fixed period of time with unchangeable memories is more intriguing than the story’s final line (in which the narrator hears Jesus’s voice whispering through the “leaves” of a pine-needled Christmas tree) because it links “social thoughts” to both the holiday of Christmas and the enshrining of romanticized individual experience (295). Combined with the narrator’s opening observation of other people’s children around a Christmas tree, which could be pleasantly nostalgic or creepily voyeuristic, the story’s conclusion lends an air of performance to the holiday; celebrants in homes or outdoors will be watched by others who will judge their rituals. If observers use what they see as a springboard to their own memories, then all individual Christmas festivities also become communal, which increases pressure to celebrate in socially accepted ways.
“Christmas in Lodgings” hones in on this point about socially sanctioned attitudes toward celebration as William Blanchard Jerrold and W. H. Wills tell the story of a bachelor in a first-person voice that differs from the opening narrator. Because the bachelor’s friends all reside “in Scotland, where Christmas is no festival,” he has no plans to leave for the holiday, but his landlady needs to use his room for a party (296). The bachelor turns sour in his loneliness as others prepare for the celebration, treats a servant rudely, refuses all pleasant advances, and mockingly describes how his landlady’s pity infuriates him. In this second story of the number, collaborative conversation is already evident as Jerrold and Wills seem to riff on two Dickens texts. The bachelor’s nasty responses to the landlady’s generosity on Christmas Day echo Scrooge’s rejection of his nephew Fred’s advances in A Christmas Carol, and the story’s emphasis on social approval of one’s Christmas rituals picks up a thread from Dickens’s opening story. Both a landlady and a servant observe and criticize the bachelor as he rejects decorative greenery and pudding, and their scorn has a lasting impact when, after his marriage, the man insists on rushing out of another lodging house before a Christmas can transpire there.
The bachelor’s most intense moments of loneliness come when he sits alone at a fire in his landlady’s parlor, and the third story continues that motif as James Hannay’s “Christmas in the Navy” features another Christmas fire into which the narrator gazes. The short piece carries a general message: even though some nautical Christmases are difficult, particularly if one lands in a Spanish jail, one also “may have a very pleasant Christmas at Sea” (300). The key is for sailors to remember the beauty of the homeland because, if they speak of England, think of “pretty cousins,” sing songs, and drink rum, the holiday can authenticate their true English values (300). Whether on a merchant ship or a naval vessel, Christmas at sea becomes a literal way of advancing the imperial interests that sustain Christmas celebrations at home.
Much more complex in its advocating for English supremacy is Charles Knight’s “A Christmas Pudding,” in which Mr. Oldknow contemplates “the mercantile history of the various substances of which that pudding was composed” (301). Inspired by his reading of travel literature, Oldknow dreams of faraway places and encounters the genii, or guarding spirits, associated with various ingredients.16 Defending Christmas pudding as an “emblem of our commercial eminence” against the Genius of the Raisin’s complaint that England is depriving Spanish and Mediterranean lands of “grapes which ought to be reserved for the unfermented wine which the Prophet delighted to drink,” Oldknow retorts that the demand created by English consumers is what causes the raisins to exist in the first place (301). Elevating an item’s market value, in this view, is a viable defense for unequal distribution of resources, cultural indifference, and disparities in labor conditions. Paul Young argues that “to Oldknow’s mind the Raisin represents Islamic irrationality and stagnation.”17 Oldknow’s insistence that the Genius of the Raisin should simply be grateful for English patronage is an approach exemplified by the Genius of the Currant, a “little freetrader,” and the Genius of the Nutmeg, an interspecies mix of contrite Dutchman and wood pigeon who thanks the English for leading him to renounce monopoly-protecting colonial violence (302–3).18
Illustrating how profoundly the standard Christmas rhetoric (and fare) is enmeshed in racial ideologies that glorify empire at the expense of humanity, the most problematic spirit is Sugar:
A West Indian sugar plantation is now mirrored—with its canes ripening under a tropical sun, and its mills with their machinery of cylinders and boilers. The Genius of Sugar is a freed Negro. It was said that in freedom he would not work; he has vindicated his privileges in his industry and his obedience. The grand experiment has succeeded in all moral effects. But the nation that demanded cheap corn would not be content with dear sugar. We must buy our sugar wherever the cane ripens. We use seven hundred millions of pounds of sugar annually, which yield a duty of four millions sterling. Mr. Oldknow thought about this, but was silent, when he saw the negro sitting under his own fig-tree; for the political questions which his freedom involved were somewhat complicated. He would trust to the ultimate power of a noble example, and in the meantime rejoice that the great body of the British people could buy their sugar at half the price that their fathers paid.
Mr. Oldknow, being somewhat at fault upon the sugar question, grew confused as new forms flitted before him. (303)
Through Oldknow’s confusion about the “complicated” postslavery questions embodied in the Genius of the Sugar, the story at once sidesteps and acknowledges the moral consequences of sugar production. Sugar’s form, however, is not combined with an animal, nor is he a fairy hybrid, like the others. He is a dark-skinned human being who has been enslaved, and the story takes great care to identify him as freed. He also differs from the previously presented genii in having no voice.
Given that Sugar occupies the most ethically fraught position, casting him as the first genius to be denied direct speech severely impairs the critique of industrial capitalism that Young locates in the figure of the Raisin. Noting its publication just five months before the Great Exhibition at the Crystal Palace, which advocated for free trade on a grand scale, Young sees “A Christmas Pudding” as a contrary text whose dialogue “works to destabilise Oldknow’s position as the voice of a pacific commercial rationale” but pays no attention to the other pieces in the Christmas number.19 Once the dialogism Young mentions is expanded to include those voices, the number’s stance clearly depicts British imperialism and its attendant white supremacy as contested and perhaps even contradictory but never fundamentally challenged as an ideological course preferable to all others. Although Oldknow is aware of his “fault” in uncritically joining the masses who blithely “rejoice” in the purchase of cheap sugar, he does not struggle to move quickly past the uncomfortable questions. Oldknow’s thoughts move to the next genius, an Irish egg collector, whose complicated role in the trade markets he responds to in a manner similar to how he reacts to the black man: by lamenting previous suffering, wishing for “just masters and wise rulers,” urging the Irish to forswear “agitation” in favor of working hard, and declining to grant the Irish woman a voice (303).20 At the climactic moment of pudding lighting, all the spirits dance around a giant bowl, and Oldknow’s song about the imaginary “social bands” forged by free trade creates a utopian vision that attempts to assuage the story’s concerns about inequity:
Britain, to peaceful arts inclined,
Where commerce opens all her stores,
In social bands shall league mankind,
And join the sea-divided shores.
(304)
This fantasy of mercantile domination that benevolently unites the globe, glossing over exploitative or outright abusive relationships to maintain a vision of Britain as “peaceful,” is an integral part of the Christmas number’s formulation of what it means to celebrate the holiday.
The second longest in the collection, Knight’s story exalts England, and the next piece, Frederick Hunt’s “Christmas among the London Poor and Sick,” abruptly changes that vision by documenting how much deprivation
