Rebel Britannia

With apologies to long-standing subscribers - who saw this last year, and are under no obligation to read it again - here is a Christmas extra, in the form of a reprint of one of my favourite pieces, to welcome the many new followers Rebel Britannia has gained over the last month. Merry Christmas to all.

Millions of people this month will be watching, reading or listening to some version of An Appeal to the People of England, on behalf of the Poor Man's Child. Many will return to the original text; others may prefer the Muppets’ interpretation.

In 1843 Charles Dickens (1812-70) had two worries on his mind; one personal, and the other … well, the other personal as well, in a way.

His immediate problem was that his career appeared to be on its death bed. He’d been a successful writer since his mid-twenties, and had become, in a short time, a superstar throughout the English-speaking world. This was the first time he’d experienced professional failure. His last completed book, American notes, had not gone down well, and more importantly his current serial, The Life and Adventures of Martin Chuzzlewit, was proving a critical and financial flop. The serials were his bread and butter; if they were finished, so was he.

The other matter was, objectively, of much greater import: the Hungry Forties. Bad harvests and bad economics had produced one of the worst slumps in British history. Prices were high, unemployment was high, and wages were low. Deadly poverty spread through the working classes, deeper and broader than in living memory.

Many conservatives then as now (but not always in between) believed, or claimed to believe, that poverty was the fault of the poor. People were poor because they chose to be – it was, to coin a phrase, a lifestyle choice. Since it was a choice, it followed logically that the way to stop people being poor was to make poverty an unattractive option. If the experience of poverty could be made ever more terrible then eventually poor people would decide not to be poor any more.

So, every new law and budget measure introduced was designed to punish the poor for being poor. To Dickens – who, unlike the people making the laws in Westminster and supporting them in the press, had actually been poor, and knew that choice did not enter into it – this was appalling. It was wickedness, cruelty; it was counter-productive and socially dangerous; it was, above all, contrary to the teachings of Jesus the human being, which were central to Dickens’s view of life.

Two imperatives collided: his income falling and his debts rising, the word-seller Boz (the early pen-name by which he was almost always referred to in contemporary journalism) needed a bestseller – quickly. And the reformist Charles Dickens, who had experienced the horror of poverty during his childhood and had never forgotten what it felt like, needed to make a stand against Conservatism, a philosophy which he despised with all his heart and brain.

He began work on a political pamphlet – his Appeal to the People - but then a better idea struck him, during one of his famous nocturnal walks: a project which might meet both objectives at once. He wrote to a friend that under his new plan, “a Sledgehammer” would “come down with twenty times the force – twenty thousand times the force” of his original scheme.

Dickens was right. His short novella, A Christmas Carol. In Prose. Being a Ghost Story of Christmas was published on 19^th December 1843, and was an immediate, massive, global success. The first print run had sold out by Christmas Eve. His publishers hadn’t fancied it at all, so Dickens had agreed to take on all the costs and risk – in exchange for all the profits from sales. The author personally supervised every aspect of his parable – the type, the artwork, the binding, the pricing, and of course the writing, and not to mention changing the name of Little Fred to Tiny Tim, and all in about six weeks. It was a hell of a gamble: if it hadn’t saved him, it would have destroyed him.

Instantly, the book became – and has remained – the most famous Christmas story in the world, and by the following Christmas many of its characters and phrases had entered the language, and what Dickens always referred to as “the Carol” had become integral to the very idea of Christmas in Britain and the USA. Within months (and irrespective of the season) at least twelve separate stage versions were running in London alone. From 1858 until his death, Dickens himself gave annual public readings of A Christmas Carol.

Alongside its army of admirers, the Carol had many critics, especially among the upper classes, both for its politics and for its literary style. But they might as well have been criticising gravity: the book was a force of nature, unstoppable and impervious to attack.

In our time, Dickens is sometimes claimed as a Radical (in the 19^th century sense of a democratic reformer), or even as a socialist. He was arguably the former; he was definitely not the latter. He believed that those who called themselves Christians should abide by Christian teachings on charity. He seems always to have taken the view that if the rich and powerful could only be forced to confront the reality of poverty, their hearts would melt. While those of his contemporaries who supported trade unionism or socialism fought against the system that created poverty, Dickens thought a better world could be brought about by changing people’s feelings, not by changing economic structures.

Does he then belong among our Rebels of Britannia? For all his political naivety, his (very small c) conservatism, his respectability, his conviction that if only employers and employees would each behave reasonably to the other then everything would be rosy, the undeniable fact remains that he fought the good fight, and he did it in words that still sing many lifetimes later.

During the writing of Chuzzlewit, Charles Dickens wrote to a friend: “I declare I never go into what is called 'society' that I am not aweary of it, despise it, hate it, and reject it. The more I see of its extraordinary conceit, and its stupendous ignorance of what is passing out of doors, the more certain I am that it is approaching the period when, being incapable of reforming itself, it will have to submit to be reformed by others off the face of the earth."

With you on that one, Boz.

*

Sources:

The annotated Christmas Carol edited by Michael Patrick Hearn (W.W. Norton, 2004)

www.penguin.co.uk/articles/2020/12/charles-dickens-a-christmas-carol-story-of

http://victorian-studies.net/CD-Forster-4.html

Morning Star 30 November 2016

www.bbc.com/culture/article/20171215-how-did-a-christmas-carol-come-to-be