Dickens, Death, and Christmas

Abstract“Marley was dead, to begin with.” Why does the most beloved of Christmas books open with a death? What has death to do with Christmas and New Year’s, and with Dickens’s Christmas books and stories over his entire life? Patten starts at the Paris Morgue and takes Dickens through his Christmas experiences from childhood on, his celebrations of the season and the sorrows that he often reviews in the New Year. Patten weaves together Dickens’s life, career, writings, journalism, travel, theatrical presentations, and religious convictions—he was composing his Life of Our Lord for his children simultaneously with his Christmas books. This is a richly designed and entertaining narrative, fulsomely illustrated, of the manifold ways Dickens figures the spirit and traditions of the winter holidays in Victorian England. Both the gothic of ghosts and retribution and the grotesque of lower-class enjoyment surface importantly in Dickens’s fantasies. Patten writes for a general audience, bringing various encompassing theories about time and narrative to bear in easily understood ways. He discloses many hitherto overlooked connections between Dickens’s writings and life. And he arrives at some surprising conclusions about Dickens’s imagination, understanding of the conditions and meaning of Christian life, and the failures of British society to meet the pressing needs of its people. Not only does he address the public reception of these writings; he also tracks the responses and understandings of Dickens’s illustrators, friends who found novel ways of telling, and mistelling, the stories.