What Christmas Is As We Grow Older

"Dickens hopes that the editorial ‘we’ is going to be a little model of inclusiveness. The readers become part of that ‘we’, as if he’s trying to conjure an atmosphere of tolerance, generosity and inclusiveness in his writing, as well as write about it. He’s trying to write it into existence. Which is a classically Dickensian mode—you don’t just talk about something; you try and make it happen in your writing. Or through your writing. It’s a story in which he reflects on what he says is what has been, and what never was, and what we hope may be. It’s because he sees Christmas as a time for reflection, for thinking about the passage of time. For Dickens, Christmas is a time for not only measuring how things have changed (and how they remain unchanged), but also showing that you can redirect the paths of your life in a different direction, should you choose. That’s because for Dickens, Christmas isn’t just a day—it’s a state of mind. It’s a state of mind that encourages those thoughts of generosity and inclusiveness. “For Dickens, Christmas isn’t just a day—it’s a state of mind” What’s interesting about his writing is that his style when he comes to describe Christmas often tries to mimic everything he celebrates. For instance, the syntax becomes longer. The lists become more tightly packed with ingredients. It’s as if he’s trying to squeeze more and more into the writing. It’s as if generosity is something that he wants to somehow embody in prose. In A Christmas Carol , Dickens realizes that, to an extent, you can laugh at these things as well as take them seriously. Later on, it’s if he becomes more earnest, more nervous about everything. As the writing becomes darker in the novels, the essays and shorter pieces have to be more straightforwardly singular in their tone, as if they’re holidays from the darker novels. But that also means that there’s less blurring—less blending of those tones—than you get elsewhere. It’s right at the end of 1851, after the Great Exhibition, of which Dickens was deeply suspicious. He thought that it gave an entirely false sense of optimism and progress compared to the reality of poverty and social division. And of course the novel that he is just starting to write—which he’ll start publishing a couple months later—is Bleak House . Support Five Books Five Books interviews are expensive to produce. If you're enjoying this interview, please support us by donating a small amount . Bleak House is a way of exposing all those social divisions that other people thought that the Great Exhibition had nicely covered up. So in some ways, you could see it as a transitional work, not only between the earlier cheerful, chirpy Christmas stories and what’s going to become much darker version of Christmas, The Mystery of Edwin Drood , but it’s also in some ways transitional as he moves towards what are sometimes called the ‘darker novels’, beginning with Bleak House and moving on from there. It’s probably worth saying that he had lost one of his own children, Dora, named after the one of the characters in David Copperfield . She had died very young, earlier in 1851. So talking about dead children in this essay was obviously very personal. He’d also lost his father—his father, of course, having been a hugely important presence in Dickens’s life as a child, not least because he’d lost part of his own childhood to poverty and unhappiness. When Dickens writes about lost children, he’s not only thinking about death as a single event. It’s also that death is a process you can go through as a child where your sense of childhood optimism and hopefulness can be slowly obliterated through the grind of poverty and family misery. Absolutely. Dickens often thought of his own childhood as being lost. In some ways, you might think of the novel’s attempt to not just recapture or reimagine, but to invent, a childhood for himself he never had. It’s a time when everyone can be a child. But it’s a means for recapturing an idealized version of a childhood you might never have experienced in life. For somebody who had such an intermittently unhappy childhood as Dickens, that’s its huge importance."