Devonshire magazine November December 2018

Charles Dickens’
Devon Christmas Present
CHARLES DICKENS did not invent ‘traditional’, old fashioned Christmases
of course, the kind that many of us still enjoy revelling in today (and
so beloved of greetings card manufacturers): that particular garland rests
more fittingly on the noble brow of Victoria’s husband, Prince Albert.
His wholesale import of the age-old German
Christmas, complete with feasting, merriment
and the lighted tree itself, hung with sugar plums
and barley sugar canes were readily embraced
by the new, romantic era, ushered in by its new
Queen with her young family.
But it was Dickens, that literary genius and
social commentator of the Victorian age who
not only promoted Christmas in this form, he
did so by creating his immortal morality tale,
A Christmas Carol.
Having lived and worked in Devon as a young
newspaper reporter, he returned to the county
at the height of his fame to give one of the first
ever public readings of this perennial classic in
August, 1858 at the Royal Public Rooms, in the
heart of the City of Exeter.
He afterwards wrote to his sister-in-law that the
good people of Devon packed the place to the
rafters and he wished that he had been able to
book the venue again.
“We had a most wonderful night at Exeter. I
think they were the finest audience I have ever
read to. I don’t think I have ever read, in some
respects, so well, and I never beheld anything
like the personal affection which they poured out
upon me at the end. It was really a remarkable
sight, and I shall always look back upon it with
pleasure.”
The reporter from the Flying Post was impressed
by the great man’s performance, as well he might.
“Mr. Dickens possesses great dramatic ability,
wonderful powers of facial expression, and a rich
sonorous voice, of which he is a perfect master‒
changing it from the rough tones of Scrooge to
the sweet and delicate key of Tiny Tim with an
easy and remarkable facility.”
Yet here, more than a century and a half after
A Christmas Carol when that crowd streamed
out into the High Street, laughing and crying in
turn at the end of the performance, it still seems
an extraordinary way for such a story to begin.
“Marley was dead: to begin with. There is no
doubt whatever about that. The register of his
burial was signed by the clergyman, the clerk,
the undertaker, and the chief mourner. Scrooge
signed it. And Scrooge’s name was good upon
‘Change, for anything he chose to put his hand
to. Old Marley was as dead as a door-nail.”
Extraordinary that is until, we are reminded of
the novel’s subtitle, often dropped by publishers
in later editions “A Christmas Carol. In Prose.
Being a Ghost Story of Christmas.”
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