A Dickens of a Christmas

 

If there's one writer ineluctably connected to Christmas, then it is surely Charles Dickens. His perennial favourite A Christmas Carol is, for many, THE Christmas story par excellence. Adapted many times, with or without added musical numbers and muppets, its redemptive narrative and social criticism are familiar around the world. But Dickens' connection to Christmas goes deeper than that. In the Victorian era his magazine All the Year Round, which he edited or 'conducted' was hugely popular. This was in no small part due to the fact that his own novels, and those of friends such as Wilkie Collins and Elizabeth Gaskell, were serialised in its pages. The first issue in 1859, for example included the opening installment of A Tale of Two Cities and later in the year The Woman in White would begin its serialisation in its pages. But one tradition which became familiar was the Christmas double issue which featured extended stories by various hands. Delving once more down into the far corners of the stacks, I have uncovered a collection of bound issues of All Year Round. Let us look within.

The first Christmas double edition of All the Year Round from 1859 features a compendium of Christmas ghost stories by various hands (including Dickens himself, Wilkie Collins and Elizabeth Gaskell) with a framing story, rather like the Ealing film Dead of Night or the Amicus films from the 60s and 70s. A Christmas Carol was itself a story of ghosts, or 'spirits', of course. Dickens did much to establish and popularise the idea of the Christmas ghost story, and he himself would provide a chilling classic of the form.

The 1866 Christmas double issue of Charles Dickens' magazine All the Year round has as its framing story Mugby Junction. This compendium starts in a rather bleak railway station in the dead hours of the night and then branches off, in literal and figurative fashion, along various lines, all with their attendant stories. Along one of them we hear the haunting tale of The Signalman, written by Dickens. It's a superb ghost story, with a vivid sense of atmosphere and an evocative summoning up of the dread spirit of place. I was memorably filmed (with Denholm Elliott in the title role) for the BBC Ghost Stories at Christmas strand. The haunting cry 'look out down below' lingers in the reader's imagination as much as in the protagonist's.

Future issues veered away from the ghostly into the comical and the adventurous, although a whisper of the gothic still lingered at times. A Message from the Sea featured the seafaring American captain Silas Jonas Jorgan (Dickens with an eye on the American market, perhaps, like all those post-war British films with American protagonists) who, like an amateur detective, solves the story's mystery. A storyteller's club provides the intervening tales. This backdrop here is Devon and Cornwall, through which Dickens and Wilkie Collins, who collaborated on the overarching narrative, had a 5 day excursion in order to sketch in some local colour. The stories in Tom Tiddler's Ground centred around visits to a hermit called Mr Mopes, based on a real character called James Lucas, known as the 'Hertfordshire Hermit', or rather more unkindly 'Mad Lucas'. Unfortunately, the success of the issue led to the poor man becoming the subject of a kind of Dickens tourism, with special excursion trains being laid on so that the hordes could spy on him in his unruly retreat. Mrs Lirriper's Lodgings featured the titular landlady, with stories aristing from various of her lodgers. She was created by Dickens and proved so popular that she returned in Mrs Lirriper's Legacy, which finds her travelling to Paris. Dickens wrote of her 'I doubt if I have ever done any thing that has been so affectionately received by such an enormous audience I can't turn any where without encountering some enthusiasm about her'.  

Finally, the 1867 issue featured No Thoroughfare, a collaboration solely between Dickens and Wilkie Collins (whose novel The Moonstone would be serialised in the magazine the next year, as The Woman in White had been in earlier issues). It was a thrilling melodrama complete with unredeemable villain and resourceful heroine, dastardly deeds and a grand climactic scene amongst the perilous peaks of the Alps (again drawing on Dickens' own travels). It was a fittingly dramatic finale to the last of the Christmas issues which Dickens personally put together and made the major contribution to.

As you can see, some of the many volumes of All the Year Round made their way to Exeter via the Newton Abbot Passmore Edwards Free Public Library, one of many libraries endowed by John Passmore Edwards in the latter years of the Victorian era. Newton Abbot would've been particularly close to his heart since he was a Westcountryman by birth, having grown up in a small village near Truro. We have a couple of names of donors, including a W.G.Palmer, who has scrawled his angular signature, and someone who my straining eyes makes out as a Mrs Crude. When the books were added to the system in 1904, Passmore Edwards would still have been alive. Who knows but that he might have perused them himself at some time on a visit back West. They are certainly still available for the perusal of one and all. So, 'look out down below'.