n Dickens, Death and Christmas,
Robert L. Patten starts by contextualising and analysing the first of the Christmas Books,
A Christmas Carol, written over the
course of October and November of 1843, as a response to such contemporary issues as
Malthusian doctrine and the Hungry Forties, as well as a general reflection of the meaning of Christmas, and
the Christian implications of Scrooge's moral and social "rebirth." But when he comes to The Chimes: A Goblin Story of Some Bells That Rang an Old Year Out and a New
Year In (1844), Patten acknowledges that this next Christmas book did not enjoy the same popular
interest at the time, or achieve the enduring literary celebrity of the Carol. The same is true of Dickens's other Christmas Books of the Forties: The Cricket on the
Hearth (1845), The Battle of Life (1846), and The Haunted Man (1848).
Yet, as Patten notes, The Chimes did have contemporary relevance. One recent event, sensationally reported in The Times for 17 April 1844, affects the fictional characters and even the trajectory of the dream of the protagonist, the ticket-porter Trotty Veck: the apparent infanticide carried out by seamstress Mary Furley.
Left to right: (a) The gold-embossed scarlet book-cover. (b) Title page. (c) Richard Doyle's frontispiece for "The Fourth Quarter", depicting Meg's suicide in the Thames as the ghostly Trotty watches.
Robert L. Patten on The Chimes, from his Dickens, Death, and Christmas
Dickens knew this story, and was horrified by it as many Londoners, though similar stories of privation were told often in the daily papers. He gave to Thomas Hood, struggling to make a living from publishing one of those periodicals, a satiric "Threatening Letter to Thomas Hood, from an Ancient Gentleman." Signed by Dickens, and composed within days of Furley's trial, it appeared in the May edition of Hood's Magazine. A rambling work, concluding with a extensive forecast of dwarfs taking over the country, it still hits the target when this Ancient diehard Tory Gentleman comes to Mary Furley... (148).
There is only one judge who knows how to administer the law. He tried that revolutionary female the other day, who, though she was in full work (making shirts at three halfpence apiece), had no pride in her country, but treasonably took it in her head . . . to attempt to drown herself and her young child; and the glorious man went out of his way, sir — out of his way — to call her up for instant sentence of Death, and to tell her she had no hope of mercy in this world — as you may see yourself if you look in the papers of Wednesday the 17th of April [1844]. ["Threatening Letter to Thomas Hood, from An Ancient Gentleman," qtd. in Patten 149]
Links to Related Material
- Robert L. Patten's Dickens, Death and Christmas (2023): The Carol Chapters
- "Slaves of the Needle": The Seamstress in the 1840s
- Frank Holl, Seamstresses (1875)
- Anna Elizabeth Blunden (Mrs. Martino), The Seamstress (A Song of the Shirt), 1854
- Thomas Hood's "The Song of the Shirt"
- Victorian Working Women: Sweated Labour
Bibliography
[See also] Dickens. Charles. "Threatening Letter to Thomas Hood, from An Ancient Gentleman," Hood's Magazine and Comic Miscellany, May 1844, reprinted in the Nonesuch Dickens Collected Papers I: 23-9, 24.
Patten, Robert L. Dickens, Death, and Christmas. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2023. [Review].
Created 19 February 2024