Hidden holiday gems from Dickens
Recently, my mother gifted me “A Christmas Carol and Other Holiday Treasures” (Canterbury Classics, 2013, 540 pages). While I’ve read “A Christmas Carol” many times, I was pleasantly surprised to find Dickens had written plenty more festive tales just like it.
This collection of novellas are short dives into 19th century England, immersing the reader in the Christmas spirit and bringing to life old holiday traditions, as well as timeless truths about humanity. Each story carries Dickens’ signature darkness and depth, his humor and hope, and realistic redemption. Ghosts, visions, and the supernatural are not just for Scrooge. We see that theme continue throughout these holiday novellas, making for spectral stories that could be read around the fire, to be enjoyed both by the young and the old.
I’ll only highlight two novellas, though there are five total: “A Christmas Carol,” “The Chimes,” “The Cricket on the Hearth,” “The Battle of Life,” “The Haunted Man and the Ghost’s Bargain.”
To big fans of “A Christmas Carol,” this one will be an especially welcome addition to their library. It’s very similar in structure and plot, but differs in its final message. A sort of New Year’s version of “A Christmas Carol,” “The Chimes” follows the story of Toby Veck (Trotty), who, aided by the supernatural, is offered a glimpse at the consequence of his misconceptions.
As this novella’s lengthy subtitle reads, this is “A Goblin Story of Some Bells that Rang an Old Year Out and a New Year In.” Trotty is a letter-carrier who passes by the old church daily. The chimes that ring there offer him comfort, encouraging him to persevere, and bringing a sense of hope and joy to his day. The story captures a particular New Year’s Eve where Trotty is uncharacteristically downcast. Constantly hearing depressing reports of heightened crime and general immorality among the poor, he begins to believe that they’re simply, by nature, bad.
He arrives home to his daughter, Meg, who announces that she and her fiancé, Richard, will be married the next day. Their engagement had been long in the hopes they would grow in wealth before wedding, but after no financial change they decide they would rather enjoy what happiness marriage provides while they’re still young, than wait any longer for riches that may never come. The happy excitement is soon extinguished by the cynical Alderman Cute who declares the poor to not be fit for good marriage, prophesying that they’ll grow to hate each other, live under the stress of financial burdens, and be overrun with nasty children they will resent.
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After a few more similar encounters, Trotty’s initial belief that men are inherently bad grows even more solidified and he becomes sadly convinced of it. Meg and Richard have also been dissuaded of goodness in their future and they call off their engagement. While alone, reading more depressing accounts of poor crime and despair, Trotty hears the chimes ringing, but soon their noise grows deafening as if bursting through his home. Feeling called, he heads to the church to inspect it and encounters more interesting sights than he would’ve ever imagined.
The story continues, growing darker at times but leaving off on a note of redemption. The message in the end is one which has not aged poorly and remains as applicable (but forgotten) in our own day and age.
The next novella is “The Cricket on the Hearth.” John Peerybingle and his wife, Dot, share a happy home and a beautiful baby boy. Although quite a bit younger than her husband, Dot lets us readers know very early on in the story just how much she loves him. She tells him how worried she was the year before when they got married, concerned that he would not love her the way she needed and that she wouldn’t grow to love him; and how relieved she is that all those worries have dissipated in gratitude at the joy they share. As she recounts all this, a cricket chirps on the hearth and Dot says that her heart sings along with the same happiness of homelife whenever she hears it in the cricket song.
During the holiday season one night, John brings home a strange, elderly man who asks to stay with the family for a few days and Dot eagerly agrees. We then meet friends of the Peerybingles: a very poor toymaker, Caleb Plummer, and his blind daughter, Bertha. Caleb acts as her eyes, describing their home and the visitors who come. However, saddened by her loss of sight, Caleb does not describe these things accurately. Their shabby, dilapidated home becomes elegant, colorful, and beautifully furnished, and Caleb’s crotchety, mean employer, Tackleton, becomes well-meaning, kind, and quiet.
Another sorrow Caleb carried is his lost son who he now assumed is dead. Years before his son had been in love with one of Dot’s old school friends, May, but after traveling to South America, he never returned. Now May is engaged to Tackleton, thanks to the pressure and urging of her mother.
Their lives intertwine and the happy Peerybingle marriage soon comes under threat, leaving John to face a shocking, difficult decision. Both this story and “The Chimes” give a beautiful insight into the human capacity for good and evil. Never wavering in his morals, Dickens’ brings his convictions to life, using wonder and whimsy to make his writings sparkle even after all this time.
(Anna Barren is a teacher and lifelong lover of books. This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it..)
