Devonshire magazine November December 2018

Devon’s winter weather in the early and mid-
1800s, like most of the rest of southern England
was extreme. Sheep on Dartmoor were still
being dug out of snowdrifts as late as April on
successive years in the 1830s. Stagecoaches and
their unfortunate passengers had to be rescued
from monumental snowdrifts: roads were made
impassable and rural communities were sometimes
cut off for weeks at a time.
In 1814, when Dickens was just two years old,
the Thames had frozen over in London and its
citizens marked the event with The Great Frost
Fair which saw coaches travelling on the frozen
river between the City and Westminster whilst
an elephant promoted a circus by being walked
to and across the ice at Blackfriars.
It has been suggested that these and similar
weather related events during his formative
childhood years - before his father was torn away
from the family and thrown into debtors prison -
made a deep and lasting impression on him that
manifested in many of his writings: particularly
in the Pickwick Papers and most pointedly in A
Christmas Carol itself.
Was the book then really an invocation of his
childhood of Christmases with his family? Many
believe that it is.
Charles Dickens
Catherine Dickens
Dickens quit his life as a reporter in 1834, bid
farewell to his drinking companions at the Turk’s
Head tavern next to Exeter’s Guild Hall and left
Devon for London, to write full time . But he came
back to the county often, and married Catherine
Hogarth, a pretty, Scottish lass then living in Exeter
and the daughter of his one-time newspaper editor.
Dickens was 24 and she just 21.
Charles John Huffam Dickens preceded her on 9th
June 1870, aged 58. His grave is to be found at
Poets’ Corner, Westminster Abbey but his greatest
monument of course is his literary work.
Of these, A Christmas Carol remains the most
popular, internationally. As a book it has never
been out of print.
On television it has appeared scores of times and
in various guises since it was first transmitted by a
New York tv channel, WABD ,on 20 December 1944.
There have been 22 film versions since the first
one-reeler attempted to tell the tale in 1901. That
is if you include The Muppet Christmas Carol
(1992) with Michael Caine as Scrooge and Kermit
the Frog as Bob Cratchit.
But to the arguably sublime from the wonderfully
ridiculous, the last words on this subject must
surely go to the great man himself.
“If I could work my will,” said Scrooge indignantly,
“every idiot who goes about with ‘Merry Christmas’
on his lips, should be boiled with his own pudding,
and buried with a stake of holly through his heart.
He should!”
But here, finally, is Charles Dickens himself,
speaking to the reader in the voice of one of the
key characters of the tale. Fred.
Fred? You will remember (or might care to know)
that Ebenezer Scrooge had a sister, called Fran,
who had died in childbirth, bringing this, her only
child into the world.
Having tried, unsuccessfully to persuade his uncle
to join him and his wife to share Christmas dinner
with them, Fred tells the unrepentant old miser:
“The only time I know of, in the long calendar
of the year, when men and women seem by one
consent to open their shut-up hearts freely, and to
think of people below them as if they really were
fellow-passengers to the grave, and not another
race of creatures bound on other journeys. And
therefore, uncle, though it has never put a scrap
of gold or silver in my pocket, I believe that it
has done me good, and will do me good; and I
say, God bless it!’”
John Fisher
It was 1836, the same year that he had published
his first literary success, The Pickwick Papers. (The
character of The Fat Boy is based on a potman at
The Turk’s Head).
Within a few years he had become an international
literary celebrity but although the couple had
10 children the marriage was not a happy one.
Nevertheless, Catherine found time, between her
confinements, to write her own best-seller - a
cookery book - which in an age of long book
titles was called What Shall we Have for Dinner?
Satisfactorily Answered by Numerous Bills of Fare
for from Two to Eighteen Persons.
Catherine Dickens died on 22 November 1879 aged
64 and was laid to rest in Highgate Cemetery in
London with her infant daughter, Dora, who had
died in 1851 aged nearly eight months.
37