My name is Hanna Foshay and I was tasked with the job of being the dramaturg for Oregon State University's fall audio production of Charles Dickens' A Christmas Carol. This was my first time taking on the role of dramaturg but as an avid researcher and theatre artist I was excited about the task at hand. I will be writing four blog posts outlining the research I have done on both Charles Dickens and the story itself and I hope that it gives deeper insight to those who have loved the story, new readers of the classic, and those who listen to OSU's fantastic production and wish to know more about Dickens and/or the classic holiday tale that we all have come to see as a staple for the holiday season.
In this post I will be discussing Dickens' life leading up to the publication of A Christmas Carol, as well as his inspiration for the novel and the social tone surrounding issues such as poverty and child labor that inspired Dickens to pen the original novella.
Charles Dickens
Charles Dickens, born February 7 1812, said himself that he had an idyllic childhood, growing up in various homes in England with his parents and seven siblings (two of whom did not make it to adulthood), living well beyond their means and allowing the children to attend a variety of well established schools, Dickens spent most of his time reading and rereading countless novels such as Robinson Crusoe and Arabian Nights, and playing outside with his siblings. During this time the family moved around a lot for John Dickens’ job, and while the family was not the most well to do, they taught their children that if they worked hard enough they could be anything they wanted, and even be rich enough to purchase a grand home if that was what they wanted. This time of family bonding, rich education, and living above their means all ended when Dickens’ father, John Dickens was sent to the Marshalsea debtors prison in 1822, under the Insolvent Debtors Act of 1813, accompanied by his wife and youngest children until he could pay back his debt of £40 and 10 shillings.
Because John had no way of making money while in the debtors prison Charles Dickens was sent to work at Warren’s Blacking Warehouse making six shillings a week in an effort to pay off his father’s debt, at the young age of twelve. Here he worked ten hour days applying labels to pots of boot blacking under harsh conditions with several other boys his age. The room they worked in was filled with fumes and the men in charge treated them harshly. Here was where his anger began for the harsh conditions the poor and children were forced to work under, and where he took much inspiration from for his future novels. The change in circumstances gave him what his biographer, Michael Slater, describes as a "deep personal and social outrage", which heavily influenced his writing and outlook.
Charles Dickens from John Forster’s The Life of Charles Dickens
"The blacking-warehouse was the last house on the left-hand side of the way, at old Hungerford Stairs. It was a crazy, tumble-down old house, abutting of course on the river, and literally overrun with rats. Its wainscoted rooms, and its rotten floors and staircase, and the old grey rats swarming down in the cellars, and the sound of their squeaking and scuffling coming up the stairs at all times, and the dirt and decay of the place, rise up visibly before me, as if I were there again. The counting-house was on the first floor, looking over the coal-barges and the river. There was a recess in it, in which I was to sit and work. My work was to cover the pots of paste-blacking; first with a piece of oil-paper, and then with a piece of blue paper; to tie them round with a string; and then to clip the paper close and neat, all round, until it looked as smart as a pot of ointment from an apothecary's shop. When a certain number of grosses of pots had attained this pitch of perfection, I was to paste on each a printed label, and then go on again with more pots. Two or three other boys were kept at similar duty down-stairs on similar wages. One of them came up, in a ragged apron and a paper cap, on the first Monday morning, to show me the trick of using the string and tying the knot. His name was Bob Fagin; and I took the liberty of using his name, long afterwards, in Oliver Twist."
Dickens continued work here, growing more and more unhappy, until the death of his grandmother, Elizabeth Dickens, who left Dickens’ father £450 allowing him to leave the debtors prison. However Charles Dickens’s mother wished for him to continue working at the Blacking Warehouse, to his great dismay, which is credited to be where his distrust towards women and poor relationship with his mother originally came from, he stated "I never afterwards forgot, I never shall forget, I never can forget, that my mother was warm for my being sent back.”
Following his time in the blacking warehouse
Dickens studied at Wellington House Academy in Camden Town, which he did not find to be a good school. During his time here he lived with various family friends, and attended the theatre quite often, noting that for several years he would attend every single day. This is where his dream of being an actor blossomed, he spent much of his free time doing impersonations of the actors he saw in the theatre (his favorite being Charles Matthews), and landed an acting audition at Covent Garden, where the manager George Bartley and the actor Charles Kemble were to see him. While Dickens prepared meticulously for his audition, he fell sick the day of and did not attend the audition, this was where his pursuit of acting ended, but he remained a performer and storyteller for life. After this he began work as a freelance reporter for four years before setting out to begin his career as a writer.
1843
Dickens’ writings were renowned for reflecting topical social issues, most often the plights of the poor, especially children. In 1843 celebrating Christmas was growing in popularity, due to the influence of Queen Victoria and the German traditions of Prince Albert, which combined with the publishing of the Second Report of the Children's Employment Commission inspired Dickens to write A Christmas Carol.
The Second Report of the Children's Employment Commission
The Second Report of the Children's Employment Commission was regarding the ages, hours, and wages, of the children working in warehouses and mines in England and Ireland at the time, it revealed that children often as young as five years old were working in the worst of conditions in places of work such as mines, paper mills, bleaching and dying facilities, and other locations for manual labor. Upon reading this Dickens planned to publish an inexpensive political pamphlet tentatively titled, An Appeal to the People of England, on behalf of the Poor Man's Child, but changed his mind, deferring the pamphlet's production until the end of the year. A month after the report was published Dickens wrote to Dr. Southwood Smith who was one of the commissioners in charge of the pamphlets publication, regarding his new plan of retaliation saying-
"you will certainly feel that a Sledge hammer has come down with twenty times the force—twenty thousand times the force—I could exert by following out my first idea".
Dickens got this new idea while speaking at a fundraising speech on 5 October 1843 at the Manchester Athenaeum. Dickens urged workers and employers to join together to combat ignorance with educational reform, and realized in the days following that the most effective way to reach the broadest segment of the population with his social concerns about poverty and injustice was to write a deeply felt Christmas narrative rather than polemical pamphlets and essays.
Publication of A Christmas Carol - 1843
“Dickens began writing A Christmas Carol in October and finished the story, which came in at less than 30,000 words, six weeks later. Writing a full story in this manner was new for him, as his other novels had been serialized over months and years. The method may have helped him craft a stronger story.” (Kettler)
Dickens’ passion when it came to social issues is conveyed in all of his novels, and he set out with each new piece to show the realities of the poorest and most destitute members of society through the eyes of the common man. He wanted to create compassion in his readers by not just showing these realities for others but making them see what life would be like if it were to happen to them. Dickens never claimed to know how to fix the problems in the world, but sought to make people aware of the need for change.
Dickens’ rush to release the novella in time for Christmas (published 19 December 1843), and his specific desire for the cover to be bound in red cloth with gilt-edged pages, and to include copies of five original black and white illustrations and three color prints with each book caused him to make very little upon the initial publication, even though the first run of 6,000 copies sold out by Christmas Eve and the novel continued to sell out well into 1844. Dickens only made £230 (equal to £23,000 in 2020 pounds) rather than the £1,000 (equal to £99,000 in 2020 pounds) that he expected due to the high production cost.
Sources
Second report of the Commissioners : Trades and manufactures. (n.d.). Retrieved November 07, 2020, from https://babel.hathitrust.org/cgi/pt?id=hvd.li53bx
First edition of A Christmas Carol. (2014, April 24). Retrieved November 07, 2020, from https://www.bl.uk/collection-items/first-edition-of-a-christmas-carol
Kettler, S. (2019, December 09). Charles Dickens Wrote 'A Christmas Carol' in Only Six Weeks. Retrieved November 07, 2020, from https://www.biography.com/news/charles-dickens-a-christmas-carol
Sanders, K. (2017, January 03). How did Queen Victoria and Prince Albert popularise Christmas? Retrieved November 06, 2020, from http://blog.english-heritage.org.uk/how-did-queen-victoria-and-prince-albert-popularise-christmas/
Gibbons, D. (2019, May 12). What the Dickens? Retrieved November 12, 2020, from https://www.rtmworld.com/what-the-dickens/
Rosenwald, M. (2019, December 21). The wrenching reason Charles Dickens wrote 'A Christmas Carol'. Retrieved November 07, 2020, from https://www.washingtonpost.com/history/2019/12/21/wrenching-reason-charles-dickens-wrote-christmas-carol/
Charles Dickens (1812-70) giving his last public reading at St James's Hall, London, 5 March 1870. He read extracts from A Christmas Carol and the trial scene from Pickwick Papers. His first reading was in 1858. (Photo by Ann Ronan Pictures/Print Collector/Getty Images
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