The Man Who Invented Christmas by Les Standiford Read Free Book Online Page A

regard, Dickens was well aware of the authority he had achieved as a spokesman and an artist. It may be difficult to appreciate such a status today, when celebrities are excoriated for expressing their political views during an awards ceremony—or during a phase of twentieth-century criticism proclaiming that novels are the subjective fancies of their respective authors and bear no practical relation to reality (if there even is such a thing as “reality”). “Art cannot rescue anybody from anything,” rings the last line of a well-known story by Gilbert Sorrentino.
    But in Dickens’s time, the notion of a narrator-author standing in the wings of a fictitious story, always ready to step forward and explain the actions and motives of a character or to deliver an exegesis on the nature of the world surrounding him, was completely acceptable. For one thing, in an age when education was less than universal and where relatively few attended university, it only stood to reason that an informed author who was at all serious about his craft might have something instructive to pass along about the workings of human nature and the laws that governed commerce. In Dickens’s day, the novel was viewed not only as a source of entertainment but also very much as a potential source of information and enlightenment.
    Furthermore, there existed in those times nothing like the network of governmental social services that a modern age takes for granted. Charitable enterprises for the poor and unfortunates of all types were run by churches and private organizations, many of which were guided by questionable motives and methods. Particularly galling to Dickens, who would “never, ever forget” his ignominious childhood, were the puritanical at heart, who demanded obeisance to their belief systems in return for a bowl of gruel. To Dickens, true charity was a matter of openhearted benevolence; to use the relief of poverty as a cudgel to beat a recipient into piousness was repellent and evil.
    Dickens was no radical, and the theories of Marx and Engels (the latter’s family owned a cotton mill in Manchester at the time of Dickens’s appearance before the Athenaeum) went much too far for him. Dickens believed that a reasonable capitalistic society could be made to recognize its responsibility to all its citizens, and that it was the duty of those most fortunate to share a portion of their gain with those whose grasp had slipped while pulling at their bootstraps.
    He opposed violent confrontation to achieve these means, of course; but he well understood why desperate men would be driven to crime and violence. And he was severely critical of individuals and moneyed interests who sought to shirk their responsibilities to the poor. Legislation that oppressed the unfortunate (such as the Corn Laws and the imprisonment of debtors and the failure to properly regulate labor practices) were particular targets of his wrath—as were bureaucratic incompetency, the scarcity of public works and sanitation, and personal greed, gluttony, and indifference.
    But Dickens was not a humorless reformer. The end he sought in all his zeal was a society in which the pleasures of life could be enjoyed by everyone: culture, entertainment, good food and drink, convivial fellowship, and a happy family. Were he alive to hear a man named Rodney King call out, “Why can’t we all just get along?” the comment would have surely brought an approving nod and the Cockney-inflected phrase that Dickens was found of using: “Oh, law, yes.”

    T hus, though it may be true that Dickens had accepted his invitation to the Manchester Athenaeum because his sister Fanny had prevailed upon him to, everything in his philosophical makeup predisposed him to make that two-hundred-mile journey by rail from London. If England was at the world’s forefront of industrial revolution—with the consolidation of small farms into large, and the mechanization of agriculture and steel