One thing for sure: Christmas as we understand it—Santa, and the tree and the gifts and the department stores and even the Christmas carol as a distinct form; what might technically be called the whole megillah—is a modern invention, dating back to the long Victorian years, the eighteen-forties to seventies, and saturated with the whole of the era’s fragrant, intoxicating ambiguities. Just a year ago, I spent week after week—the whole holiday, actually—reading Victorian Christmas literature in a cubicle (no, call it a cubby hole, more Victorianly) in the blessed precincts of the New York Public Library, an institution in need of no change. I dipped deep into what the ones who thought up the modern Christmas—the secularized, materialist feast—thought they were about. (I was researching a series of lectures on the modern meanings of winter, which I gave in Canada, though they remain quite invisible, and inaudible, in America.)
There was Dickens to re-read, of course, the
great Chaz Boz, so much among us in this two hundredth anniversary of
his birth, and his “Christmas Carol,” which, it turns out, tells a more
complicated story than we know. There was the meta-story to learn, of
how Dickens took it up both as a commercial enterprise, self-publishing
the story, and as a reformist tract. And the odd story to absorb of how
it was the English reformers of John Stuart Mill’s school who, at first,
looked at it dubiously—is just giving away turkeys really good
political economy?—while the great reactionary Thomas Carlyle embraced
it, because he loved the Total Makeover it proposed for the Victorian
heart. For Carlyle as for Dickens, the concepts of reformist
liberalism—the gradual, the incremental, the evolutionary—seemed
inadequate to cure what was wrong with Scrooge. He needs an epiphany,
not a Reform Bill.
(And Carlyle found an epiphany in it. Jane Welsh Carlyle, his formidable wife, wrote that upon finishing “A Christmas Carol ” her husband “was seized with a perfect convulsion of hospitality, and actually insisted on improvising two dinner parties with only a day between.”)
Then one learned how violently and quickly Carlyle rejected Dickens and his idea of Christmas after Carlyle realized that Dickens really meant it all: Dickens, Carlyle wrote in alarm, “thought that men ought to be buttered up and the world made soft and accommodating for them, and all sorts of fellows have turkey for their Christmas dinner. Commanding and controlling and punishing them he would give up without any misgivings in order to coax and soothe and delude them into doing right.” Shocked though he was, he was right: Dickens did think it made more moral and political sense to coax and soothe than to command and control. Men buttered up were men made better. It’s at the heart of his view of the world, and of Christmas.
A lot of fun, too, to see how the great rival among Victorian novelists, Anthony Trollope, was forced by commercial demand to write his own Christmas stories, and so used them to not-too-subtly mock Dickens—Mr. Popular Sentiment, as he calls him in “The Warden.” In one of Trollope’s Christmas stories a woman in a Paris hotel on Christmas Eve is suddenly seized with the Dickensian Christmas spirit and goes, all by herself in the middle of the night, to the hotel kitchen to make a soothing mustard plaster for her husband’s sore throat—only to enter the room of an unmarried gentleman and mistakenly, and scandalously, mustard plaster him. Don’t trust mushy altruistic impulses on Christmas Eve, is Trollope’s lesson; they lead to embarrassment more often than epiphany.
Of all the Christmas Victorian writers, though, the one I read with most pleasure, and who seemed to me most in need of revival, is the most unknown: Benjamin Farjeon, one of the really singular characters of nineteenth-century English literature. Farjeon’s first Christmas stories were written in the eighteen-sixties, far off in New Zealand, where he had emigrated after a London childhood. He sent them to Dickens, and upon Dickens’s encouragement—those were optimistic days—Farjeon took a ship and came right back to England, where he wrote endless numbers of those three-decker novels beloved of the time, with a particular feeling and fame for his Christmas stuff.
What makes Farjeon’s Christmas books so interesting—hallucinatory, in their way—is that Farjeon had been raised in London as an Orthodox Jew. Although he had, as they said then, left the formal practice of the old faith—ironically, or maybe not, his literary heyday was at the height of the premiership of that other utterly Jewish, non-Jewish Jew, Disraeli—Farjeon’s literary Christmas family, his Cratchit family, is called the Silvers, with two daughters named, of all odd Victorian things, Ruth and Rachel. Christmas heroines named Ruth and Rachel Silver! The “tell,” as one might say, is self-evident. But it is left to this apparently assimilated Jewish family to represent the Christmas spirit and Christmas values.
A recent student of those three-decker Victorian novels has compared them to today’s television dramas, since the length was fixed in advance—one hour now, three volumes then—and Farjeon is one of those writers who are the equivalent of show-runners today, admirable, and enviable for the energy of their narrative impulse, the industry of their manufacture, and the intensity of their caricatural gifts, more than for the Jamesian polish of their imagery. Ambiguous he is not, but hypnotically readable he is, and his Christmas stories, particularly the 1871 “Blade-o’-Grass,” are, like the best popular television drama, art in which one recognizes the melodramatic impulse even as one assents to the intensity of the vision achieved.
Blade-o’-Grass, the heroine of Farjeon’s book, is a friendless girl of the streets, nameless except for that nickname earned by her wandering, wind-blown nature. She grows up, has a love affair, and a baby, with a rascal named Tom Beadle—a love rather like Nancy and Bill Sykes, save that, though everyone seems to accept that Blade-o’-Grass is a prostitute, she isn’t. She is just a girl wandering the streets, who can’t do the worthy work of needlepoint or become a seamstress because she doesn’t know how to read or write. One of the many impressive things in the story—it must have been truly shocking in 1871—is that she makes no apologies for her out-of-wedlock relationship with Jonny, despite the urgings of the good people who patronize her to do so. “I love him and he loves me,” she explains to some do-gooders.
The other impressive thing is that Farjeon not only secularizes Christmas, as his master Dickens had already done, but radicalizes it. The moral voice of the book is a self-educated mason, named Robert Truefit. (Subtlety in nomenclature was not Farjeon’s strongest suit.) Truefit is, in effect, the early voice of what would become the British Labour Party: rejecting the violent rhetoric of his more unstable working men confreres, he insists that only a program of reform can alter the circumstances of poverty. He makes a rather prosy, but pointed speech, against the complacent, one-percent Parliaments of his day:
It turns out—this is Victorian popular fiction—that Blade-o’-Grass is really the long-lost twin daughter of Ruth Silver, who was adopted, and the story ends with a family reunion and hope for all. But the Christmas lesson that the Silvers teach us, along with Robert Truefit, is that the holiday can reconcile the need for change with the love of comfort. “God help the poor” is what the preachers say, Charles Truefit remarks at one moment, but amends it: “Man help the poor,” he explains, is his religious motto. A hundred and forty years later, it’s still hard to see what more can be said.
So God bless the ghost of the Jewish, Christmas-loving Benjamin Farjeon (an inspiring father, too, apparently: most of his kids became writers, and his daughter Eleanor wrote the poem “Morning Has Broken,” which was performed in the nineteen-seventies as a pop song by the soon-to-be Muslim Cat Stevens). For that matter, God bless us, everyone, particularly those in red and white who will be arriving with gifts on Christmas Eve, and those gallant Rex-led footballers in green and white who will be departing the field in victory earlier that day.
The Original Source
(And Carlyle found an epiphany in it. Jane Welsh Carlyle, his formidable wife, wrote that upon finishing “A Christmas Carol ” her husband “was seized with a perfect convulsion of hospitality, and actually insisted on improvising two dinner parties with only a day between.”)
Then one learned how violently and quickly Carlyle rejected Dickens and his idea of Christmas after Carlyle realized that Dickens really meant it all: Dickens, Carlyle wrote in alarm, “thought that men ought to be buttered up and the world made soft and accommodating for them, and all sorts of fellows have turkey for their Christmas dinner. Commanding and controlling and punishing them he would give up without any misgivings in order to coax and soothe and delude them into doing right.” Shocked though he was, he was right: Dickens did think it made more moral and political sense to coax and soothe than to command and control. Men buttered up were men made better. It’s at the heart of his view of the world, and of Christmas.
A lot of fun, too, to see how the great rival among Victorian novelists, Anthony Trollope, was forced by commercial demand to write his own Christmas stories, and so used them to not-too-subtly mock Dickens—Mr. Popular Sentiment, as he calls him in “The Warden.” In one of Trollope’s Christmas stories a woman in a Paris hotel on Christmas Eve is suddenly seized with the Dickensian Christmas spirit and goes, all by herself in the middle of the night, to the hotel kitchen to make a soothing mustard plaster for her husband’s sore throat—only to enter the room of an unmarried gentleman and mistakenly, and scandalously, mustard plaster him. Don’t trust mushy altruistic impulses on Christmas Eve, is Trollope’s lesson; they lead to embarrassment more often than epiphany.
Of all the Christmas Victorian writers, though, the one I read with most pleasure, and who seemed to me most in need of revival, is the most unknown: Benjamin Farjeon, one of the really singular characters of nineteenth-century English literature. Farjeon’s first Christmas stories were written in the eighteen-sixties, far off in New Zealand, where he had emigrated after a London childhood. He sent them to Dickens, and upon Dickens’s encouragement—those were optimistic days—Farjeon took a ship and came right back to England, where he wrote endless numbers of those three-decker novels beloved of the time, with a particular feeling and fame for his Christmas stuff.
What makes Farjeon’s Christmas books so interesting—hallucinatory, in their way—is that Farjeon had been raised in London as an Orthodox Jew. Although he had, as they said then, left the formal practice of the old faith—ironically, or maybe not, his literary heyday was at the height of the premiership of that other utterly Jewish, non-Jewish Jew, Disraeli—Farjeon’s literary Christmas family, his Cratchit family, is called the Silvers, with two daughters named, of all odd Victorian things, Ruth and Rachel. Christmas heroines named Ruth and Rachel Silver! The “tell,” as one might say, is self-evident. But it is left to this apparently assimilated Jewish family to represent the Christmas spirit and Christmas values.
A recent student of those three-decker Victorian novels has compared them to today’s television dramas, since the length was fixed in advance—one hour now, three volumes then—and Farjeon is one of those writers who are the equivalent of show-runners today, admirable, and enviable for the energy of their narrative impulse, the industry of their manufacture, and the intensity of their caricatural gifts, more than for the Jamesian polish of their imagery. Ambiguous he is not, but hypnotically readable he is, and his Christmas stories, particularly the 1871 “Blade-o’-Grass,” are, like the best popular television drama, art in which one recognizes the melodramatic impulse even as one assents to the intensity of the vision achieved.
Blade-o’-Grass, the heroine of Farjeon’s book, is a friendless girl of the streets, nameless except for that nickname earned by her wandering, wind-blown nature. She grows up, has a love affair, and a baby, with a rascal named Tom Beadle—a love rather like Nancy and Bill Sykes, save that, though everyone seems to accept that Blade-o’-Grass is a prostitute, she isn’t. She is just a girl wandering the streets, who can’t do the worthy work of needlepoint or become a seamstress because she doesn’t know how to read or write. One of the many impressive things in the story—it must have been truly shocking in 1871—is that she makes no apologies for her out-of-wedlock relationship with Jonny, despite the urgings of the good people who patronize her to do so. “I love him and he loves me,” she explains to some do-gooders.
The other impressive thing is that Farjeon not only secularizes Christmas, as his master Dickens had already done, but radicalizes it. The moral voice of the book is a self-educated mason, named Robert Truefit. (Subtlety in nomenclature was not Farjeon’s strongest suit.) Truefit is, in effect, the early voice of what would become the British Labour Party: rejecting the violent rhetoric of his more unstable working men confreres, he insists that only a program of reform can alter the circumstances of poverty. He makes a rather prosy, but pointed speech, against the complacent, one-percent Parliaments of his day:
While they legislate, girls like Blade-o’-Grass are springing up around them, and living poisoned lives. And while they legislate, if there be truth in what preachers preach, souls are being dammed by force of circumstance. What should be the aim of those who govern? So to govern as to produce the maximum of human happiness and comfort, and the minimum of human misery. Not to the few—to the many, to all.What is touching is that it remains entirely a Christmas story, insistently so, not by accident or improvisation but on purpose, full of lovely outdoor December effects. “Something seems to me wanting in Christmas,” the radical Truefit says at one point, “when there is no snow. When it snows, the atmosphere between heaven and earth is bridged by the purity of the happy time.”
It turns out—this is Victorian popular fiction—that Blade-o’-Grass is really the long-lost twin daughter of Ruth Silver, who was adopted, and the story ends with a family reunion and hope for all. But the Christmas lesson that the Silvers teach us, along with Robert Truefit, is that the holiday can reconcile the need for change with the love of comfort. “God help the poor” is what the preachers say, Charles Truefit remarks at one moment, but amends it: “Man help the poor,” he explains, is his religious motto. A hundred and forty years later, it’s still hard to see what more can be said.
So God bless the ghost of the Jewish, Christmas-loving Benjamin Farjeon (an inspiring father, too, apparently: most of his kids became writers, and his daughter Eleanor wrote the poem “Morning Has Broken,” which was performed in the nineteen-seventies as a pop song by the soon-to-be Muslim Cat Stevens). For that matter, God bless us, everyone, particularly those in red and white who will be arriving with gifts on Christmas Eve, and those gallant Rex-led footballers in green and white who will be departing the field in victory earlier that day.
The Original Source
