With the resounding success of A Christmas Carol, Dickens apparently thought he had a good thing going and started writing annual Christmas stories. There are five stories total, written from 1843 (A Christmas Carol) to 1848 (The Haunted Man). He skipped 1847 for some reason.
Last year I read The Chimes (1844), and found it tiresome and silly. It follows the Christmas Carol pattern of a man having his world view dramatically altered through supernatural influence. I found it far less affecting than its predecessor in that the protagonist, “Trotty” Veck, seems afflicted only by a bit of modern cynicism. Scrooge, of course, was a “squeezing, wrenching, grasping, scraping, clutching, covetous, old sinner,” whose damnation would seem assured without some sort of Pauline conversion. Trotty’s existential ailment seemed just as likely to be cured by a nice cup of tea as by a series of goblin-induced visions.
Despite my disappointment with The Chimes, I re-visited the Christmas stories this year, reading both The Cricket on the Hearth and The Haunted Man. The former tale was quite popular in Dickens’s time (outselling A Christmas Carol) and was often adapted to the stage. It’s small cast and lack of required “special effects” would seem to put it more within the reach of small theater than some of the other tales.
The story’s protagonists are John and Dot Peerybingle. John is a carrier and is described as “a lumbering, slow, honest man.” Dot is a bright and energetic housewife, much younger than her husband. On one of his delivery runs, John picks up a mysterious old man whom he takes in as a lodger. Meanwhile, we hear of the impending nuptials of Tackleton, a bad-natured toy merchant, and May Fielding, a local beauty and friend of Dot.
During a visit with the Peerybingles, Tackleton takes John outside and tells him to look into the window of the house. They observes Dot conversing with their lodger, who has removed his disguise and appears now as a handsome young man. John is thrown into a terrible state, in which he simultaneously blames himself for stealing Dot’s youth by marrying her and contemplates the murder of the perfidious lodger. While he is dozing by the hearth, assailed with all his misgivings, the Cricket, a sort of guardian angel to the household, appears to him in human form and shows him visions depicting all of Dot’s fine qualities and implying her innocence. As it turns out, the lodger is one Edward Plummer, May Fielding’s former lover who had vanished to South America. He had heard of May’s proposed marriage and had returned in disguise so that he could observe whether he had a chance of winning her back. His heart softened by the spirit of the season, Tackleton more or less gracefully steps aside so that the young lovers can be married. John and Dot are, of course, reconciled.
The story is very much a fairy tale and makes little sense when examined closely. Edward’s elaborate ruse seems especially unnecessary, but of course there would be no story without it. Nevertheless, it is an enjoyable little story and is perhaps the lightest of the Christmas tales. Even the villain, Tackleton, is hardly a Daniel Quilp. The only jarring darkness in the story is the state of confused desperation into which John Peerybingle falls when confronted with Dot’s apparent betrayal.
The Haunted Man and the Ghost’s Bargain, on the other hand, is easily the darkest of the Christmas tales. The story concerns a chemistry professor by the name of Redlaw, a kind man, but one given to dwelling morbidly upon his own past errors and misfortunes. He is confronted by a phantom, “an awful likeness of himself,” who offers him the gift of forgetfulness. Somewhat reluctantly, he accepts the offer and is told that not only will he forget his hardships, but that his forgetfulness will pass to all those with whom he comes in contact. Predictably, Redlaw becomes irritable and callous, bereft of the compassion engendered by suffering. He sows discord wherever he goes, even bringing strife to the idyllic (if excessively prolific) Tetterby family. Only one being is immune to his malignant influence, a street urchin:
A baby savage, a young monster, a child who had never been a child, a creature who might live to take the outward form of man, but who, within, would live and perish a mere beast.
Reminiscent of Ignorance and Want from A Christmas Carol, the bestial child is too far removed from human warmth for Redlaw’s curse to have any effect. Milly Swidger, a typical Dickens angelic heroine, also escapes his influence, but comes to him when she realizes that her family has been strangely changed. Fearful of contaminating her with his influence, Redlaw makes an appeal to the “Phantoms! Punishers of impious thoughts!” and begs to be relieved of at least the contagious aspect of his malady. He realizes the lesson that he has been taught, drawing an analogy from natural science:
In the material world, as I have long taught, nothing can be spared; no step or atom in the wondrous structure could be lost, without a blank being made in the great universe. I know, now, that it is the same with good and evil, happiness and sorrow, in the memories of men.
The phantom appears to him and, while giving him no concrete hope, tells him to seek out Milly, who, as it turns out, has been unwittingly imbued with the property of curing the wrong that Redlaw has done. Milly, of course, sets all aright with the Swidgers and the Tetterbys and Redlaw too begins to regain his memory and with it his compassion.
Philosophically, Christmas stories are usually the domain of pleasant platitudes and easy truths, so the psychological depth of this one is quite disarming. This is evident from the beginning, in which Redlaw faces not church-tower goblins or abstract embodiments of Christmas, but his own darker self, complete with its Freudian power to relieve him of consciousness of his past. But once that consciousness was erased, Redlaw found himself little better than the nameless urchin who was his undesired companion in spiritual exile.
Despite the depth of meaning in this simple tale, Dickens does not forget that he is writing a Christmas story. He provides us with much domestic levity in the form of the Tetterby family and he makes everything right in the end through the agency of an impossibly virtuous woman. As a memorial to Redlaw’s ordeal, Dickens leaves us with the prayer: “Lord, keep my memory green.”