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Writing Christmas with “a Bunch of People”

(1850–51)

The standard practice of Household Words and many other Victorian journals was to print the work of contributors without naming them. In the absence of bylines, editors in chief hoped their journals would construct distinct, unified voices of their own, and the practice of publishing contributions anonymously “prevailed almost universally until the late 1860s and 1870s.”¹ Dickens published his first pieces anonymously in the 1830s.² By midcentury, readers were familiar with the fact that Dickens and other editors did not write every column that appeared in their journals’ pages but that each piece nonetheless publicly held the editor’s stamp of approval. As Catherine Waters notes, there is a kind of inherent dialogism in this periodical form that resists easy categorization, in part because the texts that constitute Household Words simultaneously exist as the words of Dickens and the words of others.³ Many writers were honored to have their work appear under Dickens’s name, as after only a couple of years of publication, “Dickens’s journal had a readership and a kind of glamour no other journal had.”⁴ Household Words also paid well at one guinea or more per page for a Christmas number contribution, making it an attractive venue. For the first two Christmas issues, a fair amount of scholarship exists on the pieces Dickens authored as they relate to his personal conceptions of Christmas and youth, but few scholars have viewed them alongside the contributors’ pieces. The first Christmas number establishes important precedents, particularly in regard to contested imperial ideologies, that are visible only when the number is read in its entirety. In building a definition of acceptable English Christmas celebrations, the 1850 issue functions as a foundation for future years. The 1851 number continues to draw upon that base while also demonstrating that Dickens and Wills stumble in their second attempt as they learn how to sustain the Christmas numbers. Rather than showcasing a smooth progression of the form, the second number’s repetitive missteps illustrate the need for the stronger framing apparatuses that appear in subsequent years.

Until 1866, the Christmas issues of Household Words eschewed bylines, following the same practice as the regular issues, and the unprinted name most crucial to the success of both the regular issues and the Christmas numbers is that of William H. Wills, Dickens’s coeditor. Wills tended to the details of every Household Words issue as he communicated with printers and contributors, corrected galley proofs, reviewed more contributions than Dickens did, coauthored essays and stories, and arranged business matters such as payments and contracts. As John Drew points out, “Often portrayed as the anchor and engine of the editorial team, punctual, steady, unimaginative—Charlie Watts to Dickens’s Jagger—Wills was a hugely versatile and skilled literary craftsman.”⁵ Shu Fang Lai also persuasively argues that Wills’s role has been inaccurately diminished in most critical treatments of Dickens’s editorship. Lai charts a perplexing resistance to acknowledging Wills as an instrumental component of Dickens’s journalistic success even in the wake of persuasive studies from well-respected critics such as Drew.⁶ Although I agree with Lai’s assessment, Lai persistently draws Dickens as an editor who always wished for greater control and evaluates the Wills/Dickens relationship with an emphasis on contention rather than collaboration. Dickens often sent blunt instructions to Wills but also frequently needed his advice. In a letter about whether to publish poems eulogizing the Duke of Wellington in an issue that would coincide with his funeral, for example, Dickens writes, “I can’t quite decide. What do you think?”⁷ An earlier exchange between the two editors shows that when they disagree, Wills does not hesitate to challenge Dickens. Just a few months after the launch of Household Words, Dickens complains about a title Wills suggested, declaring, “I don’t think there could be a worse one within the range of the human understanding,” and then chastises Wills: “[D]on’t touch my articles without consulting me.”⁸

In a lengthy reply, Wills stakes out his position as a coeditor who will not accept provocative or unfair criticism without argument: “I hope you will understand what I endeavour always to intimate:—that when I make an objection to any article I do it suggestively.”⁹ Wills makes clear that Dickens’s consternation is a result of his own misunderstanding, not a mistake on Wills’s part, and that Dickens’s articles do not exist in a special zone exempt from comment. Explaining his editorial choices, Wills also snaps, “I did not suppose you would wish me to consult you upon so simple a matter of mechanical convenience.” Drawing upon years of experience at both Punch and Chambers’s Edinburgh Journal to put Dickens’s presumption in check, Wills retorts (in regard to the title), “I am sure it is not the worst one within the range of human understanding. Forgive me for claiming for my worst suggestion a locus within that pale.”¹⁰ Wills’s teasing tone again shifts from the merits or shortcomings of his suggestion to Dickens’s hyperbolic reaction, which contributes to an atmosphere of robust, collaborative friendship rather than hostile attack. The letter closes with Wills telling Dickens that he plans to take a couple of days off—obviously the comment of a man secure in his position. Wills kept a copy of this missive in his book of letters, perhaps to record his own strong voice for posterity in anticipation of a legacy that would cast him in a submissive role. In revising critical perspectives to account consistently for Wills’s coeditorship, we must also regard him as a constant, influential presence in the Christmas numbers. As we shall see, his involvement in some years is even more determinant of the final outcome than Dickens’s input, and his is one of a plethora of voices that speaks back to Dickens’s own consistently.

The Christmas Number

The first Christmas issue of Household Words, called simply “The Christmas Number,” was published as a regular issue on Saturday, December 21, 1850. The issue includes no table of contents, no passages linking the pieces, and no frame concept; the naming of “Christmas” in the title constitutes its strongest gesture toward commonality of theme. One senses that Dickens was still figuring out how he wanted to shape the Christmas number, blurring the lines between fiction and nonfiction without fully indulging either and including Christmas carols while avoiding the sheet music and visual art of literary annuals.¹¹ In many ways, the 1850 number is a collection of random musings about a holiday, but consideration of the number in its entirety reveals a coherence that has less to do with Dickens’s request for essays on the Christmas theme and more to do with midcentury imaginings of empire.

The voices Dickens conducts advocate for England’s “civilizing” mission and self-consciously defend the English citizenry’s demand for the materials that make an idyllic English Christmas possible. The stories do not ignore the human costs behind the production of materials such as spices and fruits but rather justify them as part of an appropriate and beneficial system of global commerce that maintains English superiority. Whether the Franklin Expedition explorers or the “Genius of the Sugar,” who “is a freed Negro,” the figures dominating these stories collectively call for the preservation of imperial ideology alongside the preservation of plums.¹² The collection of nine stories, all written by men, depicts Christmas through various objects, with various types of people, and in various locations. In all of these contexts, the privileged consumer must not forget that each ornament, decoration, and taste of Christmas should be experienced as a conscious enactment of a specifically English Christian joy.

Dickens’s “A Christmas Tree” begins the number: “I have been looking on, this evening, at a merry company of children assembled round that pretty German toy, a Christmas Tree” (289). Just two years earlier, a published sketch of Queen Victoria and Prince Albert celebrating around a Christmas tree raised the profile of the tradition and lent the authority of the monarch to the anglicized adoption of the custom.¹³ Calling the tree a “pretty German toy” in the first sentence immediately indicates that English Christmas, from childhood on, includes the navigation and appropriation of things, traditions, and people whose origins remain identified as non-English. Delivering a long list of everything on and around the tree, the story “describes such a cornucopia of toys and gifts in its reminiscences about Christmases past, that it anticipates the growing commercialization of the festival.”¹⁴ The narrator is an unidentified man watching a group of children, and he returns home in a reverie of childhood memories of Christmas, imagining years as branches on the tree. He recalls books, plays, songs, and toys that are diverting or terrifying enough to cause nightmares. Some details, such as reading the Arabian Nights and enjoying a toy theatre, correlate with Dickens’s accounts of parts of his childhood, but the story makes broader points about nostalgia and tradition rather than acting as an autobiographical essay.¹⁵ The narrator’s recollection of several “Winter Stories,” or ghost stories, told “round the Christmas fire” foresees the frame concept Dickens develops two years later and embeds the supernatural in his delineation of Christmas festivities (293). Although the narrator’s recollections span the varied nature of childhood experience, he nonetheless idealizes his memories: “Encircled by the social thoughts of Christmas time, still let the benignant figure of my childhood stand unchanged!” (295). This insistence on childhood as a fixed period of time with unchangeable memories is more intriguing than the story’s final line (in which the narrator hears Jesus’s voice whispering through the “leaves” of a pine-needled Christmas tree) because it links “social thoughts” to both the holiday of Christmas and the enshrining of romanticized individual experience (295). Combined with the narrator’s opening observation of other people’s children around a Christmas tree, which could be pleasantly nostalgic or creepily voyeuristic, the story’s conclusion lends an air of performance to the holiday; celebrants in homes or outdoors will be watched by others who will judge their rituals. If observers use what they see as a springboard to their own memories, then all individual Christmas festivities also become communal, which increases pressure to celebrate in socially accepted ways.

“Christmas in Lodgings” hones in on this point about socially sanctioned attitudes toward celebration as William Blanchard Jerrold and W. H. Wills tell the story of a bachelor in a first-person voice that differs from the opening narrator. Because the bachelor’s friends all reside “in Scotland, where Christmas is no festival,” he has no plans to leave for the holiday, but his landlady needs to use his room for a party (296). The bachelor turns sour in his loneliness as others prepare for the celebration, treats a servant rudely, refuses all pleasant advances, and mockingly describes how his landlady’s pity infuriates him. In this second story of the number, collaborative conversation is already evident as Jerrold and Wills seem to riff on two Dickens texts. The bachelor’s nasty responses to the landlady’s generosity on Christmas Day echo Scrooge’s rejection of his nephew Fred’s advances in A Christmas Carol, and the story’s emphasis on social approval of one’s Christmas rituals picks up a thread from Dickens’s opening story. Both a landlady and a servant observe and criticize the bachelor as he rejects decorative greenery and pudding, and their scorn has a lasting impact when, after his marriage, the man insists on rushing out of another lodging house before a Christmas can transpire there.

The bachelor’s most intense moments of loneliness come when he sits alone at a fire in his landlady’s parlor, and the third story continues that motif as James Hannay’s “Christmas in the Navy” features another Christmas fire into which the narrator gazes. The short piece carries a general message: even though some nautical Christmases are difficult, particularly if one lands in a Spanish jail, one also “may have a very pleasant Christmas at Sea” (300). The key is for sailors to remember the beauty of the homeland because, if they speak of England, think of “pretty cousins,” sing songs, and drink rum, the holiday can authenticate their true English values (300). Whether on a merchant ship or a naval vessel, Christmas at sea becomes a literal way of advancing the imperial interests that sustain Christmas celebrations at home.

Much more complex in its advocating for English supremacy is Charles Knight’s “A Christmas Pudding,” in which Mr. Oldknow contemplates “the mercantile history of the various substances of which that pudding was composed” (301). Inspired by his reading of travel literature, Oldknow dreams of faraway places and encounters the genii, or guarding spirits, associated with various ingredients.¹⁶ Defending Christmas pudding as an “emblem of our commercial eminence” against the Genius of the Raisin’s complaint that England is depriving Spanish and Mediterranean lands of “grapes which ought to be reserved for the unfermented wine which the Prophet delighted to drink,” Oldknow retorts that the demand created by English consumers is what causes the raisins to exist in the first place (301). Elevating an item’s market value, in this view, is a viable defense for unequal distribution of resources, cultural indifference, and disparities in labor conditions. Paul Young argues that “to Oldknow’s mind the Raisin represents Islamic irrationality and stagnation.”¹⁷ Oldknow’s insistence that the Genius of the Raisin should simply be grateful for English patronage is an approach exemplified by the Genius of the Currant, a “little freetrader,” and the Genius of the Nutmeg, an interspecies mix of contrite Dutchman and wood pigeon who thanks the English for leading him to renounce monopoly-protecting colonial violence (302–3).¹⁸

Illustrating how profoundly the standard Christmas rhetoric (and fare) is enmeshed in racial ideologies that glorify empire at the expense of humanity, the most problematic spirit is Sugar:

A West Indian sugar plantation is now mirrored—with its canes ripening under a tropical sun, and its mills with their machinery of cylinders and boilers. The Genius of Sugar is a freed Negro. It was said that in freedom he would not work; he has vindicated his privileges in his industry and his obedience. The grand experiment has succeeded in all moral effects. But the nation that demanded cheap corn would not be content with dear sugar. We must buy our sugar wherever the cane ripens. We use seven hundred millions of pounds of sugar annually, which yield a duty of four millions sterling. Mr. Oldknow thought about this, but was silent, when he saw the negro sitting under his own fig-tree; for the political questions which his freedom involved were somewhat complicated. He would trust to the ultimate power of a noble example, and in the meantime rejoice that the great body of the British people could buy their sugar at half the price that their fathers paid.

Mr. Oldknow, being somewhat at fault upon the sugar question, grew confused as new forms flitted before him. (303)

Through Oldknow’s confusion about the “complicated” postslavery questions embodied in the Genius of the Sugar, the story at once sidesteps and acknowledges the moral consequences of sugar production. Sugar’s form, however, is not combined with an animal, nor is he a fairy hybrid, like the others. He is a dark-skinned human being who has been enslaved, and the story takes great care to identify him as freed. He also differs from the previously presented genii in having no voice.

Given that Sugar occupies the most ethically fraught position, casting him as the first genius to be denied direct speech severely impairs the critique of industrial capitalism that Young locates in the figure of the Raisin. Noting its publication just five months before the Great Exhibition at the Crystal Palace, which advocated for free trade on a grand scale, Young sees “A Christmas Pudding” as a contrary text whose dialogue “works to destabilise Oldknow’s position as the voice of a pacific commercial rationale” but pays no attention to the other pieces in the Christmas number.¹⁹ Once the dialogism Young mentions is expanded to include those voices, the number’s stance clearly depicts British imperialism and its attendant white supremacy as contested and perhaps even contradictory but never fundamentally challenged as an ideological course preferable to all others. Although Oldknow is aware of his “fault” in uncritically joining the masses who blithely “rejoice” in the purchase of cheap sugar, he does not struggle to move quickly past the uncomfortable questions. Oldknow’s thoughts move to the next genius, an Irish egg collector, whose complicated role in the trade markets he responds to in a manner similar to how he reacts to the black man: by lamenting previous suffering, wishing for “just masters and wise rulers,” urging the Irish to forswear “agitation” in favor of working hard, and declining to grant the Irish woman a voice (303).²⁰ At the climactic moment of pudding lighting, all the spirits dance around a giant bowl, and Oldknow’s song about the imaginary “social bands” forged by free trade creates a utopian vision that attempts to assuage the story’s concerns about inequity:

Britain, to peaceful arts inclined,

Where commerce opens all her stores,

In social bands shall league mankind,

And join the sea-divided shores.

(304)

This fantasy of mercantile domination that benevolently unites the globe, glossing over exploitative or outright abusive relationships to maintain a vision of Britain as “peaceful,” is an integral part of the Christmas number’s formulation of what it means to celebrate the holiday.

The second longest in the collection, Knight’s story exalts England, and the next piece, Frederick Hunt’s “Christmas among the London Poor and Sick,” abruptly changes that vision by documenting how much deprivation continues to exist in the country’s metropolis. Hunt lists the numbers of poor who eat at parish workhouses and hospitals on Christmas but delivers little social commentary beyond noting that a festive indulgence in any kind of excess tends to worsen the condition of sick people (304–5). Concluding with a sketch of drunken men whose condition is difficult to differentiate from apoplexy, Hunt’s contribution contrasts the idealized view of England underpinning the stories that surround it. Thus, reading the number in its entirety reveals an ongoing conversation among the pieces that makes each one less definitive than it appears in isolation.

Following Hunt’s contribution, “Christmas in India” by Joachim Heyward Siddons returns to extreme vaunting of English Christianity as a civilizing force. Siddons’s essay bounces off of the idea that Christmas in a land associated with Hinduism and Islam (denigrated as “idolatrous” and “rude”) is not a ridiculous concept. The projects of “zealous missionaries” and others have succeeded in transforming India so that “the tide of European conquest, and, better still, the tide of European civilisation, has carried to the benighted land knowledge, and a large spirit of toleration” (305). Ignoring the violence of conquest and imperialism, the speaker then explains how Indian culinary traditions and decorative plants are repurposed to enhance Christmas celebrations. In another linking of the Irish to racialized others, rural Indians’ worshipful offerings “resemble the contributions of the Irish peasantry to Father Luke or Father Brady” (306). The strength of the colonial rulers in this setting is so profound that they can even affect the experience of climate in Calcutta, where English households light Christmas fires and “there is a wintry feel about the atmosphere; and as the chairs are drawn round the fire-place, and the whiskey-punch is brewed, the cherished idea of home on Christmas Day is suitably and completely realised” (306). Siddons’s idyllic domestic fireside forecasts the frame concept Dickens develops for 1852 and reduces the materials necessary to create such an atmosphere to chairs, a fireplace, and some whiskey. The emphasis on “home” as both private and public, as a space for family celebrations as well as the achievement of England’s national dominance, also resonates with the voyeurism of the number’s opening piece, in which Christmas celebrations are surveyed to ensure that celebrants exhibit an appropriate level of cheer and introspection.

Dialogism continues to characterize the 1850 number as the imperial project moves from hot to cold in Robert McCormick’s and Dickens’s “Christmas in the Frozen Regions,” which relates an episode pertinent to an 1841 polar expedition. McCormick joined an expedition that explored the South Pole in the same two ships John Franklin would take on the ill-fated 1845 expedition in search of the Northwest Passage. The level of fictionalization in McCormick’s piece is unclear, particularly since Dickens is listed as a collaborator. The story is important to the Christmas canon in at least two ways: first, as part of the premier Christmas number’s endorsement of imperial dominance as part of the holiday’s significance; and second, as the journal’s first Christmastime reference to the Franklin Expedition, which Dickens later defended passionately and alluded to in many future Christmas stories. McCormick’s story is about how the men celebrate Christmas in 1841 with “the usual old English fare[,] Roast beef . . . followed by the homely never-to-be-forgotten plum-pudding” (307). Surrounded by icebergs, the crew carves a ballroom into the ice for New Year and sculpts a snow woman complete with “a profusion of ringlets” about her head (307–8). The story closes with an insistence that the missing members of the Franklin Expedition may still be alive (a Christmas wish disappointed years later as news of the expedition’s demise spread).²¹

McCormick and Dickens weave storytelling and exploration together to maintain English Christmas traditions, and Samuel Sidney’s “Christmas Day in the Bush” continues those themes in Australia. Two men living a sparse life at a “new station” in the bush take a shortcut through the countryside “guided by Bushman’s signs and instincts” to crash a gentleman’s Christmas party (309). True to the tropes of transformation that under-gird colonial dreams, the host states in his toast that he had been “a beggar and an outcast” at home in Devon (310). The story augments the others by encouraging continued use of colonial lands for the reformation of those who fail in the home country. A happy ending reinforces that point as one of the visitors marries the pretty woman whose presence had drawn him to the party, and they pass “every succeeding Christmas Day under his own roof in the Bush” (310).

The number’s concluding piece, Richard H. Horne’s “Household Christmas Carols,” lacks strong thematic connections to the preceding stories, indicating that Wills and Dickens explore the possibilities of the Christmas number genre without a map dictating how the pieces fit together. Still, the mix of voices in the carol form and the collaboration inherent in group song-making draw out the conversational dynamics that run through the collection. Horne’s piece is one long carol with distinct verses spoken in the first-person voices of ailing children. “The Lame Child’s Carol” is followed by verses (all with the same chorus) for children who are “deaf,” “deformed,” “deaf and dumb,” “blind,” and “sick.” The final verse from a “healthy” child includes the aforementioned ill friends in his winter play, and each verse firmly links the patient, hopeful endurance of children to Christian love (310–12).

In addition to delineating subjects deemed appropriate for Christmastime, the first number’s formal qualities embed dialogue in the genre. Considering Knight’s story of the Christmas pudding, Waters notes that “dialogism is . . . a defining feature of the periodical context of the story,” which holds true in varying degrees for each piece in the collection.²² The implicit conversation between the stories validates and reinforces the necessity for specifically English customs to determine proper celebration of the holiday. As Sabine Clemm remarks, “Household Words frequently shows itself aware of the arbitrariness of national characteristics and its own struggle to define these. However, even the most astute writers never quite abandon the assumption that an essential Englishness does exist, even though Household Words’ definitions of it are usually fairly feeble.”²³ The Christmas numbers will continue to construct, respond to, and sometimes fetishize this “essential Englishness.” The 1850 number concludes without remarking that a tradition of holiday writing has begun, but the following year’s publication takes steps to distinguish the Christmas issue as special.

Extra Number for Christmas of Household Words

The 1851 issue, called the “Extra Number for Christmas of Household Words,” is the first to be designated an “extra.” An advertisement declares that it will please readers by “Showing What Christmas Is to Everybody,”²⁴ and six of the nine titles indeed begin with “What Christmas Is. . . .” Lacking a mission strong enough to sustain interest for twenty-four pages, the collection’s repetitive traits emerge in multiple descriptions of Christmas, exposing a need for the type of frame concept that Dickens develops the following year. Each piece displays a different angle from which one might glorify an English Christmas, but the reappearance of domestic fires, trees, festive foods, and principles of charity signals a lack of originality and creativity. Even giving voice to usually mute symbols, such as tree branches, fails to provide relief from the abundance of holiday clichés that plague the number. Some of the stories touch on an occasional unpleasant experience, but such moments are sandwiched by joyous recollections, and, on the whole, one can stomach only so many mentions of redemptive currants.

Still, the number’s common focus, “What Christmas Is,” suggests that the stories reinforce one another and that no individual speaker is alone in believing that Christmas merits pondering in print. Dickens begins with “What Christmas Is as We Grow Older,” a rumination on the role of memory and regret in celebration that continues to build a foundational Christmas vision. The piece defines “the Christmas spirit” as “the spirit of active usefulness, perseverance, cheerful discharge of duty, kindness, and forbearance” (1). Outgrowing romantic fantasies of life, one should place hope in future generations and encourage dreams in children rather than turning bitter and regretful. The piece also insists on a particular type of remembrance of the dead, barring grief and tears while insisting that residents of “the City of the Dead” be welcomed in the celebration (2). Recounting the sad deaths of individuals ranging from young children to sailors, the narrator commands, “You shall hold your cherished places in our Christmas hearts, and by our Christmas fires; and in the season of immortal hope, and on the birthday of immortal mercy, we will shut out Nothing!” (2). Leading up to the framing concept for 1852, the joining of people around the Christmas fire is crucial to this vision, and one is struck by the insistent tone that sanctions only one type of mourning.

Following Dickens’s piece, neither Richard H. Horne’s, Edmund Ollier’s, nor Harriet Martineau’s contribution offers insight that moves beyond nostalgia or clichéd observation. Rather, they are noteworthy because Dickens and Wills were astute enough to recognize these contributions as the type the Christmas collections needed to depart from in order to become consistently successful. Horne’s “What Christmas Is to a Bunch of People” is no more complex than its title, commenting on the hopes and concerns of two comfortable households. Community members—including the beadle, postman, publican, and shepherd—feature in the story’s contemplations of Christmas perspectives, and the shopkeeping class appears, but the upper ranks of the working classes merit attention only as their points of view relate to serving wealthier customers. No lower servants or factory workers are granted perspective, and the most stressful outburst from any of the included figures is the pastry cook’s “Sugar-frost and whitening!” when confection-induced anxiety startles him out of a deep sleep (6). The story ends with a brief recognition of kitchen labor, but once the cook serves a perfect Christmas dinner, she “loves all mankind; and retires to rest, after a small glass of cordial, at peace with herself and all the world” (7). Ollier’s “An Idyll for Christmas Indoors” shifts from human to plant voices. On Christmas Eve, a Sylvan Spirit sits atop the greenery decorating a sitting room, and the poem grants the spirits of holly, laurel, and mistletoe one stanza each before they speak together. The voice of the holly describes birds dying and a climate so cold as to kill its natural residents, which causes the sprig to gloat about its warm position indoors, where laurel affirms that it feels like a “glowing household June” (7–8). Ironically, natural items from outdoors accentuate the unnatural traits of idyllic domestic Christmas atmospheres. In “What Christmas Is in Country Places,” Martineau locates “the good old Christmas—the traditional Christmas—of Old England” in strictly rural locales (8).²⁵ Noting variations in local customs, the speaker explains that some regions believe good luck will grace a family if “a dark man” is the first to enter their home on New Year’s Day (10–11). Therefore, “it is a serious thing to have a swarthy complexion and black hair” because such men are compelled to enter so many people’s houses early in the morning (for a fee if the man is poor) (11). One senses possible danger for dark-skinned residents as their neighbors demand human good luck charms, and Martineau’s piece explicitly reveals the role of racialized identities in popular visions of “Old England” and its Christmas traditions. The story nevertheless concludes with another idealization of the rural scene “sheeted with snow,” producing a “social glow which spreads from heart to heart” (11).

Exemplifying how contributors’ voices became Dickens’s public voice and the entwining of collaborators’ styles, George A. Sala’s “What Christmas Is in the Company of John Doe” was reprinted in Harper’s with Dickens identified as its author, and as late as 1971, the New York Times printed it as “Christmas with John Doe” by Charles Dickens.²⁶ The story contrasts its predecessors with a refreshingly bleak declaration at its opening: “I have kept (amongst a store of jovial, genial, heart-stirring returns of the season) some very dismal Christmases” (11). Thomas Prupper then recounts terrible situations that have accompanied the holiday and details the year when he was arrested for debt on Christmas Eve. Although the prison inmates celebrate with traditional fare, Prupper cannot enjoy eating in such a hopeless place: “But what were beef and beer, what was unlimited tobacco, or even the plum pudding, when made from prison plums, boiled in a prison copper, and eaten in a prison dining-room?” (15). Once released, Prupper spends New Year’s Day with “a pretty cousin” who becomes his wife, and he concludes the story by demonstrating that the legacy of his brief incarceration brings no shame; rather, he jokes openly about not naming their first child after the prison (16). Sala’s vision may have shaped Dickens’s imagination, as the dismal atmosphere of prison saturating Prupper’s mindset resonates with Arthur Clennam’s experience in Dickens’s Little Dorrit (1855–57), whose title character is not named for a prison but is born in one. The story of John Doe takes on even greater significance in beginning to treat serious or distressing situations as appropriate Christmas topics.

Depicting the least nostalgic Christmas experience of the collection, Miss Eliza Griffiths’s “The Orphan’s Dream of Christmas” moves the number toward the types of pieces that characterize future Christmas numbers as Dickens abandons the concept of using stories simply to list “What Christmas Is” and approaches storytelling as a communal act that unites readers, listeners, and tellers even across boundaries of life and death. Sala’s story maintains a cheerful, sometimes self-mocking tone that leads to a happy ending, but Griffiths’s verse does not find its way to uplifting cheer. The poem opens with a solitary, weeping eight-year-old girl looking out of a workhouse window on Christmas Eve (16). Her parents and siblings have all died, and she dreams of death, Heaven, and Jesus—only to die herself at some point during the night. This verse indirectly challenges Dickens’s opening formulation of welcoming denizens of “the City of the Dead” to the fireside in “What Christmas Is as We Grow Older” by describing the Christmas of a family who is not fortunate enough to age at all.

Focusing on another orphan, Samuel Sidney’s “What Christmas Is After a Long Absence” changes the number’s tone yet again with a tale of emigration to South Australia that harkens back to the colonial emphasis of the first Christmas number. Facing greater obstacles than anticipated in the unfamiliar landscape, Charles imagines himself “constantly in danger from savage blacks” (17). He lists indigenous human beings alongside animals such as dingoes, uses “rude words, and even blows” to discipline his workers, and fears “the wild mountainous songs of the fierce aborigines, as they danced their corrobberies, and acted dramas representing the slaughter of the white man, and the plunder of his cattle” (18). Reinforcing the idyllically white “country” places of Martineau’s contribution, Charles is lonely when Christmas comes around and comforts himself with memories of “the Christmas time of dear old England” (18). Sixteen years later, having made the natives “tame” in his part of the bush colony, Charles returns home to search for a wife (19). Welcomed heartily, he glories especially in the “delicate-complexioned” women, appreciating a “fair white face” above all else and in contrast to his own suntanned skin (18–19). Returning to Australia with a new wife and about twenty relations, the Christmas visit enables Charles to expand the imperial project while escaping the class snobbery of England (20).

Pretension remains identified as a national flaw in Theodore Buckley’s “What Christmas Is If You Outgrow It,” but the lack of framing continues to challenge the 1851 number’s pace right up to its conclusion. Buckley’s story presents a plot that future Christmas number stories will repeat: an ungrateful son rises in social stature above his parents, then disloyally takes them for granted. Horace DeLisle, son of a respected country parson, becomes increasingly arrogant while away at school as he falls into debt and neglects his studies. His debauched character manifests most hurtfully when he leaves home before Christmas to resume carousing with friends. The story does not follow Horace to his implicit demise, ending instead with the general caution, “You may be quite sure that you have grown too fast, when you find that you have outgrown Christmas. It is a very bad sign indeed” (23). The number then concludes with another contribution from Horne, “The Round Game of the Christmas Bowl,” which comes “originally, from Fairy-Land” (23). Players convene to toss symbols of pride into a huge bowl of ice, which liberates them from troubles, and as they dance and sing, “the heat of the Christmas hearts outside causes the Offering which each has thrown in, to warm to such a genial glow, that the heat thus collectively generated, melts the ice” (24). The stress on communal offerings and the effect of the collaboratively produced heat then shifts suddenly (and rather mind-bendingly) back to the individual as the melted water transports participants home to the beds in which they dream (24).

So ends the 1851 Christmas number in a vision of individual Christmas happiness enabled by communal endeavor. Although the 1851 number is, as a collection, fairly weak in quality because of the redundant Christmas fantasies, this concluding story connects directly to the opening piece for 1850, which links individual memories of childhood to the notion that a stranger may be observing and judging one’s Christmastime recollections. The 1850 number establishes important foundations and traditions from which the future numbers consistently draw but that the 1851 number does not necessarily enhance, leading one to feel a keen need for the kind of narrative organization that Dickens devises for 1852. Had the numbers stagnated as loose assemblages of fairly random thoughts about Christmas, their future would probably have been limited and unimpressive. Beginning in 1852, however, the framing that emerges significantly advances what the multivocal collections are able to accomplish.