Bibliophile: The Man Who Invented Christmas
Every year right around Christmas time I get an itching to read books about Christmas. This year I selected two volumes, The Man Who Invented Christmas by Les Standiford and History of the Snowman by Bob Eckstein. Today I would like to discuss the former of the two.
We headed out to William & Mary’s Yule Log Ceremony this weekend, so I was in desperate need to read something that would put me into the holiday spirit. Several years back I read The Battle for Christmas
I am sorry to say that I cannot say the same for this weekend’s holiday selection. I had great expectations (pun intended) for this book, but it sorely left me flat and wanting more. Standiford’s prose felt unorganized at best and it seemed to take truly forever for the book to get going to the point. I think the title is entirely misleading in that it suggests that the author will explore at length how Christmas was restored to the hearts of millions through Dickens’s charming work A Christmas Carol. Rather, it seemed to be more of an exposition on the works of Dickens and how A Christmas Carol saved his career (as the title does suggest).
There seemed to only be a single chapter or two that even discussed how A Christmas Carol began a revival of Christmas traditions and the influences that it had on both British celebrations and American ones. The majority of the text was mired down with a myriad of details surrounding Dickens’s publications, his financial troubles, and eventual ruin of his marriage. I was whole-heartedly disappointed, as I didn’t realize that I was getting myself into a very disjointed biography of Dickens. I rather wanted to be whisked away to an enchanted world of wassail, figgy pudding, and the dense smell of evergreen.
That said, if one is looking for a book that chronicles the publication nightmares that Dickens seemed to endure, want specific statistic regarding his readership during his life and working years, and have a comparative text of the cost of his novels and series in the mid 1800s, this is the book for you. Additionally, I learned that A Christmas Carol is just the first in a series of five novels that were published for the holiday season. However, A Christmas Carol was the only one that actually spoke to the holiday tradition in name. The other four did not even allude to the Christmas season.
The Man Who Invented Christmas: How Charles Dickens’s A Christmas Carol Rescued His Career and Revived Our Holiday Spirits
Interesting. I just learned the other day from an article about whether or not it will snow on Christmas, depending on where we live, that Charles Dickens’ “A Christmas Carol” is one of the main reasons so many people associate snow with Christmas, considering most people rarely or never actually have a white Christmas. Thanks a lot, Charles Dickens, for raising our holiday spirits each year just to then have them dashed upon the rainy, noticeably un-snowy sidewalk. (The other reason for dreaming of Christmas snow is, of course, Irving Berlin’s “White Christmas.”) I didn’t know that about the other four books in the series. I also have not read any of his books for the fun of it, except for “A Christmas Carol,” which I feel is actually more about the society of the time period than Christmas. Maybe that’s why the other four in the series aren’t about Christmas.
Dickens definitely used A Christmas Carol as a way of passing on a moral message to the general population. The innocent nature of the story was a way for citizens of the time to accept the message and take it in despite the heavy nature of the message that Dickens was trying to pass on.
No one really knows why Dickens chose to leave Christmas out of the other four. From the way that the author spoke of him, I wouldn’t be surprised if he just got cocky and thought that the public would simply devour anything that he published. By in large, they did, but never like they did A Christmas Carol.