Charles Dickens’ is A Christmas Carol that continues to resound to this day. The Victorian Dickens may well have given us the Ghosts of Christmas Present and Future, but our Christmas culture is one completely and continuously haunted by the presence of the past. 2011 might have brought us a John Lewis advert that made more middle-aged mothers melt to their knees in weepy warmth than any card, present or display of selfless love than their actual child could ever give, and a Christmastide return by Kate Bush, that makes one want to burst back onto those wiley, windy moors again (albeit in the cosy comfort of a Santa Claus hat and snow boots), but our contemporary Christmas culture is one almost entirely constructed by Victorian artistry – more specifically, by Victorian literature.
Believe it or not, it was upright, stalwart social polemicist Charles Dickens who taught us that Christmas should be spent slobbing out with the family. The pre-Victorian Christmas was one of waning popularity, having been disdained and banned during the puritanical Commonwealth as a Catholic indulgence, and understood ever since as a collective spiritual observance, rather than as a familial feast. Dickens was inspired by fellow nineteenth-century author Washington Irving’s own revival of the American Christmastide tradition after its rebuke as a trapping of English Imperialism, through his Christmas writings in “The Sketch Book of Geoffrey Crayon”, which describe the harmonious warm-hearted English Christmas festivities Irving experienced while staying at Aston Hall, Birmingham. It was Dickens’ images of the rosy-cheeked Fezziwig’s parties, the resplendent, indulgent Ghost of Christmas Present and the close-knit Cratchits that popularised the image of Christmas as a celebration of the home, as much as any religious rite. Perhaps it is the perfect example of Dickensian irony, then – or else simply Christmassy karma – that today our homes are haunted by the unmercifully unending train of adaptations of this yuletide tale – from the muppets version, to the Barbie version, to the version in which each part is played by a different breed of dog.
The indulgent idea of Santa Claus as a man of material worth, with his primary function as toy-dispenser, is another creation of the nineteenth century literati. Whilst the ideas of Father Christmas as a personification of “Christmas spirit”, and St Nicholas as Christmastide spiritual presence had originated centuries before, it wasn’t until Clement Clarke Moore’s 1823 poem “A Visit from St. Nicholas” that these two were amalgamated into a more lucrative figure. The famous poem, known more commonly as “The night before Christmas”, establishes Santa as “chubby and plump, a right jolly old elf,” and for the first time acknowledges how he brings “a sleigh full of toys” with which to fill “stockings.” Moore also gives us the image of “a miniature sleigh, and eight tiny rein-deer” that “mount to the sky” with the infamous roll-call; ‘Now! Dasher, now! Dancer, now! Prancer and Vixen, / ‘On! Comet, on! Cupid, on! Donder and Blitzen”. To add another layer or literary elaboration, this idea of a magical sleigh had been pulled from a preceding poem, “Old Sancteclaus”, an anonymous work featuring in the 1821 work, “A New-year’s present, to the little ones from five to twelve”.
Victorian poets even thought to establish Santa’s other half. Mrs Claus was invented by James Rees, in his 1849 work, “Mysteries of City Life; or, Leaves from the World’s Book”, and popularised by Katherine Lee Bates’ poem of 1889, “Goody Santa Claus on a Sleigh Ride.” Bates introduces the figure of “Goody Claus” – a character, who demands of her glorified husband, “Why should you have all the glory of the joyous Christmas story, / And poor little Goody Santa Claus have nothing but the work?”
It’s not only in the secular sphere that Victorian writers continue to haunt our cultural consciousness either – even church carol services are underscored with a distinctly Victorian pen. Carol collections began to be printed in the early nineteenth century, such as Davies Gilbert‘s Some Ancient Christmas Carols (1822), William B. Sandys‘s Selection of Christmas Carols, Ancient and Modern (1833), and Thomas K. Hervey‘s The Book of Christmas (1837). The ever-popular yet oddly eerie and melancholy “In the Bleak Midwinter” comes from everybody’s favourite maudlin Victorian, Christina Rossetti.
So whilst it may be a common, and increasingly popular notion that Christmas, year on year, becomes more materialistic, more and more skewed from its origins, we must remember that we are in fact following centuries-old stipulations for the perfect Christmas, adhering to a textual tradition before which there was hardly any sense of celebration at all. If these complainers wish to take on the wisdom and words of Dickens, I wish them the best of luck, but I think I may be too busy indulging in the brand new transformers-themed adaptation of “A Christmas Carol” to contest.
