"Christmas stories" by Charles Dickens

Dickens' self-justifying letters lack candor in omitting to mention Ellen Ternan, an actress 27 years his junior his passion for whom had precipitated the separation. Two months earlier he had written more frankly to an intimate friend:

The domestic unhappiness remains so strong upon me that I can not write, and (waking) cannot rest, one minute. I have never known a moment's peace or content, since the last night of The Frozen Deep.

The Frozen Deep was a play in which he and Nelly (as Ellen was called) had performed together in August 1857. She was an intelligent girl, of an old theatrical family reports speak of her as having “a pretty face and well-developed figure” - or “passably pretty not much of an actress.” She left the stage in 1860; after Dickens' death she married a clergyman and helped him run a school. The affair was hushed up until the 1930s, and evidence about it remains scanty, but every addition confirms that Dickens was deeply attached to her and that their relationship lasted until his death. It seems likely that she became his mistress, though probably not until the 1860s; assertions that a child, or children, resulted remain unproved. Similarly, suggestions that the anguish experienced by some of the lovers in the later novels may reflect Dickens' own feelings remain speculative. It is tempting indeed, to associate Nelly with some of their heroines (who are more spirited and complex, less of the “legless angel,” than most of their predecessors), especially as her given names, Ellen Lawless, seemed to be echoed by those of heroines in the three novels - Estella, Bella and Helena Landless - but nothing definite is known about how she responded to Dickens, what she felt for him at the time, or how close any of these later love stories were to aspects or phrases of their relationship. G.K. Chesterton - Charles Dickens, London, 1903, reprinted 1977. pp. 114-127

“There is nothing very remarkable in the story,” commended one early transmitter of it, and this seems just. Many middle-aged men feel an itch to renew their emotional lives with a pretty young girl, even if, unlike Dickens, they cannot plead indulgence for “the wayward and unsettled feeling which is part of the tenure on which one holds an imaginative life.” But the eventual disclosure of this episode caused surprise, shock or piquant satisfaction, being related of a man whose rebelliousness against his society had seemed to take only impeccably reformist shapes. A critic in 1851, listing the reasons for his unique popularity, had cited “above all, his deep reverence for the household sanctities, his enthusiastic worship of the household gods.” After these disclosures he was, disconcertingly or intriguingly a more complex man; and, partly as a consequence, Dickens the novelist also began to be seen as more complex, less conventional, than had been realized. The stimulus was important, though Nelly's significance, biographically and critically, has proved far from inexhaustible.

In the longer term, Kathleen Tillotson's remark is more suggestive: “his life-long love affair with his reading public, when all is said, is by far the most interesting love-affair of his life.” This took a new form, about the time of Dickens' separation from his wife, in his giving public readings from his works, and it is significant that, when trying to justify their enterprise as certain to succeed, he referred to “that particular relation which subsists between me and public.” The remark suggests how much Dickens valued the public affection, not only as a stimulus to his creativity and a condition for his commercial success but also as a substitute for the love he could not find at home. He had been toying with the idea of turning paid reader since 1853, when he began giving occasional readings in aid of charity. The paid series began in April 1858, the immediate impulse being to find some energetic distraction from his marital unhappiness. But the readings drew on more permanent elements in him and his art: his remarkable histrionic talents, his love of theatricals and of seeing and delighting an audience, and the eminently performable nature of his fiction. Moreover, he could earn more by reading than by writing, and more certainly; it was easier to force him to repeat a performance than create a book.

Tired and ailing though he was, he remained inventive and adventurous in his final novels. A Tale of Two Cities (1859) was an experiment, relying less than before on characterization, dialogue and humour. It was well for him, at any rate, that the people raised in France. It was well for him, at any rate, that the guillotine was set up in the Place de la Concorde. Unconsciously, but not accidentally, Dickens was here working out the whole true comparison between swift revolutionism in Paris and slow evolutionism in London. Sidney Carton is one of those sublime ascetics whose head offends them, and who cut it off. For him at least it was better that the blood should flow in Paris than that the wine should flow any longer in London. And if I say that even now the guillotine might be the best cure for many a London lawyer. An exciting and compact narrative, it lacks too many of his strength to count among his major works. Sydney Carton's self-sacrifice was found deeply moving by Dickens and by many readers; Dr. Manette now seems a more impressive achievement in serious characterizations. The French Revolution scenes are vivid, if superficial in historical understanding. Great Expectations resembles Copperfield in being a first person narration and in drawing on parts of Dickens' personality and experience. Compact like its predecessors, it lacks the panoramic inclusiveness of Bleak House, Little Dorrit, and Our Mutual Friend, but though not his most ambitious, it is his most finely achieved novel. The hero Pip's mind is explored with great subtlety, and his development through a childhood and youth beset with hard tests of character is traced critically but sympathetically. Various “great expectations” in the book found ill founded - a comment as much on the values of the age as on characters' weaknesses and misfortune. Our Mutual Friend, a large inclusive novel, continues this critique monetary and class values. London is now grimmer than ever before, and the corruption, complacency, and superficiality of “respectable” society are fiercely attacked. Many new elements are introduced into Dickens' fictional world, but his handling of the old comic - eccentrics are sometimes tiresomely mechanical. How the unfinished Edwin Drood would have developed is uncertain. Here again Dickens left panoramic fiction to concentrate on a limited private action. The central figure was evidently to be John Jasper, eminent respectability as a cathedral organist was in extreme contrast to his haunting low opium dens and, out of violent sexual jealousy, murdering his nephew. It would have been his most elaborate treatment of the themes of crime, evil, and psychological abnormality that had recurred throughout his novels; a great celebrator of life, he was also obsessed with death.

How greatly Dickens personally had changed appears in remarks by friends who met him again, after many years, during the American reading tour in 1867-68. “I sometimes think…,” wrote one, “I must have known two individuals bearing the same name, at various periods of my own life.” But just as the fiction, despite many developments still contained stylistic and narrative features continuous with the earliest work, so, too, the man remained a “human hurricane” though he had aged considerably, his health had deteriorated, and his nerves had been jungled by traveling ever since his being in a railway accident in 1865. Other Americans noted that, though grizzled, he was “as quick and elastic in his movements as ever.” His photographs, wrote journalist after one of the readings, “give no idea of his genial expression. To us he appears like hearty, companionable man, with a deal of fun in him,” but that very day Dickens was writing, “I am nearly used up,” and listing the afflictions now “telling heavily upon me.” His pride and the old-trouper tradition made him conceal his sufferings. And, if sometimes by an effort of will, his old high spirits were often on display. His fame remained undiminished, though critical opinion was increasingly hostile to him. Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, noting the immense enthusiasm for him during the American tour, remarked: “One can hardly take in the whole truth about it, and feel the universality of his fame.” But in many respects he was “a sad man” in these later years. He never was tranquil and relaxed. Various old friends were now estranged or dead or for other reason less available; he was now leading a less social life and spending more time with young friends of a caliber inferior to his former circle. His sons were caused much worry and disappointment, “all his fame goes for nothing,” said a friend, “Since he has not the one thing. He is very unhappy in his children.” His wife was not all dreary, however. He loved his country house, Gad's Hill, and he could still “warm the social atmosphere wherever he appeared with that summer glow which seemed to attend him.” T.A. Trollope, who wrote that, despaired of giving people who had not met him any idea of

The general charm of his manner….His laugh was brimful of enjoyment….His enthusiasm was boundless….He was a hearty man, a large-hearted man….a strikingly manly man.

Only a week before his death he was at the theatre,

In high spirits, brim-full of joie-de-vivre. His talk had all the sparkle of champagne, and he himself kept laughing at the majesty of his own absurdities, as one droll thought followed another….at times still so young and almost boyish in his gaiety. (Lord Redesdale, Memories, 1915)

His health remained precarious after the punishing American tour and was further impaired by his addiction to giving the strenuous “Sikes and Nancy” reading. His farewell readings tour was abandoned when, in April 1869, he collapsed. He began writing another novel and gave a short farewell season of readings in London, ending with the famous speech, “From these garish lights I vanish now for evermore…” - words repeated, less than three months later, on his funeral card. He died suddenly at Gad's Hill on June 9, 1870, and was buried in Westminster Abbey. People all over the world mourned the loss of “a friend” as well as a great entertainer and creative artist and one of the acknowledged influences upon the spirit of the age. George H. Ford - A Second Guide to Research, London, 1978. pp.34-113

§4. Review about Charles Dickens' creativity.

Ralph Waldo Emerson, attending one of Dickens' readings in Boston, “laughed as if he must crumble to pieces,” but, discussing Dickens afterward, he said:

“I am afraid that he has too much talent for his genius; it is a fearful locomotive to which he is bound and can never be free from it nor set to rest…. He daunts me! I have not the key.”

There is no simple key to so prolific and multifarious an artist nor to the complexities of the man, and interpretation of birth is made harder by his possessing and feeling to need to exercise so many talents besides his imagination. How his fiction is related to these talents - practical, journalistic, oratorical, histrionic - remains controversial. Also the geniality and unequaled comedy of the novels must be related to the sufferings, errors and self-pity of their author and to his concern both for social evils and perennial grieves and limitations of humanity. The novels cover a wide range, social, moral, emotional, and psychological. Thus, he is much concerned with very ordinary people but also with abnormality (e.g. eccentricity, depravity, madness, hallucinations, dream states). He is both the most imaginative and fantastic and the most topical and documentary of great novelists. He is unequal too; a wonderfully inventive and poetic writer, he can also, even in his mature novels, write with a painfully slack conventionality.

Biographers have only since the mid-20^th enough to explore the complexity of Dickens' nature. Critics have always been challenged by his art, though from the start it contained enough easily acceptable ingredients, evident skill and gusto, to ensure popularity. The earlier novels were and by and large have continued to be Dickens' most popular works: The Pickwick Papers, Oliver Twist, Martin Chuzzlewit, A Christmas Carol, and David Copperfield. Critics began to demur against the later novels, deploring the loss of the freer comic spirit, baffled by the more symbolic mode of his art, and uneasy when the simpler reformism over isolated issues became a more radical questioning of social and assumptions and institutions. Dickens was never neglected or forgotten and never lost his popularity, but for 70 years after his death he received remarkably little serious attention (George Gissing, G.K. Chesterton, and George Bernard Shaw being notably exceptions). F.R. Leavis, later to revise his opinion, was speaking for many, in 1948, when he asserted that “the adult mind doesn't as a rule find in Dickens a challenge to an unusual and sustained seriousness”; Dickens was indeed a great genius, “but the genius was that of a great entertainer.”

Modern Dickens criticism dates from 1940-41, with the very different impulses given by George Orwell, Edmund Wilson, and Humphry House, in the 1950s, a substantial reassessment and re-editing of the works began, his finest artistry and greatest depth now being discovered in the later novels - Bleak House, Little Dorrit, and Great Expectations - and (less unanimously) in Hard Times and Our Mutual Friend. Scholars have explored his working methods, his relations with the public, and the ways in which he was simultaneously an eminently Victorian figure and an author “not of an age but for all time.” Biographically, little had been added to Forster's massive and intelligent Life (1872-74), except the Ellen Ternan story, until Edgar Johnson's in 1952. Since then, no radically new view has emerged, though several works - including those by Joseph Gold (1972) and Fred Kaplan (1975) - have given particular phases or aspects fuller attention. The centenary in 1970 demonstrated a critical consensus about his standing second only to William Shakespeare in English literature, which would have seemed incredibly 40 or even 20 years earlier.

 Chapter-II

Charles Dickens` s Christmas stories.

§1. The essence of Christmas stories and characterization of the main heroes of these works

Who ever understood children better than he? Other writers have wondered at them, he understands them, - the romance of their fun, the fun of their romance, the nonsense in their ideas, and the ideas in their nonsense. He wrote a portion of one of his best Christmas serials - “Boots at the Holly-Tree Inn” - it is called - a story of baby love which would have drawn smiles and tears from Mr. Grangrind, and which, as was recognized on the spot as absolutely true to nature by a mother in the gallery, whose sympathy I thought at the time would be too much for Mr. Dickens himself. We could picture better than he that curious animal, the British boy? Why he understood him in every phrase and under every aspect of his existence, whether he was the pupil of Dr Blimber` s classical academy or of Mr. Fagin `s establishment of technical education. Who, again, fathomed more profoundly that sea whose dimples so often deceive us as to its depth, the mind of a young girl? …

As seasonably welcome as either plum - pudding let us say, or as mince pies - and, happily, just as inevitable for many years past, on the animal coming round of December - have been the successive Christmas numbers of Mr. Dickens `s periodical have long since come to look for ward to them very succeeding twelvemonth almost as were mothers of course. We would as soon think, somehow of celebrating Christmas without, for example, dangling a pendant bunch of mistletoe overhead or without wreathing green branches and red berries about the paneling of our homerooms, as without according once more a welcome, not merely upon our hearths, but within our hearts to some new tale or series of tales more or less appropriate to the season - to the holy - days and the holly - nights of Christmas - tide-tales told by our Great Novelist at regular intervals now during a goodly span of one whole score of years - between 1845, the first memorable year thus celebrated by Mr. Dickens with the best of all his Christmas Books, The “Christmas Carol”, and the last year, 1865, hardly less noticeable in its turn as the year within which he produced about the finest of all his Christmas Numbers, “Doctor Marigold”. Happily his Christmas story - teller appears to be fairly exhaustible. He never seems to lack, year after year, some ingenious device - some device perfectly new and original in itself, and never previously thought of as a medium for the relation of as series or cluster of narratives - upon which, as upon a connecting thread, he can string together the priceless, pearls, blown eggshells, winter daisies or what not, making up the miscellaneous assortment of each successive Christmas Number. Here, in “Mugby Junction”, is the last, and certainly not the least surprising evidence of this extraordinary ingenuity of his in the way of imaginative contrivance. It is as different from “Doctor Marigold”, in the root idea of it, and in the whole manner and treatment of it, as Doctor Marigold was, in each of those particulars, different from Mrs. Lurriper. Each of Christmases short - stories stands absolutely “per se” - must be regarded as distinctly “sui generis” - “none but itself can be its parallel”. It was the same one year with “Poor Traveler” - another with the “Wreck of the Golden Mary” - another with the “Holly-Tree Inn”. Mr. Dickens never repeats himself. One while a “Lodging Housekeeper” - another Cheap Jack - now a Boots - now a Railway Polter - his identity is swallowed up, as one way say (and say, too, without one atom of extravagance) in the last of his great realistic idealizations.

…The main excellence, value, and attraction, however, of the number all lie as a matter of course in the for opening papers from the hand of our great novelist. Foremost among them, do our thinking, being beyond all comparison the best of the four - the story of “The Signalman.” Brief though it is, it is perfect as a work of art. It shows again, and in a remarkable manner, Mr. Dickens `s power in his mastery of the terrible. The pathetic force of it is truly admirerable. It is, surely, the finest Tale of Presentment that has ever yet been told. … immediately after “The Signalman” in excellence - and thoroughly delightful, if only by way of contrast, commend us to “The Boy at Mugby”- own brother to Trabb `s boy in “Great Expectations” - a friend of their heart to Tom Scott, in the “Old Curiosity Shop” - worthy of being comrade and associate of Bailey Junior in “Martin Chuzzlewit”. … Êàòàðñêèé Èãîðü Ìàêñèìèëèàíîâè÷ - Äèêêåíñ â Ðîññèè. Ñåðåäèíà XIX âåêà, Ìîñêâà, 1966. ñòð.65-77

Mr. Dickens has this Christmas earned our admiration by the freshness with which he tells his animal story. The Christmas number of “All the Year Round” is, it is well-known, a batch of stories connected together by the editorial narrative which professes to account for the collection of so many separate tales. Of the separate tales now published we do not propose to speak also one of them is by Mr. Dickens himself. They are well-selected batch of short- stories, which, however, call for no special remark. The interest of the critic and of the reader will rest upon Mr. Dickens introductory narrative, which is even better in its way than the introduction to “Mrs. Lirriper `s Lodging's. Mrs. Lirriper was one of our author's most characteristic sketches…. But this year Mr. Dickens has become forward with a character destined to be more popular than even Mrs. Lirriper. Doctor Marigold is only a sketch, but it is masterly sketch, and one that deserves a place in our memories beside the picture ever drawn by Charles Dickens. Doctor Marigold is the name of a Cheap Jack who delights us with his eloquence, with his cleverness, and with his goodness. Mr. Charles Dickens is particularly happy when he can get an equelent character, and all his more memorable personages, as Sam Weller, Mrs. Gamp, and the rest, are chiefly memorable for the peculiar eloquence with which they assert themselves. Doctor Marigold has all the eloquence of a Cheap Jack, asserts himself with vigom, and is very amusing.

This is the style of the man who is exhibited before us in many such amusing attitudes and Mr. Dickens, displaying his characteristics, has the opportunity of indulging in his broadest humor. At the same time, however, he shows the more serious aspect of the man`s character. We all know the story clown who had to crack his jokes in the saw - dust while his wife was dying in the room hard by. Cheap Jack in his fashion has to amuse the crowd that comes to buy his wares while his child is dying in his arms. The situation here is an old one, but Mr. Dickens has touched it with new feeling and set it before us in the tenderest light.

… It is not certainly by these lighter efforts that Charles Dickens ought to be judged. The two characteristics to which he owes his reputation are beyond all doubt his sentiment, and his share of that humor which really forms a part of sentiment, though it is often considered as independent of it. As a sentimentalist, Charles Dickens in his best moments has not often been surpassed in English literature. His bizarre and grotesque literary taste, and the curious light under which he sees almost all the common things and the common events of life, drag him down, in his intervals of weakness into the mere. But, with all his failings and vulgarities, Charles Dickens at his best is a very great author, and a consummate sentimentalist. His attempts to portray or to caricature or to satirize the upper classes of society has always been ludicrous failures. When Charles Dickens enters the drawing-room his genius deserts him, and hurries down the kitchen stairs into more congenial company. One is in danger, accordingly, of forgetting the astonishing poem with which he draws life in its less polished but equally healthy and vigorous forms. His sympathy for poor people is real and unaffected, and helps to make him the great writer he is; and when we look through all the romantic literature of the day, and see how little genuine feeling there is that comes up in power and pathos to Mr. Dickens `s feeling for the poor, we can not but acknowledge the charm that this trait lends to most of Christmas. There is warmth and a cheering in his stories that reminds one of the mistletoe and the holly. Nor is Charles Dickens satisfied with being himself full of warm-heartedness and sentiment. Whatever he is describing, whether it is animate or inanimate nature must fall in with and follow in his train. Orpheus, as the legend goes, made the trees come dancing after him, and Charles Dickens is not above performing the same feat with the chairs and tables, and the rest of the furniture of the room upon which his fancy descends. He has only to strike the night key-note, and immediately a concert begins about him, in which the kettles on the hearth begin to sing, the fire to talk, and the fire-irons and the fender to smile, and all together to chime in with the lyrical poem which forms the chief subject - matter of the chapter. Nobody expects to find in his Christmas stories the sentiment and the humor which might be looked for in larger works, but it is not difficult to discover something to the same tare. Doctor Marigold `s description of little Sophy `s death, for example, is not meant to compete with twenty similar pictures that Charles Dickens has drawn already; but there are little pathetic touches in it which no one in our day, except Mr. Thackeray and Mr. Dickens, is in the habit of producing. Little Nell is a far more finished portrait than little Sophy, but little Sophy bears quite the same relation to little Nell that a Christmas members of “All the Year Round” does to a two-volume novel. …

The pity is that he doesn't turn his attention annually to something a little better, and on a larger scale. A Christmas books by Charles Dickens used to be one of the entertainments of the season. It has been succeeded by a witty and pleasing chapter in which Charles Dickens attempts to carry off the absurdity and the dead weight of the chapters which he joint-stock company have added to his. The Irish legend which comes second in “Doctor Marigold `s Prescription”, and which is “not to be taken bedtime”, might we believe, be taken with perfect impunity at that or any other hour, even in the most haunted house. The narrative of the composer of popular conundrums, like popular conundrums in general, is very deadly; it is possible the gentlemen who has devoted so much of his valuable time to composing Chapter III in “Doctor Marigold `s Prescription”. Stories a Quakeress, of a detective policeman, and a murderer man `s ghost follow. They are very poor and very stupid, and are only fit for perusal in a railway train at the critical period when all the daily papers have been exhausted, and no book or periodical of any kind is to be had within a hundred miles. “Doctor Marigold `s Prescription is to be had for moderate sum. Charles Dickens is doubtless worth it all; but we very much doubt whether his assistants are worth the paper on which their efforts of genius have been printed. Philip Colins - Dickens and Crime, New York, 1962. pp. 267-281

This was the extra Christmas Number of “All the Year Round,” 1863. Mrs. Lirriper was vastly popular, and Charles Dickens revived her the following year, in “Mrs. Lirriper `s Legacy”. Noticing this the “Saturday Review” wrote: “the twelve page in which, last Christmas, Mr. Dickens made her a familiar friend to so many thousands of people are perhaps the most inimitable of his performances”, but regrettably Charles Dickens had now sentimentalized her - “The last half of Charles Dickens `s contribution to the present number might almost have been written by the authors of the stories which make up the rest, and anything less flattering could scarcely be said” - probably by James Fidzjames Stephen.

Mr. Charles Dickens to the delights of hundreds of thousands is himself again in “Mrs. Lirriper `s Lodgings. The public can have the satisfaction of renewing its old pleasure, and reading something new which Charles Dickens has scarcely, if ever, surpassed. Mr. Lirriper is entitled to rank with Mrs. Nickleby and Mrs. Gamp. And when Charles Dickens writes at his best, it is surprising how very unlike him are all his imitators, and how subtle and numerous are the touches by which he maintains his superiority. There are one or two faults in Mrs. Lirriper, as it seems to us especially her turn for verbal epigrams and little smartnesses of language, which appears inconsistent with the simple ungrammatical shrewdness and volubility of her utterances. The general impression she produces is not that of a woman who would say of the opposition lodgings in her street that the bedrooms advertised night-porter is “stuff”. Nor would she be likely, we should have thought, to say to teeth, “that they are nuisances from the tune we cut them to the tune they cut us.” But if even this criticism is right - and we must acknowledge that the enormous observations of lodgings could alone have revealed to Mr. Dickens so many secrets of the life led in them may have introduced him to epigamic landladies - this is very small blot in a great performance. There are only twelve pages of Mrs. Lirriper, and yet she is so drawn in that show space that we can scarcely believe that there really no such person, and that a fortnight ago no one had ever heard of her. She is one of those creations which show how genius is separated from mere clever analysis. She stands by us like living character, and not, as ever in the works of Charles Dickens is so common, as a peg on which funny drolleries and references to some physical peculiarities is hung. She is quite the lodging-keeper; fills her house as well as she can; hates Mrs. Wozenham, her rival, with a true professional hatred; and yet she has a goodness, and overflow of humor and sense, and benevolence quite her own. The abundance of by-remarks that proceed from her is inexhaustible and although, by the characteristic oddity of expression they are tolerably well connected with her, they are often instances of the drollest and happiest fancies that have come from Charles Dickens. What, for example, can be more far-fetched and yet more true that Mrs. Lirriper `s view of photographs, as “wanting in mellowness as a general rule and making you look like a new-ploughed field”; or the description a boy with a parcel, as “a most impartment young sparrow of a monkey whistling with dirty shoes on the clean steps and playing the harp on the airy railings with a hoop stick”, or her confession, as to Norfolk Street, strand, that “of a summer evening when the dust and waste paper lie in it, and stray children play in it, and a kind of gritty calm and bake in it, and a peal of church bell practicing in the neighborhood, it is truffle dull”. At the same time, it must be owned that any single detached oddity, however happy can not give any idea of successful whole. For in those of Charles Dickens `s works which, in comparison with “Martin Chuzzlewit” or “David Copperfield”, are utter failures, there were never wanting some scattered happiness of this sot, and it might be possible to pick a sparkling sentence or two even out the vast waste of “Little Dorrit”. Things become amusing, when said by Mrs. Lirriper or Mrs. Gamp, which would scarcely raise a smile if they came from one of the sharm funny people who in themselves are mere blanks. …

How true to nature, even to their most trivial details, almost every character and every incident in the works of the great novelist whose dust has just been laid to rest, really were, is best known those whose tastes or whose duties led them to frequent the paths of life from which Charles Dickens delighted to draw. But none, except medical men can judge of the rare fidelity with which he followed the great Mother through the devious paths of disease and death. In reading “Oliver Twist”, “Dombey and Son”, or “Chimes”, or even “No Thoroughfare” the physician often felt temped to say, “What a gain it would have been devoted his powers to the medical art!” It must be forgotten that his description of hectic (in Oliver Twist) has found its way into more than one standard work, in both medium and surgery; that he anticipated the clinical researches of Mr. Dax, Broca, and Hughlings Jackson, on the connection of right hemiplegia with aphasia: and that his descriptions of epilepsy in Walter Wilding and of moral and mental insanity in characters too memorous, to mention, show the hand of a master. It is feeble praise to add that he was always just, and generally generous, to our profession. Even his descriptions of our Bob Sawyers and their less reputable friends always wanted the quarseness, and, let us add, the unreality, of Albert Smiths; so that we ourselves could well afford to laugh with the man who sometimes laughed at us, but laughed only as one who loved us. One of the later efforts of his pen was to advance the interests of the East London Hospital for children; and his sympathies were never absent from the sick and suffering of every age. À.À. Àíèêñò è Â.Â. Èâàøåâ - ×àðëüç Äèêêåíñ / Ñîáðàíèå ñî÷èíåíèé â 30-òè òîìàõ. Ò.12., Ìîñêâà, 1959. ñòð.81-89

As usual as Christmas the extra member of Household of Words contains a story, the greater part of which is writing by Charles Dickens, but which on this occasions less a festive tribute to the season that a celebration of the great qualities displayed by our race in recent emergences, Crimean and Indian. The reader may, indeed, object to this description that there is no mention of India or the Crimea in its pages, that its scenery belongs to fable land, and that its characters and incidents are purely imaginary. But the moral elements are the same in either case, in his events and the ideal narrative, and there is so far and identity in both series of transcriptions that the novelist may be charged with a public function and convicted of a patriotic interest in political crisis. In the prevalent spent of criticism we have little doubt that Charles Dickens will be sat on his trill for this great irregularity. It may be argued that “The Perils of Certain English Prisoners and the treasure in women, children, silver and jewels” are a sort of professional or preoccupied ground, and that the novelist has no title to seek in public transactions which are passing under his eyes materials for his idealization, or to furnish romantic types of the actual achievements which his well ascribe to the heroism of the countryman and contemporaries. His readers on the other hand, may reply to this objection that it's clearly symptomatic of a growing tendency to extend patterned rights over the residue of creation, and so may evince their sympathy with the trespasser. At all events, his offence has its phrase of utility, and is not insignificant as a part of the dispensation by which national virtues are kept alight, and their splendor lives in familiar observation. From the “Iliad” downwards men of imagination have been foremost to display the qualities of their respective races when raced to heroic hates of emotion and action; they have labored to bring these into high relief and to range them monumentally for recognition and honor; and in gathering fame themselves out of such endeavors, they have rendered no pity service to their compatriots, in these days, when the men of imagination for the most part write novels, or, in other words, when the novelists for the most part do the work of men of imagination, there is no reason that we know about why they should neglect this portion of it. Originally the chief minis trance in the behalf was poets, but the poets of this day have hung their harps upon the welowes and taken to celebrate their “soul agonies” and personal inconveniences. The writer who would touch a national theme at all must at least have some claim to be considered national himself - national in his fame or national in his sympathies, and we question if anyone of his harshest critics will deny that this qualification is possessed by Charles Dickens.

… Short and slight as this story is, it enables Charles Dickens to bring out the salient traits so recently displayed by his countrymen and country - women amid hardships and dangerous which have never been existed. Their intrepidity and self-confidence, their habit of grumbling at each other without occasion and of helping each other when occasion arises, the promptitude with which they accommodate themselves to any emergency and the practical ability with which they surmount every embarrassment the latent sympathy between gentle and simple, the rude and refined which common hazards stimulate and common sufferings sanctify; in short, the sprit of mutual reliance of receptoral service and sacrifice, which they have exhibited in fact Charles Dickens hast striven to reproduce in fiction. It was impossible that he should touch this or any theme whatever without infusing into it some of his humor or of the force of his genius. But he has evidently to content with the very fullness of his subject, which leaves little margin for imaginative decoration. These awful horrors of which we know the literal particulars have been mingled with such spectacles of moral grandeur and heroism that invention can hardly elevate or ingenuity enhances them. … Where the reported reality is so astounding it is only the talent of Charles Dickens, employed for a legitimate purpose, which could induce us for a moment to listen to the echo.

“Christmas is good time: a kind, forgiving, charitable, pleasant time: the only time I know of in the long calendar of the year, when men and women seem by one consent to open their shut-up hearts freely, and to think of other people below them as if they really feel fellow - passengers to the grave, and not another race of creatures bound on other journeys.”

Charles Dickens

Last thirty years he was always on a trip - he left England and came back, ran from London and returned over again, he departed from public work and again immersed in it. At times, among these throwing, romantic dreams of a young maiden took him away. But as a whole, he was of a great geniality and communicated with his friends, whom he attracted due to his charm and vigorous energy. Besides, he, in all possible ways, searched new means to strengthen the communicable relations with the reader - contrary to varying forms of the creativity, counter to changes in public taste, to spite of attacks of creative powerlessness that enthusiastic appreciation of public was switched from his novel to him, but in any other field of activity; that in this sphere passing improvisations have found a place that appeared in his novels in connection with necessity to issue novel publications. And he has found - all over again in Christmas stories and amateur performance, then editorial work, and soon - in public readings of his compositions. The listed art impulses were not always realized by Charles Dickens, more often he was urged on with material reasons and crave of public work, he was never given to one thing, especially to the detriment of his novels. And only one sphere of his creative activity had the direct connection with his artistic world - “Christmas Stories”. Walter Dexter - The Letters by Charles Dickens. 3 vol., London, 1938

The idea about first of them, “Christmas Songs”, came to his mind in grandiose meeting in Manchester where, acting together with Disraeli and others, he stated his conviction that the education is capable to serve the sanction of all social problems in England. He has created “Song” during the night walks across London streets, when he still was writing “Martin Chuzzlewit”. This thing has been conceived to return the arrangement of the reader depressed with the failure of his novels. In Christmas days, 1843, “Song” published in excellent edition, with the illustrations of the well-known artist, a good friend of Charles Dickens., John Leach. The successes of the enterprise, direct reaction of readers have convicted him of necessity to continue the started business. The next year, he printed “The Chimes” illustrated by his friends-artists. And then, excluding 1847, extremely intense because of work on the novel “Dombey and Son”, he annually published one Christmas story: “The Cricket on the Heart”, “Battle of Life”, etc - the last one published in 1848. Becoming the editor of “Household Words” and till his death, Dickens Charles frequently included in “Christmas Number” specially written story even if it is not on a Christmas theme at all.

Among these later Christmas stories there are a lot of interesting biographical materials-as "Christmas Tree", the other had the huge popularity-"Seven Poor Travelers", "Mrs.Lirriper's Lodgings", "Dr.Marigold's Prescriptions" and so on. But as a whole, Dickens genius was close within the framework of the story, humor, which had no boundaries, pathos, spending on a trifle, decorated with sentimentality, there is the complete absence of overtones which is put into a work with great thematic spheres of life, and that is why the stories raise from the level of boring journalistic prose, there is not even that tension and true action, which differentiate the best examples of Victorian journalistic novelistic,-this can be said not about the last story written with Wilkie Collins. With the exception of one, Christmas stories"-are not great success of Dickens. "Novelette" or "story"-are not suitable for him. "Battle of Life" and "The haunted man" deserved great success, luck even when it just appeared and nowadays, these creative works caused enormous interest as the witness of the attachment of Dickens to his life experience, here changed into highly enterprise stories. “Cricket on the Heart” was very popular at his time; the figure of the girl-wife is described pathetically - central in “David Copperfield” - and an amazing ability to see freakish images, faces, and pictures on the red-hot coal, highly described; the biggest success got “The Chimes”, story helps to understand the social position of Charles Dickens and by the way shows the extraordinary role of an author as the political satiric.

In the context of Charles Dickens creative activity, the complex analysis of social defects and their interdependence is emphasized, preparing grandiose linen of the later masterpieces: kind motives of villains in “The Chimes” directed ideas prompting earlier name of the novel Little Dorrit - “No One Guilty”. Only one Christmas story is read with great pleasure till the present days - the earliest, Christmas Song, and this merited success where the short form is revealed in the most profitable way: energetic action, natural dialogue, simple plot. From that point of view we can realize the whole idea about social problems disturbing Charles Dickens, however, here these problems understood as a myth accompanying Dickens from his childhood, and the scene appeared amazingly natural, as if simple, clear, logic dream.

In Martin Chuzzlewit Charles Dickens has already tried to create the world of dreams, one way or another presents in all his novels. In the eve of murder of Montague Tigg, John Chuzzlewit dreams of the end of life: something strange, disturbed, as if the city is seen above from the bird flight, a lot of people hurrying in the streets - they are familiar, but they look strange, they pass as the chilly memories of everything what had happened to hi in his life. This type of dream takes its origin from the Arabic tales, where the heroes of the story fly on the carpet-plane or on the wings of the magic bird above the cities, countries. Lesage used this idea in his own story, but the scenes of social life and morality is described by the author and he showed the contrast between - wealth and poverty, guilt and innocence, old and youth, death and birth.

In Christmas song, in the dreams of Scrooge, these two themes merged as a whole -we see the world by these contrasts and we also are informed about past life of Scrooge, his gone childhood that will never return and lost innocence. In the latent depth of Scrooge's visions Dickens Charles hides his personal pains, suffered in the factory of Warren: we find ourselves in the horrible darkness after the warm bedroom; from the hot fire we are taken away to the deserted, bare plains, to the sea; we just sit at the holiday table - and already see thrown children: the name of a girl - Poverty, the name of a boy - Ignorance. That time Dickens convicted that the crime, poverty, inequality, violence which he hated and was afraid of in modern society, - all these is cause of uneducation, I think everybody should think like that if they need and desire better future for themselves and for their nation. Charles Dickens always believed in education, but his thoughts about the methods of education essentially changed. But, then, coming back from America, he did not change his mind that only education is able to stop the deep-rooted evil, where he saw consequence of injustice and severely arranged society, where the human is only economic unit.

This idea presents in two firstly written Christmas stories, but in The Chimes Charles Dickens gives it as thesis in the form of political satire that in Christmas Song, accompanying it with horrible scene facing Scrooge children - Ignorance and Poverty - he expresses his past sufferings and ideas. Scrooge is last who could be appealed to - all kind-hearted generous men, who are able to reorganize the society with personal nobility and generosity. The difficulty, however, presents because Scrooge is partly hero of typical story with ghosts; but this Christmas story, myth about expiation and condescended for good fortune, is necessary for holiday, promising changes better future. We can not mark Scrooge as the true merchant. Like Pickwick, he passes through purifying fire of world sufferings, only for this reason he should experience his own childhood, to see childhood of Little Tim, by the spirits of Poverty and Ignorance to see general childhood. And in the middle of our lives we are under the power of the death - “…christmas holidays… when people… visit their relatives, they see their close peoples even in poor and destitute persons, they are just as we, walking across on the road of death, but there are also another type of men who choose another ways” - so, even in our childhood we are on the threshold of the end. In the visions of Scrooge, he sees the childhood of him come to the end and his heart becomes rough; he visions the death of Tim, and other kids' too - Ignorance and Poverty - come forward as the bulletin of something more terrible: “mostly care about the boy, the “death” follows him”: the nightmares of Scrooge were so horrible - but, all depends on the occasion, whether to sit with the kid by the fire or to be “a little boy lost in the snow-storm”, about what Little Tim sang about, with the thin, pity, low voice, and sang it truly splendidly. Neither in the Christmas stories nor in “The Chimes” there is no consecutive scenes of social abuse, and there is only one means to stop all this - praying; but these nightmares make us to understand how the life is unsafe and the small happiness, joy of us is unlasting, then the vague idea appears that all these emotions have connection with something forgotten in our childhoods, and also it has connection with Christianity. These thoughts belonged to Charles Dickens: “How joyful is to feel like a child, at times.” Essentially, Dickens talked about various themes in his Christmas stories, however, he used narrative form of writing, and rearranged it as the stories which he read in his childhood and related them with his biggest wish. That is why the Christmas stories make reader to think deeply on it and gives sentimental emotions. This idea concerns another books of Charles Dickens too. That is why the novel Oliver Twist is wide-read all over the world, and lovely book of the readers. Impression of the Christmas stories on readers was surprising. Dickens' heart filled with generous feeling. Thackeray wrote: “You blessed everyone who read this story.” Unfortunately, Charles Dickens got less profit from the great circulation of the stories than he counted on. Edmund Wilson - Dickens: Two Scrooges, in the Wound and the Bow, London, 1941. pp.1-104

Blessed with ageless appeal, the stories of Charles Dickens were the drawing force behind the Victorian era's revival of the previously declining Yuletide tradition. Universally popular almost from the moment of publication, they are widely regarded as the catalyst that rekindled the joy of Christmas in Britain and America. Originally published in the weekly periodical Household Words, which Dickens edited until his death, these short-stories capture the very essence of Christmas as it was meant to be… a joyous celebration of family and friends.

§2. The differential features between Dickens' and Irving's Christmas stories.

Dickens, Charles is fairly considered as the first writer who invented this genre in England. Christmas stories appeared not accidentally in Dickens' creative activity. They rose completely naturally, so these stories corresponded to his inner logics of the artistic method. This condition was marked by such a penetrating historian of literature - Lois Cazamian, who subtitled the chapter about Charles Dickens as “La Philosophie de Noel”, in his book of English socialistic novel.

However, it does not mean that the genre of Christmas stories did not exist until Dickens in other countries, even in little bit different form. The existence and appearance of this genre in the epoch of Romanticism in literature is so natural and possible, because Christmas story appear due to national beliefs spread in different countries, some kind of magic happening at Christmas night. For romanticists, as it is known, orientating in using folklore for material; decorated with mystic, dark, “ballad” tones, Christmas national fantastic had to be quite comprehendible.

That is why it is necessary that writers of one nation have to create Christmas stories under the direct influence of literature of another nation. Difference of styles, an approach to the theme and its development, make us to suppose that there is no interdependence between them.