet on the floor, flowers on the altar screen, a white embroidered altar frontal.

… The Evensong was at nine with a meditative Sermon. At twelve, the Eucharist was celebrated and a Sermon preached on the mystery of the Incarnation. The Church was lighted, and before the Service the whole choir proceeded round the Church two and two, singing the hymn –

Ye faithful, approach ye,
Joyfully triumphing, 
O come ye, O come ye to Bethlehem.

What began as part of the Catholic revival in the Church of England spread to other sections of Anglicanism, and indeed to other churches

“A Christmas Carol was released during the Christmas season of 1843. Although its high production cost and low selling price did not bring in a lot of profits, it was an immediate success — and it made a permanent mark on how Christmas is viewed and celebrated in modern times. The vocabulary has crept into today’s conversations, with a “Scrooge” being someone who refuses to get in the holiday spirit, and “Tiny Tim” being any innocent in a vulnerable situation. Most importantly, every time this piece of literature is read or displayed on the silver screen, it reminds us of a vision of Christmas that has little to do with displays of wealth, and instead focuses on loved ones and the joy of an act of charity.

That Dickens chose to call his story of Scrooge’s Christmas conversion “A Christmas Carol, is a reminder of the musical transformation of Christmas in the nineteenth century. That the story should have ghosts as a central feature is a reminder of the mid- Victorian interest in the paranormal. The most English Christmas service, the Festival of Nine Lessons and Carols, was a nineteenth-century creation, being devised by Archbishop Benson when he was bishop of the newly established see of Truro for use on Christmas Eve 1880. Although the church of the early centuries and the medieval church had employed a rich hymnody, at the Reformation the old Latin hymns we) e not replaced by English ones. The only hymns commonly sung were metrical versions of the psalms. Carols were originally songs of joy accompanied by a dance. The word itself comes from the Italian, carola, meaning ‘a ring-dance’.

7 Traditions revived by Dickens  (Charlotte Ahlin)

  1. Caroling – Caroling was already an old fashioned Christmas tradition by the Victorian Era. Almost no one actually went caroling anymore, although collecting old carols in songbooks was starting to become popular among the nerdier Victorians. Dickens just went ahead and wrote carolers into his book anyway, as if it was an intrinsic part of holiday festivities. One of the earliest scenes in the book involves Scrooge yelling at carolers through his mail slot.
  2. Christmas Tree -Dickens shares credit for this one with Prince Albert, the husband of Queen Victoria. The Prince Consort brought the Christmas tree to England in 1840 as a custom from his native Germany, and people were… meh about it. It seems kind of foreign and kind of pagan. But in 1850, once Dickens was already established as the modern father of Christmas, he wrote a short story called “A Christmas Tree,” depicting the tree as the cozy, nostalgic centerpiece of a classic Christmas celebration and people ate it up. If Dickens declared indoors trees a part of traditional Christmas, then obviously indoor trees were a part of traditional Christmas (even if they weren’t exactly traditional).
  3. Gift Giving – Gift-giving was already a part of New Years celebrations, but Dickens went ahead and depicted presents (specifically, giving toys to children) as an integral part of Christmas, as though the tradition had always been there. He was trying to inspire acts of charity in men like Scrooge.
  4. Paid Vacation

He terrified rich people so thoroughly, in fact, that getting time off for holidays gradually went from an “unrealistic” pipe dream to a reasonable demand.

  1. Feasting – An enormous holiday feast was largely considered a decadent tradition by the 1840s, but Dickens flipped the script: the point of feasting in his book isn’t to stuff your face, but to spend time with family.
  2. Santa Claus –  Santa Claus/St. Nicholas/Father Christmas is a weird hybrid remix of a number of different figures from folklore. Dickens’ Ghost of Christmas Present splices them all together pretty neatly, though, to create a jolly, big-bearded fellow who wants to dance about celebrating the season and shaming capitalists for the inadequacy of child welfare. He’s not the sole source for our modern Santa myth by any means, but he is the one ghost from the book who managed to attach himself permanently to our concept of the holidays.
  3. Christmas Spirit –
    He clearly loved both the old and the newfangled Christmas traditions, but A Christmas Carol has less to do with the actual holiday than with the culture of giving to others and fighting for labor reform by the warm glow of midwinter candlelight. He half revived, half created the traditional spirit of the holidays, giving us the hyped up franken-holiday season we know and love today.”