'Twas the Night Before Dickens

The world of Charles Dickens, in the popular imagination of our day, is little more than a Victorian Christmas card; plump ladies in funny caps, fat gentlemen in side-whiskers, all gathered 'round the Christmas table, chubby tykes gamboling about, and a toast in punch about to be drunk to the joys of the Season, perhaps to be followed by another to the dear little Queen. And then, what? Carols perhaps? How jolly. But look again at the card reproduced above. It is the very first commercially produced Christmas card, from 1843. There's more to it, isn't there?

Nowadays, there are whole collections for sale on EBay of just such happy scenes in miniature; whole happy villages reproduced in neat plastic, snow white plastic on tidy plastic streets full of clean little plastic Victorians and everybody, again, seems to be forever on the verge of singing. And this cheery vulgarity, for whom is it named? Why, Charles Dickens, of course.

It is entirely understandable that some might find this vision of the sanitized,

sentimentalized past more than a little noisome. Dickens would.

And there's worse. In Kent, England there's now an amusement park, brazenly called "Dickens' World," where costumed characters parade around the tidy reproduction of London, including, if you can believe it, the quaint slums, and drop off the little ones for daycare in "Fagin's Den."

Because what's missing in the miniatures and the amusement park -- other than taste -- and present, at least peripherally, in the actual Victorian scene on the card, are the poor. The model Victoriana is all about nostalgia, a phenomenon Charles Dickens found ridiculous and distasteful, if not infuriating, because nostalgia precludes even the possibility of progress. If they were in fact, such "good old times," then what was all that fuss about the Poor Laws, about child labor, about exploitation, and poverty, "ignorance and want?"

Dickens was no killjoy. Don't think that. As the title of Les Standiford's new book points out, Dickens is, after all, The Man Who Invented Christmas. But Christmas, as Dickens understood it, was as much or more about what we do to one another the rest of the year, as it is about what we do for one another, or at least intend to do, come December 25th.

So, enjoy the Festive Season, as those jolly folks in the middle of the first Christmas card seem to be doing. Dickens would heartily approve. He'd join in the fun, if he still could. (And maybe he does, depending on one's point of view.) But note what's just to either side of the good time. And remember, as Charles Dickens, in his "generous anger," wrote, and spoke, and read aloud and fought to remind us: that the spirit of Christmas need not come but once a year.

I hear "The Chimes" at midnight yet again...

Every year at the bookstore, I read Truman Capote's little sentimental masterpiece, "A Christmas Memory" aloud, to celebrate the Holiday Season, as we call it in retail.  Years and years ago, when I was living in San Francisco, I went every year to hear just such a performance at a bookstore there. Now that reading was given by a wonderful retired actor.  Mine, alas, is entirely amateur, if somewhat... practiced, shall we say? by now.  This has become a tradition for me and the bookstore and I confess, I look forward to it every December.  Whatever my shortcomings as a reader, I like to think, as they used to say on the "Society Page" in my little hometown newspaper about any local event other than a funeral, "a good time will be had by all."

This year's reading of "A Christmas Memory" will be Wednesday, December 3rd, at 7PM at the bookstore in Seattle, with encores at Bellevue & Mill Creek 

 (check the Reading Aloud Events Schedule for a reading near you.)  Please do come.

Additionally, on Tuesday, December 9th,  at 7PM, I will be reading Charles' Dickens' 

"The Chimes: A Goblin Story of Some Bells that Rang an Old Year Out and a New Year In."  This will be a first for me.  Back in February, I helped celebrate the Great Man's Birthday with two selections from his novels, both taken from his own adaptations for his celebrated public readings.  Again, I like to think, "a good time was had by all."  (At least, no one complained to the management about the noise.) Emboldened, I added this reading of Dickens' second Christmas Book -- written the year after "A Christmas Carol," -- to my

 schedule.  The exceptionally good people in our Events Department indulged me yet again, bless 'em.

The only problem now is adapting Dickens' reading copy of "The Chimes" for an audience unfamiliar with the story.  Had I simply read the more justly famous "Carol," I need not have spent, as I have, so many long nights typing, scribbling and sweating to communicate something of the true magic and power of this lesser known work to a contemporary audience.  Dickens' didn't have this problem when he did his readings of "The Chimes."  In the first place, he was, by all reports, a truly remarkable actor and his readings of his own work were considered one of the wonders of the Victorian Age.  Oh.  In the second place, Dickens' audience knew his other Christmas Books -- he wrote five all together -- as well as they knew his "Carol."  Certainly, now as then,  everyone knows Ebenezer Scrooge, Tiny Tim and the rest as well as any characters in the history of literature.  But contemporary  audiences

 probably don't know this second story or dear old Toby "Trotty" Veck at all.

Well, you should.

And so, I'm up tonight again, typing, scribbling, etc., in the hope of doing justice to Charles Dickens, Toby, and The Chimes.   I won't, of course, but I'll do my best.

I hope you can come and hear the result.

I will NOT buy another book about Charles Dickens, A Christmas Carol, or Scrooge... okay, I did.

In the long list of Things I Intend Never to Do Again -- updated almost weekly nowadays -- there are some activities precluded by encroaching middle-age; such as dancing to fast songs, keeping up with current slang, and wearing tight shoes. I could go on, but won't. Other tasks, I've come to admit, are simply beyond me; like reading Joyce, doing algebra, and learning to appreciate the finer points of modern opera. There are tasks I undertook convinced I would do well, and yet failed to master; and here cooking Chinese food at home, baking my own bread and learning Latin come most quickly to mind. I remain resolved, regarding the above.

In perhaps no other subset of my list have I so regularly failed, as under the heading of Books I Will Not Buy. I said I'd never read another

book on Lincoln, and that even if I did, I'd never buy another, and then one of my favorite American historians, William Lee Miller, heretofore reliably not a Lincoln man, published, in 2002, Lincoln's Virtues: An Ethical Biography, and I bought it. And I read it. And it was, predictably, fascinating. Since then, I've allowed myself no more than three or four other books on the subject, but still, you see the danger of the slippery slope here, don't you? And with

Lincoln's Bicentennial coming...

And now, I've let myself go again and bought yet another new book on a subject I ought not to need or want to ever read about again: The 

Man Who Invented Christmas: How Charles Dickens's A Christmas Carol Rescued His Career and Revived Our Holiday Spirits, by one Les Standiford.

I do not need to read this story again. I do not need to own another book about Charles Dickens. I do not know Mr. Standiford or his works. But the book was pretty. The introduction, read o

ver lunch, was well written and charming. At $19.95, the book was not outrageously priced. And, for all I knew, this book might have information I might find helpful when writing my introduction for my new Christmas reading this year at the store -- December 9th, at 7PM, tell your friends,-- of one of Dickens's other Christmas Books, The Chimes, so...

Well, damn. I bought it. I read it. I recommend it.

If all you know of the "Carol" is a movie or television version, you really ought to read the novel. It is a perfect book. If you want to read a fascinating story not only of Dickens, but of Christmas and how it came to be Christmas as we imagine it now, then read this new book.

And if, like me, you intend to go on making lists, resolutions and the like, be prepared to acknowledge, as I've had to yet again, just what irresolute, weak, self-indulgent creatures we humans really are. I speak here, of course, primarily, though not exclusively I'm sure, for myself.

God bless us, every one.