The Man Who Invented Christmas (16 page)

E. T. Jaques, a veteran combatant in the courts of chancery, adds a poignant postscript to his account of the court battle: “It adds a new interest to Westminster Hall when one thinks of the radiant party which turned out of Knight Bruce’s court after judgment had been delivered: Dickens—the eager, beautiful young Dickens of Maclise’s drawings [he was, for all his accomplishments and his travails, only thirty-one]—all aglow with his victory, and bubbling over with thanks to Talfourd and the rest…and Mitton, nearly as excited as the plaintiff himself.”

In this regard, it might be noted that what Dickens saw vindicated that day was not simply his right to control the sale of his intellectual property (for it would be the rare author who regarded his writings solely as “property”). This battle was over far more than pounds and pennies. To the extent that his words—especially the words that were woven up into
A Christmas Carol
—were an inextricable expression of himself, then Judge Bruce’s decree had also vindicated the core of Dickens’s being. Absolutely, the author would have glowed.

“The pirates,” Dickens wrote to Forster in the aftermath, “are beaten flat. They are bruised, bloody, battered, smashed, squelched, and utterly undone.” Two days later he was ready to state that he might even profit from the whole affair. In a letter to Forster, Dickens suggested that he could actually steal something back from Lee and Hewitt and their cohorts, by simply copying the preposterous claims they had made in their various depositions: “The further affidavits put in by way of extenuation by the printing rascals
are
rather strong, and give one a pretty correct idea of what the men must be who hold on to the heels of literature.” He told Forster that he was giving serious thought to printing these amazing depositions into his own fiction, “without a word of comment, and sewing them up with
Chuzzlewit.
”

Furthermore, he was not through with Lee and Haddock, vowing that they would have to account personally for their slander against his good name. He told Forster, “I am determined that I will have an apology for their affidavits. The other men may pay their costs and get out of it, but I will stick to my friend the author.”

He also playfully confessed to Forster his lingering guilt concerning his old friend Thomas Noon Talfourd, who had needlessly gone to so much trouble in the matter: “Oh! the agony of Talfourd at Knight Bruce’s not hearing him! He had sat up till three in the morning, he says, preparing his speech; and would have done all kinds of things with the affidavits. It certainly was a splendid subject.”

And while the petition of Lee and Haddock to have the injunction against them lifted had been dismissed, he pointed out that final disposition of his case against the pirates was still to come: “Talfourd is strongly disinclined to compromise with the printers on any terms. In which case it would be referred to the master to ascertain what profits had been made by the piracy, and to order the same to be paid to me. But wear and tear of law is my consideration.”

To be sure, weathering the many irritations and costs of a civil suit was difficult enough. Given Dickens’s early experience with the workings of the courts, however, it is hard to believe that he did not have some inkling of the blow that was coming next.

Despite Talfourd’s feelings, and as court records show, Dickens made an effort to settle the matter with Lee and Haddock, stating that “the plaintiff entertained no vindictive feelings towards the defendants, and authorized them to offer that if the defendants would pay the costs and apologise, no further litigation would follow.” However, Lee and Haddock were having none of that. “Mr. Anderson declined to enter into any arrangement,” the record states. “The plaintiff must take his remedy at law.”

In the end, however, the law could offer Dickens no remedy. Faced with Dickens’s pending claim of £1,000 to cover lost sales and legal expenses and its almost certain adjudication in his favor, Lee and Haddock promptly declared bankruptcy. And because they listed no assets (beyond, one supposes, their unsold inventory of
A Christmas Ghost Story
), the plaintiff was responsible to the court for their costs as well.

Dickens, who was already deep in debt, could scarcely afford more. He wrote to Talfourd, “I have dropped—dropped!—the action and the Chancery Suit against the Bankrupt Pirates,” for there was little hope of recovering anything, and he was not about to incur further expense.

As to the other four booksellers named as defendants, they “have come in and compounded, so that I lose nothing by them,” he said. But, “by Lee and Haddock (the vagabonds) I do lose, of course, all my expenses, costs and charges in those suits.”

He may have stopped the proceedings, but damage to Dickens’s pocketbook was already done. E. T. Jaques estimates the cost of such a case as at least £700, and while Dickens had only had to pursue one suit of the five filed against the booksellers, even the costs of preparing and filing the others—which were necessary to flush out which parties had actually published the offending volume—would have been significant.

It was an illustration of what befalls a man who sues a beggar, but as Jaques points out, at least Dickens was in fact able to salvage some material for future books. From this misadventure almost certainly would spring that wonderful scene in the chancery court of
Bleak House,
wherein eighteen lawyers, “Eighteen of Mr. Tangle’s learned friends, each armed with a little summary of eighteen hundred sheets, bob up like eighteen hammers in a pianoforte, make eighteen bows, and drop into their eighteen places of obscurity.”

In the end, though, it seems to have been another bitter disappointment for Dickens. Two years later, when the possibility of a similar court action arose, he wrote to Forster: “My feeling…is the feeling common, I suppose, to three-fourths of the reflecting part of the community…and that is, that it is better to suffer a great wrong than to have recourse to the much greater wrong of the law. I shall not easily forget the expense, and anxiety, and horrible injustice of the
Carol
case, wherein, in asserting the plainest right on earth, I was really treated as if I were the robber instead of the robbed. Given such…I know of nothing that
could
come, even of a successful action, which would be worth the mental trouble and disturbance it would cost.”

Glum words indeed. But when he was confronted with the first financial statement from his publishers regarding
A Christmas Carol,
Dickens probably wondered if any good would ever come from his little book.

13.

I
t is worth remembering that Dickens had hoped to earn as much as £1,000 from his “little Carol,” and in the first heady days of its life, such dreams must have seemed not only attainable but positively modest. As Forster put it, “There poured upon its author daily, all through that Christmas time, letters from complete strangers to him which I remember reading with a wonder of pleasure; not literary at all, but of the simplest domestic kind; of which the general burden was to tell him, amid many confidences, about their homes, how the
Carol
had come to be read aloud there, and was to be kept upon a little shelf by itself, and was to do them no end of good. Anything more to be said of it will not add much to this.”

And a pleasant story it would be if only good news flowed in the immediate wake of
A Christmas Carol
’s publication. The truth is, however, that along with all those delightful letters pouring in to thank Dickens for what he had created, there came a missive of an entirely different nature from Chapman and Hall.

“Such a night as I have passed,” Dickens wrote to Forster on the Saturday morning of February 10, after he had scanned the contents of that packet from the publishers. “I really believed I should never get up again, until I had passed through all the horrors of a fever.”

One can only imagine Forster’s reaction to such an opening, of course. What ailment, what terrible misfortune could have befallen his friend?

Dickens had come home the evening before, he told his agent, to find the statement of accounts regarding
A Christmas Carol
waiting, and this was the cause of his great distress.

It is not difficult to imagine the author, sinking into the chair at his desk, hoping that his first quick glance at the bottom line had been askew, a vision, the result perhaps, as Scrooge might have put it, “of an undigested bit of beef” or a crumb of cheese.

He would have placed the account sheet on the desk before him, adjusted his lamp, perhaps rubbed his face just to get the blood running before he checked again: Calm down now, Dickens, take it as it comes, first things first:

Proceeds from sales, tops on the list. “6,000, less approximately 103 gift, library, and press copies, sold 26 as 25 in cloth for 3s. 6d. each.” (The abbreviation for shillings is
s.,
and the abbreviation for pence is
d.
) Yes, yes, he would have nodded, such gifts and discounts to booksellers were simply unavoidable, the cost of doing business…and thus the tally of gross proceeds, at £992 5s.
Not bad, not bad at all.

There would have been a quick mental check of the math, of course, 6,000 at three and a half per, yes, a thousand pounds give or take. Though perhaps it had been a mistake to insist on that five-shilling cover price, after all.

On to the expenses next, possibly something there, some error, some explanation for the pounding of his heart, the bottomless feeling in his bowels:

“Printing, £74 2s.” Yes, about right.

“Paper, £89 2s.” Might have gotten away with less, but the look of the thing was all-important…

“Drawing and Engravings, £49 18s.”
Laws, laws.
Mr. Stiff, the hack with the Dickensian name who had designed, illustrated, and engraved
A Christmas Ghost Story
for that pack of thieves at
Parley’s,
might have been paid a pound for all his trouble. Then again, Leech’s work was of the first quality, was it not?

There were also charges for two steel plates at £1 4s., the printing plates themselves at £15 17s., and paper for the plates at £7 12s. All in order, it appeared.

But then the charges for coloring—
Lord
—£120. And the binding of the books, at £180…. Though what a handsome volume it was.

Incidentals and Advertising, at £168 7s. 8d. Down to the penny with their bloody “incidentals” were Chapman and Hall.

And, lastly, “Commission to Publishers,” 15 percent of receipts off the top, and totaling £148 16s.

All those expenses, then, and the total of them, £855 8d. And that final, dreadful, bottom line:

“Balance of account to Mr. Dickens’s credit: £137 4s.4d.”
Egad.
No matter how long he stared at it, the number would not change.

Dickens was shattered, and said as much to his agent: “I had set my heart and soul upon a Thousand, clear. What a wonderful thing it is, that such a great success should occasion me such intolerable anxiety and disappointment.”

Nor was Dickens satisfied with that down-to-the-pence accounting supplied by Chapman and Hall. He dashed off an angry note to Mitton, saying that he had not the least doubt that his publishers “have run the expense up, anyhow, purposely to bring me back and disgust me with charges. If you add up the different charges for the plates, you will find that they cost more than I get.”

Still roiling in a bath of anger and disappointment—on the one hand this tremendous accomplishment, and on the other hand next to nothing to show for it—Dickens told Forster, “My year’s bills, unpaid, are so terrific, that all the energy and determination I can possibly exert will be required to clear me.”

He reiterated his determination to go abroad, no matter what his financial condition, “if next June come and find me alive,” then lamented, “Good Heaven, if I had only taken heart a year ago!”

Of course, had he gone abroad the year before, there likely would have been no
Carol,
but Dickens skipped that point. “I was so utterly knocked down last night,” he told Forster, but his resolve was now steel. “I will be off to some seaside place as soon as a tenant [for his house] offers. I am not afraid, if I reduce my expenses; but if I do not, I shall be ruined past all mortal hope of redemption.”

The largest part of those expenses went toward the upkeep of that house, a thirteen-room manse on Devonshire Terrace, where Dickens had moved his family in 1839 when the money was rolling in from
Pickwick
and the rest. Located opposite the York Gate entrance to Regents Park (just around the corner from another famed set of literary lodgings, the 221B Baker Street flat of Conan Doyle’s Mr. Holmes), and including spacious gardens, the house had required an eleven-year lease of £800, plus an additional rent of £160 per year. Dickens had upgraded the doors of the home to mahogany, replaced its mantelpieces with Italian marble, and ordered the study soundproofed against the clamor of a household that, with the birth of his son Francis in January, now included five children.

Dickens described it as a house of “undeniable situation and excessive splendour,” and given that he had written some of his most successful works there, including
The Old Curiosity Shop
and
A Christmas Carol,
it would surely have pained him to leave it. But, as he told Forster, his mind was made up.

There was a bit of impatience in those letters he dashed off to Forster and Mitton, certainly, for in fact sales continued strong for his
Carol,
well after the Christmas season had come and gone. The second and third printings ordered up in January would be succeeded by half a dozen more over the course of 1844, until by the end of the year nearly 15,000 copies would be sold. Only seventy copies would remain in Chapman and Hall’s warehouse at the close of business on December 31, and the bottom line of their closing statement records that “Amount of Profit on the Work” had climbed to £726.