Charles Dickens Lecture Series 1: Professor John Mullan on A Christmas Carol

[Music] very close to us which is and it was painted by Margaret it is a protest in three and the first reference the Dickens makes to the Christmas Carol happens to be one of the actual which was okay and it's got some Dickinson because of course everybody was NT published some stuff this when there were people reading into wondering who this ball was anyway um I was given for this for this all sorts of questions by Laurie at the back who's the sort of ring master chef tour cast on this occasion and he sent me one of what I imagine is characteristically eloquent emails person who writes an email as people in the nineteenth century wrote a letter to something they had seen and with a lot of questions if he suggested that I try to answer each question would be a very good one for a single lecture and one or two other questions I don't really nobody else to do but I'll try to address some of them and Laurie you can tell me on coffee dance afterwards whether I've managed to answer them and there are questions like you know why ghosts like Christmas where to get the idea from why do people like it why don't we still like it do deal with some of those but I will fess up Rima I am a a literary board I'm in the last week of my university term and I am sort of doing Lick Creek in lectures and things all the time and I am but that's what I do so I'm not going to particularly talk to you ever have Dickens's life I'll say one or two things about his career I'm not going to particularly talk to you about Victorian England and poverty and ignorance are they actually ignorance in want as they actually were I'm going to sort of talk to you about how Dickens wrote yes because that's what that's my thing that's what interests me and about what I take to be the incredible audacity the audacity of his of his writing and perhaps in that we'll see something of why why it's lasted and of course it's extraordinary how in different versions it has lasted here is my favorite recent reincarnation of Scrooge some of you I recommend this as a as a Christmas book or such a tease for any of your any relatives you've got with a sense of humor it's the protagonist of a wonderful posy Simmonds graphic novel I suppose you call it called Cassandra dark some of you might have come across and like many tales since the 1840s it is based of course on a Christmas Carol she's a bit more sort of insulated well padded let's say that one imagine Scrooge would have been armed but she is indeed a Scrooge from more than an agent part of the delight of reading this posy Simmons recent new book is knowing that somehow this ghastly misanthropic monster for such years she's an expert on fine art and I thought she would be a good person to choose and has a rather smart gallery in Kensington I think how she's going to be converted to sort of Christian virtues because as soon as you recognize the story you're reading you know that she has to be Christmas cows being performed in Leeds and Manchester and the Old Vic it's all over the place this time last year there was that film the man who invented Christmas and it did make me think of it when I about them when I saw for the first time this wonderful portrait but it was describing because of course Nephilim not quite like the portrait but um he's actually Dan Stevens played Dickens as he was writing a Christmas carol that's what the film which came out exactly a year ago was about and he's a bit older super Dickens I think he's at least four plus five years too old to played Dickens when he was writing the Christmas carol but still fairly well-preserved still isn't a and lustrous locks and of course he does have lustrous locks in that portrait and I think many people who not Dickens experts when they first see portrait they always say the same thing don't they we say she was really rather good King wasn't and what perhaps they should be thinking about instead it's not whether it was good but what this film which wasn't wasn't that wonderful film but what it was about which is something that interests me which is trying to imagine Dickens as a as a young man as a young writer and a Christmas Carol but when he wrote he wrote he had only recently turned 30 you know any who he was 31 I think when he wrote a Christmas carol and still full of a good deal of SAP as well as a good deal of desperation one interesting thing as I now turn to things he actually wrote about this film was it dreamt up an absurd subplot in order to try to do something which I think literary critics had a lot of trouble we're doing with a Christmas Carol which is explaining where Dickens got the idea from the film invents an Irish nurse maid whom Dickens over here as we see telling ghost stories to his children I mean he should sack up already actually but he overhears and then goes Dean what a good idea I'll use some of these in my new book I want to come to guess in a second but I think one thing to say about Christmas Carol which is one of the many things that's remarkable about it is that we all probably everyone in this room probably knows that the ghost story is a great sort of Victorian fixture indeed the Christmas ghost story and yet in 1843 it isn't actually there's a wonderful anthology called the Oxford book of Victorian ghost stories and the earliest ghost story it gives in that book is from Elizabeth Gaskell an author who worked for Dickens and it's from 1852 and it was first part household words Dickens's own journal which he himself as he put it conducted and he sub edited that very story and it's from the 1850s and they're very much in the eighteen sixties that the ghost story becomes a fixture of victorian magazine publication so happy ghost stories before they've been ghost stories particularly that dickens read by scott by Washington Irving it will be wrong to think that this was a genre which was there for the picking it wasn't and of course that film the man who invented Christmas we know he didn't he didn't there's lots of Christmas before Dickens comes along every Jane Austen novels got Christmas in it and it's quite an ease up actually but perhaps it will be true to say he was the man who insisted on Christmas I wanted to start by asking thinking about why Christmas mattered to him and may seem too obvious to me stating but it's something we should recognize I'm afraid the pictures are over that context as the soon to say can you all read it be enough to see okay and this is one of the first times he mentions Christmas in of surviving letter and he's writing to the young publisher John the Crone about his it awaits first book sketches by Bors and he refers in the letter to George Cruikshank who is the illustrator of the book and it's telling that this is one of the very earliest references to Christmas because why it matters will you have the kindness to leave that for me and I'll send for it about seven o'clock this evening the bound calling of monthly magazines crook Shack wishes to see it I had a long interview with him yesterday morning the result of which I will communicate to you when you're again in able to attend to business he only waits now to see you and pledges himself that as far as he is concerned the book shall be out by Christmas without fail the book is sketches by bores invariably in his letters not always but most of the time in his letters I've done a search the word Christmas is preceded by the word by by Christmas yes occasionally in time for Christmas and he's always talking about something he or one of his a happy one of the writers he later employees for one a household word all around but usually something that he is writing Christmas above all for Dickens is what it still is if you run water spoons or dogs it is the time of the year when you make up for all those times when people don't see me by any blinking books and it's the time when you have to have your new literary product on the marketplace here is another slightly later example from very early in his career 10th August 1836 he's in the course of writing pick with papers it's but it has begun coming out but I mean he's still writing it as it's coming out and buoyed by its growing success he's taking all sorts of mad commitments all over the place and one of these is indicated here it's right into the book Sir Thomas tag dear sir I've made the nearest calculation my power the length of the little work you speak of the little work you speak of is a book for children and guide my own demand by the nature of the arrangements I'm in the habit of making with other booksellers I could not agree to do it for less 120 pounds I'm not aware what the profit is upon this description of book or whether it would or would not justify you in such an outlay if it would I should be prepared to produce the whole by Christmas the sale at that time of year I apprehend will be important okay and it's very important that the commercial motive is always entangled for Dickens with let us call it the festive one the celebration of the season for which a Christmas carol is so famous and that commercial motive of course I mean I think unfairly as many cases for Dickens it's often pointed out you know the irony of the fact that to satisfy his urgent demands for money he's urgently felt need for money Dickens writes a book about a man who's been almost damned by his love for money and you're having another talk like Claire Tomalin about Christmas carols on stage I'm sure she will be such as noted by will talk about his life and his needs at this time because Dickens his success feeds need in his case he's just moved into his big house near Regents Park and no sooner does he have one success than he uses a product he uses it to generate an ever more so spacious and hungry lifestyle lots of children lots of parties lots of traveling lots of rental lots of money to pay for expensive rents and always the need to find something else and indeed in that film the man who invented Christmas rather crudely the filmmakers sort of known this irony and they have Christopher Plummer as this sort of rather not very comical Scrooge turn to Dickens and point out that he and Scrooge Dickens and Scrooge reaction to the kind that both money obsessed Dickens of course relished the income that he got the sales that he got from his books not just for the money but for the proof of his powers and as you probably know christmas carol was very disappointing to him commercially at first at least big clause although it was incredibly popular it have been so expensive to produce particularly because of things like hand colored plates that actually he got a lot of profits from it were much smaller than he'd hoped blames a lot of publishers of course as always didn't immediately swap them and its popularity was a course international here he is right and Cornelius Felton who is the Harvard professor of Greek whom he met on his 1842 toured the United States and describing with sort of vicarious excitement the arrival of his own book in Boston Dickens was almost standing on the key side to receive it himself but all something fascinatingly saying something about his peculiar method of composition and and I think saying it literally not metaphorically now now if instantly on the receipt of this instantly you will send a free and independent citizen data to cue Narwhal but Boston you will find that captain Hewitt of the Britannia steamship my ship as a small parcel for professor Felton of Cambridge and in that parcel you will find a Christmas carol in prose being a ghost story of Christmas by Charles Dickens overweight Christmas Carol Charles Dickens wept and laughed and wept again and excited himself most extraordinary manner in the composition and thinking where of he walked it sorry in the composition and thinking we're off he walked about the black streets of London 15 and 20 miles many a night when all the so before folks had gone to bed I think it's with quite often with Dickens is fiction but perhaps this one particularly it's really useful to think of the work not just as written to be read aloud which I think most of his fiction most of the time is but in a way read aloud as it's being written as it's been composed performed and there are many stories and perhaps know some of them reported by friends and one or two of his children of how he worked doing the voices running across the room to a mirror and pulling faces laughing to himself going back and writing it down as if he was enacting characters even as he was at the desk and of course it deals Christmas Carol with wonderfully kind of vulgar and popular material it deals above all we goes and here is a sort of I hear it as a slightly sort of puzzled reminiscence by the former journalist novelist and to war round there Eemian george augustus sulla writing in old age in his memoir about his memories of dickens and he'd been a writer for household words no dickens where what he liked to talk about was the latest piece of the theaters the latest exciting trial police case the latest social craze or social swindle and especially the latest murder and the newest thing in go I think I was actually one of the most brilliant bits of literary criticism of Dickens ever offered because in a sort of way that sums him up they're sort of bravado of his populism and the fact that of course he was gripped by in terms of fiction things which sometimes secretly we're all really gripped by and ghosts okay and I want to come to guests now but also never to forget the manner in which he acted out that fascination with ghosts that Salah lissa must his other sort of vulgar interests which he said get mostly of course from the newspapers because in a Christmas carol is not just a vulgarity of content it's a wonderful colloquial vulgarity of style too you cannot you know cannot have any talk about Christmas Carol make this a litmus test of any talking in the future without its first sentence which has I think the greatest : Marley was dead I want to get Marley was dead : I can't Marley was dead to begin with there is no doubt whatever about that I love that that wonderful opening sentence Marley which is a which is about beginnings and the two or three things that he means by to begin with with his course he's beginning by saying something as if somebody was telling you a story in an informal manner well to the give way but also of course Marley was dead to begin with because he's not going to be dead much longer there is no doubt whatever of that and I don't want to dwell on this but you can all think I'm I hope of the ways in which although you can imagine perhaps a novel told in the first person that might not be written by Dickens that might sound like this no third person narrative written by any other self-respecting good novelist in the nineteenth century would ever talk like this there is no doubt whatever about that Dickens is a wonderful bigger fire of the patterns of speech and Carols I hope to show in a second dad uses an extraordinary inventive audacious and brilliantly in correct ways some of the fertility of speech that is often lost when language the English language hits the literate page it's got ghosts in and I've said the ghost story is a funny thing when he's writing because it's very it's not yet established he's going to go on he can't learn this at the time Dickens is going to go on in the eighteen fifties and sixties to play a more important role in establishing the ghost story as a staple of Victorian for the staple for the Victorian reading public and as a staple of Christmas entertain he's going to do more for that than any other figure but he hasn't done it yet and one question I remember asking I think I know the answer now I didn't until I remember asking about Christmas Carol and in verse it was did Dickens believe in ghosts what did Dickens think about ghosts and the entres sort of no but I wanted to spend a little while on his interest in gates because he is fascinated by them and they turn up in all sorts of ways in in his novels and here is a peculiar example from not long after the publication of a Christmas carol and this is an elector he wrote to a new friend of his he moved with his family to Genoa in Italy and he's he's embarking on the novel which came after Martin Chuzzlewit martyr just what he was writing he interrupted Martin Chuzzlewit innocent in essence to to do a Christmas Carol internationally Dombey and son and staying in Genoa he befriended a Swiss banker called Emile de rue de La Rue and any of delarue's wife suffer from all sorts of peculiar symptoms which fascinated Dickens main ones being terrible convulsions insomnia and she saw specters she saw specters and Dickens had just got interested in mesmerism and especially in his own powers apparently with anything to their ruse agreement bizarrely Dickens embarked on a program of mesmerizing madame de thoux and this is one of the letters he wrote to about her tendency to hear and see ghosts I quite agree with you in your construction of that extraordinary circumstances a circumstance about the vortices in the sickroom G his voices it is a philosophical explanation of many ghost stories though it is hardly less chilling than a ghost story itself there is no reasonable doubt that the woman received the impression magnetically from madam deny Ruth okay so somebody else has heard voices in the house but in fact it seemed Dickens believed in something which may seem to us supernatural but which he thinks is sort of natural which is that there are magnetic communications between people in heightened emotional states so he was always looking for he was always looking for explanations of apparent hauntings and visitations and specters but he was fascinated by the symptoms one of the reasons we know that at least officially he didn't believe in ghosts is that later in his in his career in his life there was especially in the 1860s an explosion of spiritualism and you'll know about lots of other Victorian writers became fascinated by this Robert Browning being one of them for instance and wrote about it and Dickens was an aggressive campaigner against spiritualism and against those who claim to be able to put people in touch with the spiritual world and people who campaigned against the credulity of those who believe such things they but must by no means believe that conjuring and ventriloquist are old trades they must disbelieve all philosophical transactions containing the records of pain full and careful inquiry into now-familiar disorders of the senses of seeing and hearing and into the wonders of somnambulism epilepsy hysteria Mya's Matic influence vegetable poisons derived by whole communities from corrupted air diseased imitation and moral infection that list of things is not satire those are all things Dickens believes in those are all some of the different explanations for what credulous people might think of as ghosts but credulous people always do think of ghosts and Dickens knows of the terror of ghosts the terror of haunting and a Christmas carol for all its comedy would not be the thing it is if the Kings didn't believe in that terror his extraordinary letter but he wrote from his American tour but a prison he visited but wrote writing that to England to his friend John Force Forster about the horrors of solitary confinement a horrible thought occurred to me when I was recalling all I'd seen that night he goes on tours of prisons what if ghosts be one of the terrors of these days I pondered it on it often since then imagine a prisoner covering up his head in the bedclothes and looking at from time to time with a ghastly dread of some inexplicable silent figure that always sits upon his bed or stands if the thing can be said to stand that never walks as men do in the same corner of his cell and the more I think of it the more certain I feel that not have fewer these men during a portion of their imprisonment at least a nightly visited by spectres a horrible thought the spectre the ghost is of course a psychological reality in Dickens is imaginary of these men's ordeal and especially a psychological reality of the guilty of these people who are in prison for crimes and because of the psychological reality of ghosts I don't quick I mean this is leaping ahead but you keep getting people in his novels talking of ghosts or thinking they see ghosts and one of the most famous is one which never actually gets a natural explanation which is in one of his greatest novels believe has here is the housekeeper Bleak House talking to they deadlock Lady Dedlock at this stage a very guilty figure and mr. Trant was son George has been accused of a murder which we assure as readers he hasn't committed but it may be that Lady Dedlock has done it and a mrs. Ratliff's Justina have got got an anonymous letter which accuses and this revives the legend of the deadlock house which is that in times of trouble there's footsteps you can hear loudly the footsteps of the ghost walking up and down the ghost walk the terrace outside the main saloon of the house my lady I came away last night from Chesney world to find my son in my old age and the step upon the ghost walk was so constant and so solemn that I never heard that like in all these years night after night as it has fallen dark the sound has echoed through your rooms but last night it was all fullest and as it fell dark last night my lady I got this letter so it's also story of other things that saw that itemizes that by noting murder but there's no doubt that Dickens preserves this substrains relative an absolutely scorning spiritualism any serious belief in hauntings yet fascinated by ghosts as a kind of index of human human imagination what is of reverbs it very briefly passing get back to Christmas Carol in some of its detail what is really extraordinary rereading it recently I just cannot think that you'll have a little time for questions up front people here can think of other examples I cannot think of an example of a really good story which managed us to be a story of a ghost story which manages to be funny and frightening and they're a comic ghost stories mostly unsuccessful I think but of course most ghost stories rely above all on suspending the disbelief for long enough just suspending it so that you cannot see the absurdity no accident of course most good ghost stories are short stories and yet Dickens manages although his story becomes grimmer has the stage to proceed he's he manages to be funny as well as frightening and in some ways I would say that almost is the best thing about Dickens throughout his novels why is he so good because he's funny not just because he's funny but because as a writer Dickens he's always funniest when he shouldn't be reread sometime I don't know the opening chapter of Dom Byzantine Sun which is both the saddest ghastliest and funniest opening chapter of a novel you're likely to come and where you will laugh at the Harley Street doctors swapping platitudes over mrs. Dolan B and Dickens would hope cry too at her death and the two are intermingled and they're intermingled in a Christmas carol in the very style a bit of course okay you've had my favorite : here is my favorite cliche Martin Amis a writer I admire rogue gave a collection of his I think often brilliant reviews he gave it a title for war against cliches I said cliche was the biggest enemy of any good writer Dickens loves a cliche he rushes towards cliches embraces them here is the cliche with which was such a plum he commences a Christmas carol we know Molly's dead to begin with old Marley was as dead as a doornail mind I don't mean to say that I know of my own knowledge what there is particularly dead about doornail I might have been inclined myself to regard a coffin nail as the deadest piece of ironmongery in the train but the wisdom of our ancestors is in the simile and my unhallowed hand shall not disturb it all the country's done for you will therefore permit me to repeat emphatically that Marley was as dead as a doornail think of how many rules are creative writing that breaks in the manuscript incidentally you can get a facsimile in many libraries facsimile of the manuscript of a Christmas carol you'll note that when you look particular the opening is clearly written a great speak I mean he wrote this thing white in white heat and there are as is the case in some other Dickens manuscripts at least for certain phases he'll son right with very few Corrections it's all coming out at at first time but interestingly one of the very few Corrections he makes a manuscript to the first page for Christmas Carol is that completely redundant phrase of my own knowledge which he inserts as a second thought yes mind I don't mean to say that I know what there is particularly dead about to dawn out second sentence of verse and then he puts in of my own knowledge that's genius I think okay that would Henry James do that would George Eliot do it would the Blessed Jane herself do it now I think not they're all great writers but in different ways from Dickens mind I don't mean to say that I know of my own knowledge the kind of patterns weird patterns of speech but I sort of pedantic person might follow and this cliche this weird cliche is dead as a doornail of course that's from old doors where the door nails were banged into so hold the door rigid and just as he's starting the story this narrator Charles Dickens and Charles Dickens we call him and Charles Dickens his first reader thought of an ass this isn't an invented narrator this is the guy himself just as he starts a story he goes off on a digression about why this author office odd phrase about how dead something can be and he brings it alive again of course which is what the story's about the story is about a dead person coming back to the life but no way the story's about dead words dead language coming back to life and that's one of the things that Dickens was so wonderful I think better than any other writer that there's ever been bringing back to life often witty and strange life the unregarded and dead in our language on which we all rely so much and I thought I'd throw at you just to convince you of this I throw at you a couple of other cliche examples Dickens full of cliches here is one very close this is from Martin Chuzzlewit and this is from an installment Martin Chuzzlewit that he wrote not long before he set off on Christmas Carol this is our introduction to mr. Peck was my introduction to mr. Petts name this is mr. Peck suit meeting the sour old rich old al Martin Chuzzlewit and of course he's very so sucky uppy because he thinks old Martin just was going to die very soon and he wants him to leave him his money or his money and so he gets particularly on the agile asleep pious and of course mr. Pett Smith I'm sure you all know is the hypocrite of hypocrites it would be no description and mr. Peck sniffs gentleness of manner to adopt the common parlance and say they looked at this moment as if butter wouldn't melt in his mouth he rather looked as if any quantity of butter might have been made out of them by churning the milk of human kindness as it spouted upwards from his heart fantastic isn't it yes 1kj gets another one you know I write sometimes on student s a mixed metaphors avoid but they're not decaying some way makes the cliches even better the milk of human kindness becomes butter not melting in his mouth it's one of his tricks is to take cliches surprisingly literally and then remind us of their richness and their delightful absurdity and how much we need them and here is another little example Lester Celeste the deadlock a stiff Celeste the deadlock complete has so lets the deadlock is only a baronet but there's no mighty a baronet than he his family is as old as the hills and infinitely more respectable he has a general opinion that the world might get on with kibbles but would be done up without deadlocks what on the holes mid nature to be a good idea little low perhaps we're not in close with a part fence but an idea dependent for its execution on your great county families and comically of course the cliche alters the hills but we will see it will say it why not write it and it's implanted comically in celeste as head and solemnly maybe if we find him thinking that his family is rather more respectable than hills although they might be a Christmas carol risks every kind of offense against good polite prose and that there is its tonight here's another kind of offense hyperbole dickens loves exaggeration he loves implausible overstatement especially if you can stir in a little kind of ill-considered idiom on the way here is scrooge again in state one he carried his own load temperature always about with him he iced his office in the dog days and didn't Thorat one degree in christmas external heating cold had little influence on scrooge no warmth good warm no wintry weather chill him know when that blew was bitterer than he no falling snow was more intent upon its purpose no pelting rain less open to entreaty foul weather didn't know where to have him the heaviest rain and snow and hail and sleet could boast of the advantage over him in only one respect they often came down handsomely and Scrooge never did upon why not throw that into pars repetition exaggeration this kind of rich rhythm of idiomatic but rendered with as rare inventiveness which transforms dead roses into life once there's nobody like him for it here is some more examples well just look at this one quickly it's from a favorite novel of mine Dombey and son from the opening chapter and again a comparable thing where Dickens takes a forbidding character like he took Sir Leicester Dedlock by filling his consciousness with ridiculous exaggerations in this case makes him comical as well as sinister I mean this is again it's constantly this thing which if anything is is my theme it is this that the comical and the frightening the absurd and the threatening are so brilliantly mixed and mr. Dom is just had a son whose son is lying in a basket of the fire as if he were a muffin and and he is finally got his son and again he said zombie in it son in exactly the same tone as before those three words convey that one idea of mr. Tommy's life the earth was made for Dombey and son to trade in and the Sun and Moon were made to give them light rivers and seas were formed to float their ships rainbows gave them a promise of fair weather winds blue for or against their enterprises stars and planets circled in their orbits to preserve inviolate a system of which they were the center common abbreviations took new meanings in his eyes and had sole reference to them ad had no concern with anno domini but stood for a no Dongbei and some easy rethinking this it doesn't matter does it it's as if the prose has taken on the habit of his peculiar form of self-importance and that's what it does to narrative when we see things as mr. Dombey might see them his character and his fixation produce the hyperbole one of the tricks Dickens was trying out in a Christmas Carol became becomes a sort of a signature for him I don't know of any writer who does who does use it this phrase that I'm going to come to at the end of this passage in the same way here's a one more dominant son before we go back to Christmas Carol a wonderful passage about camden town and it's about a kind of turn off of the building of the railway north from Euston in the 1840s and well this is the neighborhood as to the neighborhood which had hesitated to acknowledge the railroad in its struggling days that had grown wise and penitent as any Christian might in such a case and now boasted of its powerful and prosperous relation there were railway Packers in its Draper shots and railway journals in the windows of its newsmen there were railway hotels office houses lodging houses boarding houses railway plans maps views wrappers bottles sandwich boxes and timetables railway hackney-coach and stands railway omnibuses railway streets and buildings railway hangers-on and parasites and flatter us out of all calculation there was even railway time observed in clocks as if the Sun itself my plates as good as paradise losses made poetry this the humble list is the king of lists but I just want I mean we could spend lots of time this and I won't wonderful as it is but I just want you to notice what happens in that last sentence which is of course about something that really happened railway time until then as many of you know until the railways London and Bristol had a different time by about six minutes or something I think it wasn't it was only with the coming and the dominance at the railways that it became necessary for every town and city in Britain at the same time but well as that that's behind the sentence look at that as if as if the Sun itself had given in as if is a special Dickens thing here's some as ifs from A Christmas Carol and guides for the tree star will tell you it's a simile it's not really assume it's more like a flight of fantasy Dickens sometimes gets treated as though because people read him reflecting sagely on these sort of terrible living conditions of groups the large groups of Victorian society and people sometimes read him as if he's a sort of social realist and and to me is the opposite he's a scientist is the greatest fantasised of English literature and a lobbyist fantasizing gets channeled into these as is the ancient Arabic church whose gruff old Bell was always peeping slightly down at Scrooge as the gothic window in the wall became invisible and struck the hours and quarters in the clouds with tremulous vibrations afterwards as if its teeth were chattering in its frozen head up there well later on stay three deed and this is a blue knowing as if it's a Anna as if about them the warmth of Christmas that Scrooge doesn't notice in time has been taken out by the ghost of Christmas press into the streets in time the bells ceased and the Baker's were shut up and yet there was a genial shadowing fourth of all these dinners and the progress of their cooking in the thawed blotch of wet above each baker's oven where the pavement smoked as its stones when cooking - you probably know lots of people who were not affluent enough to have their own proper stoves and kitchens would take their Christmas meal - the Baker and the Baker would bake it in their up babies were baked in their oven suddenly the very stones of London becomes a part of the feast of Christmas and this as if this as a turn of Dickens's imagination which is a little thing but I think a sort of signifies the way he worked the way he thought the way he transformed reality into something super real is associated with what I was talking about in the first part of my lecture dos and ghostliness in A Christmas Carol here is the appearance of the ghost of Christmas past the hair was curiously stirred as if by breath or hot air and though the eyes were wide open they were perfectly motionless that and it's livid color made it horrible but it's horrible it sorry this is Marvin of the ghost of Christmas this is Marley that and it's living kind of made it horrible but its horror seemed to be in spite of the face and beyond its control rather than a part of its own expression and here just a little bit further on in the same Staves day one the bells ceased as they had begun together they were succeeded by a clanking noise deep down below as if some person were dragging a heavy chain over the cars in the wine merchants cellar why is it Scrooge's destiny to be visited by ghosts why is it inevitable but it's going to be ghosts who come to and I think the inevitability of the narrative of a Christmas carol is part of the answer to Laurie's unanswerable question about why Christmas Carol has so lasted not just the brilliance of its faith or or it or the lasting things but the fact that in the very telling of it you the inevitability of what's going to happen screwed waiting for the next visitation is part of its texture and it's inevitable that I think Scrooge has to face ghosts because fantasy fantasy the very thing that Dickens does in those sort of brilliant stylistic as is is what above all he's opposed to and so sorry this is the next ghost yeah we'll just have this on and then we'll see we'll have a little final vision of Scrooge this is the ghost of Christmas present it's hair which hung about its neck and down its back was white as if with age and yet the face had not a wrinkle it and the tenderest bloom was on the skin the arms were very long and muscular hands the same as if its hold were a long common strain the little turn a phrase tends to proliferate when there's something mystifying puzzling strange about what the narrative is describing too strange for Scrooge Scrooge had as little of what is called fancy about him as any man in the City of London even including which is above word the corporation aldermen and livery it's as if the very style Christmas Carol is a kind of dancing around screwed correcting him enacting in itself all the capacities not just of generosity but of fancifulness that he does not have course the the other thing about a Christmas Carol and Al this is where I like to end the talk is is where I started with its idea from the beginning as other the idea of it as a narrative to be performed a narrative to be read out loud one of the extraordinary things about Christmas Carol we had a reading in my department lost yesterday evening actually an annual event would do these funny things and lots of people come made read it was a puppet of Dickens that people pass round when they go to reading that's gone so next you know this is the English department at UC I don't like it although they and it takes takes about a three three hours to read the whole thing out that especially cabinet breaks for a glassful to Dickens have course cut it down when he performed it he cut it down a lot and we have his we actually have his originally annotated cut down text of a Christmas carol and i think attic dance it was about an hour or so when he performed it what an incredible thing it must be to see here is his letter to his friend the Aten we Macready in which Dickens explicitly describes it as something that he would like to see performed not just by itself but by others I have sent you to the charge of our trusty and well-beloved Colden a little book I published on the 17th of December and which has been a most religious success the greatest I think I've ever achieved it pleases me to think that it will bring you home for an hour or two and I long to hear you have read it on some quiet morning it's very important isn't it to Christmas Carol that were with Carroll that where the read out loud will read to yourself it is so short [Music] it's the it's the subject of a lot of the lecture which I might do one day extraordinary thing that the novella is one it's a very early version of what we now call a novella but this is a very this is an almost unknown literary form in it doesn't have a name in the early nineteenth century a narrative that you can finish in one sitting and in some ways it's something natural isn't it - with the Christmas Carol we already know the story but I think it's unimaginable to think of the Christmas carols a book you read over several days it's a book designed to be read in one go and perhaps to be read aloud or performed at least in the head and the narrator the last couple of slides for you go the narrator of a Christmas carol is performing for you he is there speaking in the first person this is beginning of state to where the apprehensive Scrooge is about to be visited by the second ghost in the story the curtains of his bed were drawn aside I tell you by hand not the curtains that he speaks nor the courtesies back but those to which his face was addressed the curtains of his bed were drawn aside and Scrooge standing up into a half recumbent attitude found himself face to face with the unearthly visitor who drew them as close to it as I am now to you and I am standing in the spirit and Dickens convinced readers and as I think he still convinced his readers that he was as it were even if they were reading silently to themselves speaking aloud to them in all sorts of ways his narrative vivifies the images of speech not just in those of little some of those tricks have I showed you earlier but in the person of the narrator the person and manner of the narrator and here finally is Dickens his testimony to his own pride in the effect of a Christmas carol as a performance course it was a book that lots of people said had done more good more Christian goods than any number of the sort of parliamentary reports on child labor or on poverty those blue books that Dickens had indeed been reading at the time he was composing a Christmas carol and perhaps it did but Dickens was above all and I think understandably proud of it simply as a performance piece here he is many years later still performing it and writing to his writing again to MacCready after going back home to Kent after one of his performances of a Christmas carol I'm going down this afternoon for rest which means violent cricket with the boys after last Saturday night which was a teaser by triumphant the Sir Martin Hall audience was I must confess a very extraordinary thing the two thousand and people were like one and their enthusiasm was something awful their enthusiasm for him of course but it's not just eco manger so enthusiasm for the gripping business of a performer born ere ative and you know he can't be here but I hope that as well as you've had quite a few bits I do yes I do I think that's I'll take that I'll take that metaphor simile my my one hesitation is that given the amount that he wrote and I mean not just his books and his journalism but also his surviving less of cause he destroyed lots and lots of stuff but still there's lots and lots of Dickens is writing it is extraordinary how rarely he kind of comments on the sort of literary aspects of what he's doing do you see what I mean so I don't to give you a simple example to up the guys mean you know Bleak House he rides he does this extrordinary nobody's ever done this before he writes the book in alternating chapters of past and present tense and all the ones in the past tense are told in the first and all the ones in the present tense are told in the third I mean you know nowadays people who want to get on the man book along let's do that but you know nobody did it in the eighteen fifties he never says anything you know he never says that wait where's a bit more Henry James he'd be telling everybody that he knew how clever he was being and why he was doing it so that's my my hesitation but the Dickens is Dickens makes oh so few comments upon the sort of you know his style and his way of writing but yes absolutely do you think that oh you know he was immensely conscious of his relatively uneducated his relative his relative uneducated this and that was Bahat and and yet also as a Sir Walter died act he read lots of lots of good prose and his wonderful isn't he about a mimicking grandiosity and you know one of his favorite devices where I didn't talk about today is he loves writing instead of circum like you tree ways for comic purposes about things and using long words he's got a massive for Cadbury so so he's read all the good literature I think he has to be absolutely has to be so conscious of what he's doing and it's sort of and it's let's say impoliteness yes i think he has you know he's he's really conscious of how things have received more but any other writer any other famous writer he's obsessed with the reception and the sales of his works and one thing that strikes me and I'm never so I never realized this before I'm writing a book trying to write a book that so for the first time I've read lots and lots of contemporary reviews and it's amazing how carping they are actually I mean even the ones which say oh yes this is really good but this character doesn't work and that sucked what doesn't work and it's difficult to think of I think great novelist who from the firmest everybody had reservations you know everybody as soon as they started praising him had something bad to say as well even some of his and the good things they said were very much to do with at least in in the early years were were to do with two things we were to do with the fact that he was sort of comically like enhancing and that he was sort of morally good I mean the latter being the thing which I think is least interesting about him actually but when they start talking about how they're right how he's writing critics are really really comping about it and he must be reading all those reviews I mean we know you are us and so he must have been conscious that let us call it the literary establishment we're a bit sniffing and I think the sniffing is egged Aman of the name lock screw what's your favorite yes they're incredible then and he has I think more of his more of his name's have actually become words in the OBD than those of any other writer great I mean I'm actually right fish in my book I'm writing a chapter on names and on on his names I mean as you probably know a lot of the time in the in the sort of surviving and there are lots of surviving sort of plans not just manuscripts but also some of his planners for his novels and you've been working away at the names so they just they don't I mean not Scrooge I don't know it seems to us have come to him other names like other like like other writers like Henry James or TS Eliot he got from advertisements and people he knew but also he worked to worked away so you know you can see him on the magnet indeed in the number plans for David Copperfield how he got to merge step you know he worked away at it and there was stone and killing and hard things and he tried lots and lots of until he finally got it and trouble which I can't recite Cindy moment might be able to remember I don't know but there's a there's a whole chain until he finally gets touch as always and you know one of and he clearly did it bit by instinct but at the same time the names really really mattered and he he did say about which novel it was but he did say somewhere you know once I got the name I've got it yes and you'll hear novelists nowadays often I talk to a lot of contemporary novels or interview them and they would say something like oh what they you know what clothes they wear yeah once I can work out their voice or and Dickens I think the name I think you're absolutely right very often it was the name above all but gave him away he worked aware but there in strawberry because are they because they are I mean when you tell people who maybe have just seen Muppet Christmas Carol that's a good one but but who don't read it if that that you know that sort of Scrooge was just something he invented there also surprised no no you got it out of a dictionary it's a word the meaning a tight-fisted Meissen no no no it's becoming that they're one of the extraordinary things is done he does be very rarely murdstone's about as close as you get to in any of his really good name as to what they use what they call what the litter experts call it my Tillich name that's a name where you call somebody what they are yes so people in the 18th and 17th century in especially in comic either not just Nobles plays as well characters were call things like justice Thrasher Squire all worthy yes mister squares bit more complicated but yeah and or revenge on some comedies people are called thought only the Fox their names declared them only occasionally just Dickens do that that's doing it I always slightly things from luck choakumchild in hard times but Gradgrind yeah now that's great isn't it there is a grind there but but you can't say exactly it exactly describes him because he's a memorable character Greg Bryant Ian as all I can say is that the poetry that was terribly important to him I think and you know you're right to think it's important he thought it was important and you know every no I'm sure everybody has everybody has their their favorites I mean there's a few dead look I guess it's a quite er that's a rather literal way sorry my favorite one my favorite one should I take my absolute favorite one and Great Expectations is all linked and when Aulick who did you know great expert a nine one one book but anyway all Italy is sort of pips sort of ghastly slightly mirror image who resent in the words in the Forge and all it ends up murder well raining Joe Gary's wife pips sister mrs. Joe and she eventually dies from from it and who tries to murder pip at the end of the story and he's called all link and he's filled of anger and fury murders resentment of PIP and when his name's first mentioned I can't remember who it is somebody says or what if he can't be calling what kind of name is that it was called all link and you get that in Dickens novels people actually comment on its name so it's not just that it's actually built into the sort of narrative but sorry that's not an explanation but he absolutely is his thing and he kept one of the people who worked on all the year round with him remembers how he kept collections and names he recorded them sometimes in books but he he said he had a bag of bits of paper in which he broke names of when he heard them or when he thought of them and he did read as Henry James also D deathless and when he saw good names because actually there was some why was it wonderful I talked a bit about that about the idea of Dickens you know as a young writer which is what he was when he wrote at Christmas yes yes there were one or two things about the film which were absolutely necessary for for it to work as it did which I think were were fine but wrong so the thought for instance of Dickens with writer's block I think it's a bit weird not just cuz I just don't think he really did I mean he always had all I'm struggling with this I'm struggling with that but my our standards extraordinary and the demands upon him to produce so unremitting yes that this picture there was a picture in it the other thing and he himself said a Christmas Carol once he had the idea he just they just wrote itself and you can as I was saying you can actually sort of see that for the manuscript you can actually see it in Dickens manuscript I really recommend you if you ever get a trial to see one in reality or even in fact silat facsimile of all that remain secrets and you can see him moving across the page you can see the hurry and the fire of it in a way that's very unusual but the other thing I thought about not right was he has his friend Jon Forster who was indeed his near the person he loved most I think in his whole life and it represents Forster doing all the negotiation with the publisher and Dickens is as bit of a sort of kind of oh ha sort of head in yeah I mean he may have sometimes had his head in the air but but but when it came to I mean he was an absolutely dedicated negotiator and there's a wonderful very almost unreadable for the sheer wealth of its detail book called Dickens and his publishers an academic book done by him again I'm afraid the author the author's name great American Dickensian done about forty fifty years ago which just takes all it's about his differences negotiations with his publishers and you realize that was the drama that he dedicated himself to more completely than his family or even his friendships I mean and he you know that letter I showed you right at the beginning you know 120 pounds I don't know if you'll make a profit of it about this of this but that's what I'm that's what you're giving me I mean right from the first he's at it so you know I didn't think that was true to him but but I thought it was I thought it was great to try and reimagine Dickens the young man rather than this chat without funny beard you mentioned beginning yes yes yes what wonderful language no yes no he absolutely he absolutely did he wrote I mean he wrote he did write a couple of other sort of semijns ones with comic elements which didn't really work very well but mostly from when in the eighteen fifties he began to realize I mean he was he was probably the cause but he also he realized he was tapping into something much wider in Victorian fiction publishing that the ghost story was a big deal he took a really serious interest in it as a scary thing and there's wonderful letters he writes to mrs. Gaskell which have survived saying I really love this story it would be more frightening if only the child I think that would really worry just a suggestion and he's editing her copy and he absolutely is dedicated to the art of apprehension apprehensiveness what you absolutely describe at the settlement that's what ghost stories are bad I think in a way maybe shock sometimes but mostly apprehensiveness but worried about what's going to happen quite as much as what does happen so you know yeah but the funny thing that Christmas cows it precedes that and and perhaps in a ways is a sort of is a liberated work because they can some of the conventions go story in Victorian England haven't really been established you know so when Oscar Wilde tries to write a comic ghost story I was that he's rather hopeless really because he's got all those serious ghost stories behind him and he can't really actually you can't do anything except sort of turn them on their head but Dickens absolutely was a dick was that you know wrote serious serious scary stuff to absolute that was such a fascinating series insights reflections on the difference is writing and especially a Christmas carol so it's delightful to have you here today and for making that I defend the time in your busy academic schedule to be here but also you've given your time in support of this incredible exhibition the last portrait so if you haven't had a chance to see the last portrait exhibition it's just behind you do take some time this afternoon while you're here to do so and as you've seen on your seats we've left some material there for you and when the Charles Dickens Museum is trying to raise the money to practice this portrait to join our permanent collection so that the lost portrait is never lost again and can be on public display into the future if you've even already to the appeal thank you if you haven't please consider doing so and let me know if you're able to contribute or even more importantly let some let everyone you know [Applause] [Music] yes did you with me

Channel: Philip Mould & Co

Views: 2,947

Rating: 4.891892 out of 5

Keywords: charles dickens, john mullan, a christmas carol, dickens lecture series, 1843, 19th century literature, english literature, classics, exhibition, philip mould

Id: OKpR49y_E6Q

Length: 77min 53sec (4673 seconds)

Published: Thu Dec 13 2018