Victorian society from the 1840s onwards was relatively newly industrialised and urban. Though this meant there was a middle class who, for the first time, had the disposable income and leisure time to invest in Christmas festivities, it also meant that workers in the cities had less time to celebrate Christmas in their traditional ancient ways. Most traditions survived in rural areas, where farming communities were poor but had lots of spare time, with relatively little work to do in midwinter. It is also worth noting that Christmas was seen by strict Christians as a less important liturgical holiday than Easter. All these factors combined to mean that someone in the 18th century wouldn’t really have considered the holiday particularly more or less important than any other annual occasion.
Dickens, however, thought that Christmas could be a powerful moment for both communal good cheer and for the rich to show compassion for the poor in the coldest part of the year. Born the son of a Portsmouth debtor, he worked for three years from the age of 12 in a factory blackening shoes, and maintained a commitment to progressive social reforms for the rest of his life.
Dickens’s genius was to take ancient traditions with roots in historic cultural practice and modernise them for the mass Victorian public, some of the best examples of which come from A Christmas Carol. Shortly after one in the morning, for example, the Ghost of Christmas Present appears to Scrooge in the form of ‘a jolly giant, glorious to see…clothed in one simple deep green robe, or mantle, bordered with white fur.’ The genial Ghost is barefoot, and wears a wreath of holly and icicles on top of his brown, curly hair. This is Father Christmas before Coca-Cola popularised imagery of him in fur-lined red robes (though they didn’t invent the red robes themselves, the company ran a thirty-year ad campaign from the 1930s through to the 1960s which all but formalised the idea that Santa = red). More significantly, though, the Ghost clearly resembles the Green Man, the mysterious symbol found carved throughout British churches for thousands of years, a possibly pre-Christian icon thought to have embodied plenty.
Likewise, the Cratchits eat a goose, a more traditional bird to eat up until, per most sources, the turkey overtook it in the mid-20th century in Britain, possibly because it was easier to mass-raise turkeys, and possibly as an American influence. Incidentally, Dickens was a serious admirer of Washington Irving, who himself had codified Christmas traditions in his native USA thirty-odd years before A Christmas Carol with The Sketchbook of Geoffrey Crayon, Gent. Among other things, Irving’s book chronicled and popularised traditional English Christmas practices and informed American readers about traditional life back in the Old Country.
Even the idea of Christmas as a time when the streets and fields of England are blanketed with white snow might well owe its origins to Charles Dickens. Although December is typically not a snowy time of year in Britain – January and February are far more likely to be white – Dickens wrote during what is known as the Little Ice Age, a colder-than-average period of several hundred years whose final inflection point was around the 1850s. In practice, the winters of A Christmas Carol and the other novellas could have been almost a degree and a half Celsius colder than ours are now. In February 1814, when Dickens was two, the Thames froze over so thickly that an elephant was led across the ice beside Blackfriars Bridge. It hasn’t frozen since. In short, Dickens covered his Christmas scenes in heavy snow which might have been less unusual for him than us, cementing the idea in the British cultural consciousness.
