people around the Christmas fire is crucial to this vision, and one is struck by the insistent tone that sanctions only one type of mourning.
Following Dickens’s piece, neither Richard H. Horne’s, Edmund Ollier’s, nor Harriet Martineau’s contribution offers insight that moves beyond nostalgia or clichéd observation. Rather, they are noteworthy because Dickens and Wills were astute enough to recognize these contributions as the type the Christmas collections needed to depart from in order to become consistently successful. Horne’s “What Christmas Is to a Bunch of People” is no more complex than its title, commenting on the hopes and concerns of two comfortable households. Community members—including the beadle, postman, publican, and shepherd—feature in the story’s contemplations of Christmas perspectives, and the shopkeeping class appears, but the upper ranks of the working classes merit attention only as their points of view relate to serving wealthier customers. No lower servants or factory workers are granted perspective, and the most stressful outburst from any of the included figures is the pastry cook’s “Sugar-frost and whitening!” when confection-induced anxiety startles him out of a deep sleep (6). The story ends with a brief recognition of kitchen labor, but once the cook serves a perfect Christmas dinner, she “loves all mankind; and retires to rest, after a small glass of cordial, at peace with herself and all the world” (7). Ollier’s “An Idyll for Christmas Indoors” shifts from human to plant voices. On Christmas Eve, a Sylvan Spirit sits atop the greenery decorating a sitting room, and the poem grants the spirits of holly, laurel, and mistletoe one stanza each before they speak together. The voice of the holly describes birds dying and a climate so cold as to kill its natural residents, which causes the sprig to gloat about its warm position indoors, where laurel affirms that it feels like a “glowing household June” (7–8). Ironically, natural items from outdoors accentuate the unnatural traits of idyllic domestic Christmas atmospheres. In “What Christmas Is in Country Places,” Martineau locates “the good old Christmas—the traditional Christmas—of Old England” in strictly rural locales (8).25 Noting variations in local customs, the speaker explains that some regions believe good luck will grace a family if “a dark man” is the first to enter their home on New Year’s Day (10–11). Therefore, “it is a serious thing to have a swarthy complexion and black hair” because such men are compelled to enter so many people’s houses early in the morning (for a fee if the man is poor) (11). One senses possible danger for dark-skinned residents as their neighbors demand human good luck charms, and Martineau’s piece explicitly reveals the role of racialized identities in popular visions of “Old England” and its Christmas traditions. The story nevertheless concludes with another idealization of the rural scene “sheeted with snow,” producing a “social glow which spreads from heart to heart” (11).
Exemplifying how contributors’ voices became Dickens’s public voice and the entwining of collaborators’ styles, George A. Sala’s “What Christmas Is in the Company of John Doe” was reprinted in Harper’s with Dickens identified as its author, and as late as 1971, the New York Times printed it as “Christmas with John Doe” by Charles Dickens.26 The story contrasts its predecessors with a refreshingly bleak declaration at its opening: “I have kept (amongst a store of jovial, genial, heart-stirring returns of the season) some very dismal Christmases” (11). Thomas Prupper then recounts terrible situations that have accompanied the holiday and details the year when he was arrested for debt on Christmas Eve. Although the prison inmates celebrate with traditional fare, Prupper cannot enjoy eating in such a hopeless place: “But what were beef and beer, what was unlimited tobacco, or even the plum pudding, when made from prison plums, boiled in a prison copper, and eaten in a prison dining-room?” (15). Once released, Prupper spends New Year’s Day with “a pretty cousin” who becomes his wife, and he concludes the story by demonstrating that the legacy of his brief incarceration brings no shame; rather, he jokes openly about not naming their first child after the prison (16). Sala’s vision may have shaped Dickens’s imagination, as the dismal atmosphere of prison saturating Prupper’s mindset resonates with Arthur Clennam’s experience in Dickens’s Little Dorrit (1855–57), whose title character is not named for a prison but is born in one. The story of John Doe takes on even greater significance in beginning to treat serious or distressing situations as appropriate Christmas topics.
Depicting the least nostalgic Christmas experience of the collection, Miss Eliza Griffiths’s “The Orphan’s Dream of Christmas” moves the number toward the types of pieces that characterize future Christmas numbers as Dickens abandons the concept of using stories simply to list “What Christmas Is” and approaches storytelling as a communal act that unites readers, listeners, and tellers even across boundaries of life and death. Sala’s story maintains a cheerful, sometimes self-mocking tone that leads to a happy ending, but Griffiths’s verse does not find its way to uplifting cheer. The poem opens with a solitary, weeping eight-year-old girl looking out of a workhouse window on Christmas Eve (16). Her parents and siblings have all died, and she dreams of death, Heaven, and Jesus—only to die herself at some point during the night. This verse indirectly challenges Dickens’s opening formulation of welcoming denizens of “the City of the Dead” to the fireside in “What Christmas Is as We Grow Older” by describing the Christmas of a family who is not fortunate enough to age at all.
Focusing on another orphan, Samuel Sidney’s “What Christmas Is After a Long Absence” changes the number’s tone yet again with a tale of emigration to South Australia that harkens back to the colonial emphasis of the first Christmas number. Facing greater obstacles than anticipated in the unfamiliar landscape, Charles imagines himself “constantly in danger from savage blacks” (17). He lists indigenous human beings alongside animals such as dingoes, uses “rude words, and even blows” to discipline his workers, and fears “the wild mountainous songs of the fierce aborigines, as they danced their corrobberies, and acted dramas representing the slaughter of the white man, and the plunder of his cattle” (18). Reinforcing the idyllically white “country” places of Martineau’s contribution, Charles is lonely when Christmas comes around and comforts himself with memories of “the Christmas time of dear old England” (18). Sixteen years later, having made the natives “tame” in his part of the bush colony, Charles returns home to search for a wife (19). Welcomed heartily, he glories especially in the “delicate-complexioned” women, appreciating a “fair white face” above all else and in contrast to his own suntanned skin (18–19). Returning to Australia with a new wife and about twenty relations, the Christmas visit enables Charles to expand the imperial project while escaping the class snobbery of England (20).
Pretension remains identified as a national flaw in Theodore Buckley’s “What Christmas Is If You Outgrow It,” but the lack of framing continues to challenge the 1851 number’s pace right up to its conclusion. Buckley’s story presents a plot that future Christmas number stories will repeat: an ungrateful son rises in social stature above his parents, then disloyally takes them for granted. Horace DeLisle, son of a respected country parson, becomes increasingly arrogant while away at school as he falls into debt and neglects his studies. His debauched character manifests most hurtfully when he leaves home before Christmas to resume carousing with friends. The story does not follow Horace to his implicit demise, ending instead with the general caution, “You may be quite sure that you have grown too fast, when you find that you have outgrown Christmas. It is a very bad sign indeed” (23). The number then concludes with another contribution from Horne, “The Round Game of the Christmas Bowl,” which comes “originally, from Fairy-Land” (23). Players convene to toss symbols of pride into a huge bowl of ice, which liberates them from troubles, and as they dance and sing, “the heat of the Christmas hearts outside causes the Offering which each has thrown in, to warm to such a genial glow, that the heat thus collectively generated, melts the ice” (24). The stress on communal offerings and the effect of the collaboratively produced heat then shifts suddenly (and rather mind-bendingly) back to the individual as the melted water transports participants home to the beds in which they dream (24).
So ends the 1851 Christmas number in a vision of individual Christmas happiness enabled by communal endeavor. Although the 1851 number is, as a collection, fairly weak in quality because of the redundant Christmas fantasies, this
