The Man Who Invented Christmas (17 page)

However gratifying the continued enthusiasm for the book might have been, the amount was still well short of that “quick £1,000” that Dickens had hoped to gain. Furthermore, once his work on
Martin Chuzzlewit
was completed in June of 1844, his £200 monthly income from that source would disappear as well. Dickens stood resolute on his decision to leave Chapman and Hall, however, and Forster accordingly informed those men that once Dickens had completed his commitment to them for
Martin Chuzzlewit,
their association would be terminated.

On June 1, shortly before the publication of the final installment of
Chuzzlewit,
Dickens signed a publishing contract with William Bradbury and Frederick Evans, the two men who had been printing his books from the beginning. While Bradbury and Evans had little experience with the publishing side of the business—the editing, advertising, and retailing—Dickens trusted the pair and figured that their inexperience might be all the better, given his needs. In fact, “a printer is better than a bookseller,” he said, sniping at the abilities of Chapman and Hall to market his books to the trade. And, in the belief that his advice to Bradbury and Evans would constitute all they really needed to know about purveying his books, he hammered out an unusual agreement with his new publishers. Instead of the author receiving a percentage of sales or profits, Dickens agreed to give Bradbury and Evans a 25-percent share of the net proceeds from anything he might write over the next eight years.

Bradbury and Evans would have no say about what Dickens might write, though the parties did agree that if Dickens were to undertake the editing and publishing of a periodical during that period, then his share of any profits from such an enterprise would drop to 66 percent and theirs would rise accordingly. In return, Bradbury and Evans would advance Dickens £2,800, which was the amount he reckoned necessary to see him through a year abroad and another furlough from writing.

He might or might not attempt a book about his planned travels in Italy and elsewhere, Dickens allowed, but from now on he would be the one to decide the course of his career. There was only one small exception: it was understood by all parties at the time of the signing that he would have a follow-up book to
A Christmas Carol
ready for the Christmas season of 1844.

With that promise made and the contract signed, Dickens turned his thoughts from writing for a time, and set about making preparations for his move. Of course he continued to take pride in his
Carol
’s continued success, and would even describe himself in a letter the following year as “the author of
A Christmas Carol in Prose
and other works.” And undoubtedly, he took the time to savor letters such as that from Lord Jeffrey: “Blessings on your kind heart…for you may be sure you have done more good by this little publication, fostered more kindly feelings, and prompted more positive acts of beneficence, than can be traced to all the pulpits and confessionals in Christendom since Christmas 1842.”

But for all intents and purposes, with the publication of
A Christmas Carol
behind him, Dickens had closed the books on one part of his adult life, and was intent upon making the transition to another. Though only thirty-two, he had established himself as an author and as a person of renown, and, furthermore, he had survived the storm of blows and backlash that often follow in the wake of great success. Even though the public had been indifferent to his
Chuzzlewit,
Dickens wrote Forster following the completion of its final chapter that in his own heart rested the knowledge that the book had been a hundred times better than anything he had done before.

And in addition, at the nadir of his most gloomy days, he had in six feverish weeks produced a book based upon the very same themes—skewering pomposity, excoriating greed, championing charity for the unfortunate—but he had done it differently, pointing to the possibility of change, and in such a way that readers everywhere embraced his words and praised him for acknowledging their shortcomings and encouraging them to become more generous and loving. Truly, he had proven to himself that he was capable of writing books that needed to be written. So, out with the old, in with the new.

He packed up his family and headed off for Italy to see what might strike his writer’s fancy, though he assured Forster of one certain thing: he was going to follow up the
Carol
with a Christmas book to “knock it out of the field.”

14.

D
ickens may well have intended to begin a new chapter in his career when he set out for the Continent, but the legacy of all that he had done by that time would trail his steps forever. And of everything that he had written to that point, nothing would prove more persistent and pervasive and powerful than
A Christmas Carol.

In addition to the piracies and the imitations, soon after the publication of the novel there appeared on London stages the inevitable—and mostly unlicensed—dramatic adaptations of the kind that followed the publication of any moderately successful book. It was a backhanded form of acclaim that Dickens endured from the earliest days. And in those unauthorized imitations of his first novels, Dickens actually saw more reason to be flattered than aggrieved or threatened. For one thing, there was little money in the theater for a writer in those days. Even a licensed adaptation might bring an author a pound per act at most, and Dickens had come to view the productions more as free advertising and evidence of the broad appeal of his work than anything else.

Until 1843, in fact, the national licensing laws permitted only the Royal Theatres at Drury Lane and Covent Garden to present serious dramatic productions. While there was plenty of spectacle available elsewhere, in saloons, meetinghouses, and other public venues, these presentations generally took the form of vaudeville, including burlesques, sketches and scenes from popular sources interspersed with music, and various conglomerations of pantomime, soliloquy, magic acts, mesmerism, ventriloquism, and acrobatics, antedating the variety shows of the television age to come.

As a young man, Dickens had been fascinated with this shaggy form of theater, and he often took part in school and amateur productions. Only the onset of a terrible head cold had kept him from auditioning for a part in a Covent Garden production during his early days as a journalist, in retrospect a happy accident that may have forestalled quite a different career path. Though his success with
Sketches by Boz
may have displaced any serious aspirations as an actor, Dickens’s interest in the theater never left him. In 1838 he penned a farce titled
The Strange Gentleman,
which was doing well enough to encourage him in further dramaturgical endeavors, until the landslide popularity of
The Pickwick Papers
swept him irreversibly in a different direction.

Still, Dickens remained a resolute theatergoer, and often an eager performer. During the Canadian segment of his American tour, he directed and appeared in a series of farces staged by the officers of the Royal Garrison in Montreal, giving the unpaid role his all. As he wrote Forster, “[T]he pain and perspiration I have expended during the last ten days exceed anything you can imagine.”

In addition, he counted a number of playwrights and theater critics among his closest friends, including Forster, the multitalented Bulwer-Lytton, and lawyer-cum-playwright Thomas Noon Talfourd, who represented him in the
Parley’s Illuminated
case, and whose work had been produced at Covent Garden. And while involvement in the theater remained a vaguely disreputable enterprise well into the nineteenth century, the passage of the Theatres Act in 1843 changed things greatly. The act diminished the rather dictatorial powers of the Lord Chamberlain to restrict the licensing of theaters and limited him to the prohibition only of performances where he thought it “fitting for the preservation of good manners, decorum or of the public peace so to do.”

While such ambiguous language would remain largely in effect until 1968, and prompt more than a bit of debate about what was offensive to twentieth-century manners, the Theatres Act was a boon to serious playwrights, extending the reach of their work into a wide range of venues and thus to middle-class England. Theaters thereby gained a heightened respectability and more secure economic footing. The boom in 1840s theater-building would result, in fact, in the creation of London’s famed West End district.

Prior to 1843, however, theater in London was something of a mongrelized enterprise. The concept of copyright for a stage play was laughable—and besides, why would any director or producer pay an artiste serious money to concoct an original composition, when any number of hacks would be glad to “re-originate” the works of Defoe, Fielding, Richardson, or Smollett for a few shillings?

One of Dickens’s early stories, “A Bloomsbury Christening,” was co-opted in this way in 1834, and Dickens himself was happy to review the proceedings, where he noted good-naturedly that the characters were “old and particular friends.” Dickens scholar Paul Schlicke estimates that by 1840
The Pickwick Papers, Oliver Twist,
and
Nicholas Nickleby
had been staged at least sixty times, and the author had become somewhat resigned to the matter, though it did annoy him when the productions were poorly done, or his dialogue carelessly transcribed, or the conclusions to his stories given away before the final publication in book form.

Of everything Dickens had written up to that time, however,
A Christmas Carol,
with its brevity, tight-knit story line, vivid characters, and colorful dialogue, was a natural for the stage, and the adaptations (carefully cataloged by Dickens scholar H. Philip Bolton) began to appear almost immediately. On Monday, February 5, 1844, three productions opened simultaneously in London.

One, titled
A Christmas Carol: or, The Miser’s Warning,
a drama in two acts, was penned by C. Z. Barnett and performed at the Surrey Theatre. Described by critics as “much grimmer” than the others, and lacking any songs, its run was brief. A second,
Scrooge, The Miser’s Dream,
was penned by Charles Webb and opened at Sadler’s Wells, where it lasted fifteen performances. The third was the only version actually sanctioned by Dickens (and thus the only version for which he would receive a share of the profits).
A Christmas Carol: or, Past, Present, and Future,
in three acts, by Edward Stirling, opened at the Adelphi, the theater with the best reputation at the time, and ran for more than forty nights.

Dickens attended a production of the last, and though a bit apprehensive before going in—“Oh, Heaven! If any forecast of this was ever in my mind!”—he seemed pleased by what he saw: “Better than usual,” he dubbed the effort, adding that the actor playing Scrooge (“O. Smith,” a scenery-chewing veteran who had starred in the lead of
Frankenstein,
as well as in a few adaptations of Dickens’s work previously) “was drearily better than I expected. It is a great comfort to have that kind of meat underdone, and his face is quite perfect.”

The production of Webb’s version would close relatively quickly at Sadler’s Wells, but it had already begun a simultaneous run at the Strand in London. Not only did it run at that theater well into March, but Webb’s rendition was so popular that it was given at least five productions elsewhere during the season.

Before the year was out, there would be at least sixteen productions of the story to reach the stage in England, some of them taking great liberties with the original. In one, Scrooge was reunited with his long-lost fiancée, while one of the Webb versions culminated in a near-riot when the three Spirits of Christmas came back on stage to join such stalwarts as Puck, Punch, Pan, and Apollo in a veritable chorus-line grand finale.

Stirling’s authorized version actually crossed the Atlantic, where it was performed at the Park Theater in New York City during the Christmas season of 1844. And revivals of both the Webb and Stirling versions were again mounted in London that season.

If the gratifying reviews in respected newspapers had restored Dickens’s reputation in literary circles, the unprecedented number of dramatic productions spread his name to an exponentially wider audience, in the same way a successful film adaptation might for a popular novel today. And yet, while these days nearly every American has attended, acted in a school version, or at least seen the notices for
some
holiday production of
A Christmas Carol,
1844 marked the high-water point for the number of theatrical adaptations of the story for more than half a century. Part of the drop-off after that year can be attributed to the fact that Dickens churned out four Christmas books in the five years following, and one of those, 1845’s
The Cricket on the Hearth,
became by far the most dramatized of its brethren during the writer’s lifetime. That story actually ranked third in frequency of Dickens adaptations during that period, after versions of
Nicholas Nickleby
and
Oliver Twist.
In addition, Dickens himself began offering live readings of
A Christmas Carol
in the 1850s, a practice that proved immensely popular, and which he continued to his death.