Tag Archives: Charles Dickens

Authors, Bookselling, Publishing

Christmas Books by Dickens and Thackeray

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I’d say most Americans who know anything about Charles Dickens know that he wrote A Christmas Carol and maybe something else, like The Oliver Twist and Shout. Something they won’t know (and I didn’t either) is that A Christmas Carol was only the first of Dickens’s Christmas tales, which he produced as the Christmas book market was changing with the publication of seasonal annuals.

Leaning again on Joseph Shaylor’s 1912 book on publishing and bookselling, A Christmas Carol was released a few days prior to Christmas Day 1843 for five shillings a copy. Due to his publisher’s waning faith, Dickens had to argue for this work to be its own book and agreed to pay all costs, his publisher receiving a commission. That wasn’t cheap. The original run of 6,000 books sold in a day, but Dickens earned only £250. Interest held for the following year, selling 15,000 copies and earning the author £726.

(For comparison, a solicitor’s clerk could earn 18-25 shillings/week, launderers 2 ½ shillings/day, female upholsters 9-11 shillings/week, and butlers £40-100/year. One pound is made of 20 shillings. Taken from The Dictionary of Victorian London)

By November 1844, Dickens had written The Chimes: A Goblin Story of Some Bells that Rang an Old Year Out and a New Year In, and it sold better than its famous predecessor. In 1845, Dickens released The Cricket on the Hearth, which reportedly sold twice as much as The Chimes did. Next, he released The Battle of Life in 1846, which doesn’t have a Christmas theme. No word on how well it was received, but Shaylor does describe it as the last of Dickens’s Christmas books “as it was found impossible to maintain the high standard that the first volumes had reached, and as the books were rather expensive.” The Spectator closed its 1846 review, saying, “The name of the writer, and the holyday disposition of people to spend their money, may circulate the book; but if this experiment upon the public be repeated, Mr. Dickens will find that a trade carried on without the requisite capital must come to a stop.”

Dickens took another swing at it with The Haunted Man and the Ghost’s Bargain in 1848. It reportedly sold 18,000 copies and made the author £800. (I wonder if he continued to bankroll their publication.)

Perhaps spurred by Dickens’s seeming success, William Makepeace Thackeray published Mrs. Perkins’s Ball with his own illustrations as an 1847 Christmas book, the same year Vanity Fair was released. He reportedly wrote a mock critical review of Mrs. Perkin’s Ball, ‘realizing’ midway through that he had written it himself. The success of this Christmas book encouraged him to release these titles in each of the following years: Our Street (1848), Doctor Birch (1849), Rebecca and Rowena (1850), and The Kickleburys on the Rhine (1851). The last book was advertised “to be ready on December 16, for the annual edification of Christmas parties” in illustrated editions for seven shillings, six pence, or without illustrations for five shillings.

An illustration by Thackeray from his book Mrs. Perkins's Ball.

“Grand Polka,” an illustration by Thackeray from Mrs. Perkins’s Ball (Wikimedia Commons Public Domain)

For a few Saturday links:

C.S. Lewis: Aaron Earls offers a passage from The Horse and His Boy as one that always makes him cry. I understand. I can still hear the voice of the reader of this passage from an LP I listened to repeatedly as a kid.

Wartime Christmas: Writing in 1915, Arthur Machen asks how we should handle celebrating Christmas during the Great War. “[W]e grown-ups, like the wealthy dealers, can look after ourselves in this matter of presents. It is the children that we should think of chiefly, and we should determine that no shadow of the war shall be allowed to spoil their Christmas.” He mentions puzzles at the end. I wonder what he would have thought of these marvelous wooden puzzles.

Utopia: Étienne Cabet and his 1840 Voyage en Icarie (Travels in Icaria), “was so popular and affecting that it led hundreds of French citizens to leave their homes and journey to the United States to realize the egalitarian paradise he had described.” As it fell apart, the author blamed the women.

Feature Illustration: Kyd (Joseph Clayton Clarke), “Character Sketches from Charles Dickens,” Wikimedia Commons Public Domain

Reading, Religion

You Must Be Common afore You Be Oncommon

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Ronni Kurtz describes the encouragement he finds (along with Pip) in Great Expectations: Don’t long for a future time after you’ve studied and learned all the thing; be grateful for who you are today.

Well, Pip, be it so, or be it son’t, you must be a common scholar afore you can be a oncommone one, I should hope! The king upon his throne, with his crown upon his ‘ed, can’t sit and write his acts of Parliament in print, without having begun, when he were a unpromoted Prince, with the alphabet–Ah! And begun at A too, and worked his way to Z.

Religion

Christmas of Comfort and Fog

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Scrooge did not recognize the fog surrounding him. J. G. Duesing writes,

When Scrooge is first greeted by the caroling of “God rest ye merry, gentlemen,” he responds such that “the singer fled in terror, leaving the keyhole to the fog.” Dickens’s fog is not dismal or dark, Chesterton says, but rather something that draws in and, in the case of Scrooge, corners. Fog “makes the world small …”

He describes how this plays to the particular comfort of Christmas and the light that has pierced the fog of the world.

Photo by Rory Björkman on Unsplash

Fiction, Publishing

Cruciform Press Is Publishing Fiction

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Cruciform Press, the people behind several excellent books (the one title Cruciform is a good choice), has begun to publish fiction.

One of the first things we did when weighing this fiction venture was to network a little to try to find some potential candidate manuscripts. What we found was certainly encouraging, but we also know that these must be just the tip of a much larger iceberg!

As fans of good fiction on Christian themes, we have to admire this optimism. They are releasing three titles for this effort, all speculative fiction, two new works, and one republication by Charles Dickens that they are calling a forgotten classic. Prices look good. They offer several pages as a free sample, and there’s a 30% discount running.

Truth Is No Stranger to Fiction

 

Coffee, Tea, Drinks

For Dickens, Good People Drink Tea

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British food historian Pen Vogler has brewed up a book of sixty recipes that appear in Dickens’ stories or figured into his life. She suggests Dickens put coffee into the hands of wicked people and tea in cups of the right, moral, and good.

Take Mrs. Jellyby in Bleak House.

“She neglects her feminine role as mother and wife, whilst she writes coffee-fueled letters long into the night, to promote her coffee-growing charity,” says Vogler. “It is funny, but, as with all Dickens’ bad mothers, it has a chilling ring of his own unhappy experience. He could never forgive his mother for wanting him to continue to work at the blacking factory, rather than go to school, even after his father was released from debtors’ prison.”

By contrast, Joe Gargery in Great Expectations is “as truly humble and good as Uriah Heep is not” and “a natural tea-drinker.” (via Prufrock News)

Authors

Dickens Did Not Meet Dostoevsky

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Thanks to Richard Pearson for pointing out a Times Literary Supplement article on Dickens meeting Dostoevsky. We talked about that meeting a good while back. It appears this story of a meeting of great authors has been repeated by reputable news outlets a few times, while the scholars who should know all there is to know about it say it never happened.
Eric Naiman writes, “The newspaper’s collective unconscious was unable to give the story up. It demands retelling, and by now Dickens and Dostoevsky can be found meeting all over the web. Their conversation appeals to our fancy while, as Gates realized, comforting us with a reaffirmation of what we already know.”

Tomalin regarded publication of the article in the Dickensian as an authentication of the encounter; moreover, the meeting had subsequently been mentioned in monographs by two leading Dickens scholars, Malcolm Andrews and Michael Slater. “We were all caught out”, Tomalin wrote. “The hoax was a clever one precisely because it convinced so many Dickens scholars.”
This is odd, backwards logic. The hoax wasn’t clever because it convinced so many Dickens scholars; rather, it was clever for the same reason it convinced them: because it was modest.

Apparently, Michael Slater’s biography brought this encounter to the attention of book reviewers, which raised it’s profile among scholars of Dostoevsky. Then, the koshka was out of the sumka.
But there’s more. If you read Naiman’s lengthy investigation, you will discover that the name of the writer who foisted this mythical story on us is but one pseudonym of many for an independent scholar who could never get hired to a British university. The story of how Naiman tracked him down is incredible and vulgar, but if you want a literary mystery, read this one.

Authors

We are the new nexus of the literary world

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Back in April, I posted a note from our friend Dale Nelson, about a record of a meeting between Dostoevsky and Dickens, which showed up in a recent book.
Since then a lively discussion has been going on in the comments. A couple different contributors have shown up to question the authenticity of that reference. It appears that the published account lacks corroboration, and there are reasons to doubt whether, although Dostoevsky did visit London in 1862, the two men ever actually spoke to one another.
Commenter Robert Newsom conveys the following statement from The Dickens Fellowship’s The Dickensian web site:

“Dickens and Dostoyevsky: A Notice
“In the Winter 2002 issue of The Dickensian (vol 98, pp.233-35) we published an article on Dickens and Dostoyevsky which contained remarks apparently made by Dickens in an interview with Dostoyevsky in London in 1862. The occasion was allegedly recalled by Dostoyevsky in a letter of 1878 which was transcribed in a journal cited by the article’s author. Subsequent researchers have so far not been able to locate the journal cited nor indeed to verify that such a journal exists. The author was the unfortunate victim of a very serious road accident some time ago, and is not in a condition to respond to further enquiries on this issue.
“We are therefore bound to issue a caution that the authenticity of this letter by Dostoyevsky remains to be proven, in spite of the fact that it has gained currency in a number of recent publications on Dickens.”

Mr. Newsom goes on to say, “Michael Slater had previously withdrawn his account of the alleged meeting from the paperback edition of his biography.
“All very mysterious.”
Thanks to everyone who has participated in this illuminating discussion.

Authors, Non-fiction

Dostoevsky interviews Dickens

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This from Dale Nelson, of Mayville State University:
According to Michael Slater’s Charles Dickens: A Life Defined by Writing (2009, p. 502), Dostoevsky talked with Dickens in London at the office of All the Year Round in summer 1862. Dostoevsky wrote about the meeting to Stepan Dimitriyevich Yanovsky in a letter dated 18 July 1878, so 16 years after the event. The letter was translated by Stephanie Harvey in Dickens’s Villains: A Confession and a Suggestion, published in The Dickensian vol. 98 (2002): 233-5.
The Dostoevsky passage, as quoted by Slater:

—He told me that all the good simple people in his novels, Little Nell, even the holy simpletons like Barnaby Rudge [!?], are what he wanted to have been, and his villains were what he was (or rather, what he found in himself), his cruelty, his attacks of causeless enmity towards those who were helpless and looked to him for comfort, his shrinking from those whom he ought to love, being used up in what he wrote. There were two people in him, he told me: one who feels as he ought to feel and one who feels the opposite. From the one who feels the opposite I make my evil characters, from the one who feels as a man ought to feel I try to live my life. Only two people? I asked.—

I would be happier if Dostoevsky had written the letter right after the interview. I figure, though, that, at the least, these two did actually meet. That seems wonderful.
Update: The story of the Dostoevsky-Dickens meeting is a hoax. See the Comments for more details.