I've tried to set myself something of a Christmas tradition these last couple of (married) years, and read an edition of Dickens' Christmas stories each December. In 2011 I read the Penguin Classics A Christmas Carol and Other Christmas Writings, so in 2012 I chose A Christmas Carol and Other Christmas Books (Oxford Classics, 2006, edited by Robert Douglas-Fairhurst). The plan is to rotate these two each year until I get sick of them. We'll see how long that lasts...
So, this Season's 500 page tome contained the full set of Dickens' annual Christmas books, originally published separately and then gathered into a collection by the author in 1852. We get A Christmas Carol (1843), The Chimes (1844), The Cricket On The Hearth (1845), The Battle Of Life (1846) and The Haunted Man (1848). 1847 was missed, we're told in the introduction, because Charlie was too busy working on Dombey and Son.
A quick side comment on the illustrations: these are gorgeous, and do much to enhance the charm and appeal of the various texts. Dickens prose is often florid and picturesque anyway, but these occasional and expressive line drawings add that extra dimension and really encourage the reader's imagination.
But back to the words:
A Christmas Carol is for many of us our first experience of Charles Dickens, and I'm sure for far too many of us is the only experience of Charles Dickens too - either in book form or the endless round of TV, film and stage adaptations. It's evolved into a piece of pure Christmas folklore these days, with the characters having settled in to the public psyche and taken on a life of their own beyond the confines of the story. Scrooge himself is now a descriptive term, readily interchangeable for 'miserly' and it undoubtedly comes as a shock to some that the word / name hails from this story.
So much of what we consider to be 'Christmas', as depicted in images on cards and in songs, comes from this story - or rather was first gathered and captured in this story. I wouldn't want to claim that Dickens invented what we now think of as Christmas, but he did a hell of a lot to cement much of its romantic imagery in our consciousness.
The Christmas Carol story is brilliant. Purely, simply brilliant. It has atmosphere aplenty, it tugs at the heartstrings, it paints so many wonderful pictures and it rockets along at quite a pace. The only occasion when a modern reader might baulk these days is over the length of time it takes for Scrooge to realise that he's dead in the future when it's plainly obvious to all as soon as he's taken there. Unfortunately for Ebenezer he needs to be shown his gravestone before he accepts the fact. But other than this psychological quibble it is possibly the perfect Christmas yarn, the perfect ghost story and the perfect 'feel good' tale.
I don't see myself tiring of reading this story each year at all.
The downside of A Christmas Carol being so good, and coming first, is that Dickens set himself an almost impossible task in attempting to match it each year. If this Oxford Classics book does anything it shows that, frankly, he failed. In fact, it's not surprising that after four valiant attempts he decided to leave it and just dedicate a special seasonal issue of Household Words, his periodical, to Christmas-related stories instead. There he could share the pain with Wilkie Collins, Elizabeth Gaskell and various other contributors of varying literary skill.
The Chimes presents us with 'Trotty' Veck, a street courier / messenger for hire, who likes hot tripe and worries about his daughter and potential future son-in-law. My first reaction was 'I don't like his name'. I'm not proud of that as a critical response, but as a reader looking for some Christmas-time escapism it immediately put me at odds with the text and prevented me from getting fully immersed in the world - which is where I wanted to be. So much of Dickens' work is full of wonderfully expressive character names. Trotty Veck is not a good example. He's also a fool and it's difficult to sympathise with him. There's a supernatural element where Veck has apparently died and is shown the future by the goblins who live in the 'Chimes', the local Church bells, but it never has any of the heart-warming appeal of the Carol and I found my attention wandering. Of course it all works out fine in the end, and Trotty hasn't died - it's all a tripe-induced bad dream, and he and his daughter manage to help some strangers to what will hopefully be a better life with Veck's landlady below. There's a moral in the story, apparently, but it was lost on this reader because I felt at odds with the text the whole time.
What off-balanced me completely was that on the last page Dickens suddenly comes over all self aware, questioning his and the reader's perceptions over the text we've just read. It's all very Sternean, and I can't help but feel the whole piece would have had more charm and appeal if Dickens had taken the playful or unreliable narrator role throughout instead. This 'afterword' comes across, instead, like a knowing wink from an orator, closing a public presentation (and one now is put in mind of Dickens own public readings of A Christmas Carol.)
The Cricket On The Hearth was an improvement, inasmuch as it held my attention, but again the world it depicts didn't reach out to me as a reader and I found the characters and their situations difficult to empathise with. Dickens, in glorious Nineteenth Century fashion, was prone to verbosity and over-description and I started to feel a bit fatigued by over-writing during this story. There's no supernatural involvement this time - although the title and the introduction lead one to expect some input from the cricket at some juncture - but there's also no overtly Christmassy feel to the story. It's quite a sweet story as it turns out, and it shows the value of trust and deep love in a marriage - presumably not just at Christmas though. Again we're given characters of lowly status in the world, with Dickens writing moral lessons for the common man, but none of the characters are particularly vivid or endearing and, alas, none of the names really stood out.
I really struggled with The Battle Of Life more than any of the stories. If I hadn't been determined to finish the collection this would have made me give up. To me it was 80-odd pages of words, failing to interest or engage me at all and with nothing to do with celebrating Christmas - and I don't get what the title has to do with the story specifically. The characters lacked definition and I found it tiring continually having to remind myself of settings and relationships because I found no interest in them or their situation. Does this story constitute a valuable addition to the English literary canon? Not in my view. I can only hope that in two years time when I pick it up again I'm a more enlightened reader.
We're back on supernatural ground with the final story The Haunted Man. It starts off wonderfully, with a gorgeous atmosphere and I was really quite taken from page one. It has a psychological punch which adds interest, but it still has a tendency to wander and ramble, and it requires considerable concentration on the part of the reader to keep tabs on who is where and how everyone fits together. This story was also included in the Penguin Classics edition I'd read the previous year, so I was already familiar with it, but I don't think that made me fonder of it, or that I found it easier to read this time around.
Maybe my mistake was in reading them all one after another - could I have 'Dickensed' myself out? Perhaps next year I should split the stories up with other reads in between, or only read one per year? Or perhaps I should have thought 'I wonder why these other stories aren't as well known as A Christmas Carol?'
These stories were collected together by Dickens as 'The Christmas Books' in 1852, so he was actively encouraging comparison and comment, and for them to be looked at as a whole. A Christmas Carol is a good length story, not too florid but not too concise. The Chimes, The Cricket On the Hearth and The Battle Of Life all feel too long and rambling to me. The Haunted Man is better at holding its length and maintaining interest, but I think it's a shame when a story or novella feels laboured and drawn out. The other clear point for me is that the later books don't offer any further Christmas trappings or folklore (at least not that's been handed down through the years); they don't build on any established myths or create any of their own, they're merely novellas published around Christmas time but not subscribing themselves to any obvious Christmas celebrations.
Dickens imagined himself something of a social campaigner, highlighting the plight of the poor and the general inequality of life - largely through his own personal experiences. But he was a realist too: he satirises, he jibes and pokes away through his creative writing where he can also make a successful living, rather than jeopardising his position with more forceful campaigning. These Christmas stories are very representative of that side of Dickens - they have a didactic purpose, painting pictures of life in various strata, and can be seen as homilies in many ways. But whereas in his novels Dickens had the space to develop characters and build situations I don't believe this novella length was a comfortable medium for him: his work falls between two stools, not having enough space and time to develop strong central characters with clear and original messages, whilst at the same time wanting to pack too much in, thus overcrowding the short capacity and leaving the reader befuddled at times. All except A Christmas Carol, of course, in which he gets everything right.
All things considered, these lesser known Christmas stories have value and interest from a bibliographical or contextual perspective, and they add value to collections of Dickens shorter published works these days, but truly there is only one Christmas Book and that is A Christmas Carol.
No comments:
Post a Comment