I wish you all an absence of those ill effects which sometimes attend upon the consumption of rich viands.

The oldest extended description of Christmas in fiction that I have read is in Washington Irving’s Sketch-Book (1819), which describes a classic English Christmas:

There was now a pause, as if something was expected; when suddenly the butler entered the hall with some degree of bustle: he was attended by a servant on each side with a large wax-light, and bore a silver dish, on which was an enormous pig’s head, decorated with rosemary, with a lemon in its mouth, which was placed with great formality at the head of the table.  The moment this pageant made its appearance, the harper struck up a flourish…  (“The Christmas Dinner”)

The running joke, despite all of those servants and the harper, is that the country squire laments that he is overseeing the decline of the great English tradition – that the pig should be a boar, that the pheasant pie should be a (vile, inedible) peacock pie.  How sad for him; how lucky for Irving.

One clever serial number of Anthony Trollope’s Orley Farm (1861-2) contains four Christmas chapters that sweep up all of the novel’s plotlines and characters.  “Christmas at Noningsby,” full of jolly games (see the Millais illustration to the left), or “Christmas in Great St. Helens,” where is uttered that great line about a roast turkey tasting “[l]ike melted diamonds.”  An all-time champion 19th century fictional food scene.

The characters in the previous chapter, “Christmas at Groby Park,” are not so lucky, since the lady of the house is a cheapskate and a hoarder, keeping food in her own room that she denies to her family and guests:

And over and beyond the beef there was a plum-pudding and three mince-pies.  Four mince-pies had originally graced the dish, but before dinner one had been conveyed away to some up stairs receptacle  for such spoils.  The pudding also was small, nor was it black and rich, and laden with good things as a Christmas pudding should be laden.  Let us hope that what the guests so lost was made up to them on the following day, by an absence of those ill effects which sometimes attend upon the consumption of rich viands.

"And now, my dear, we'll have a bit of bread and cheese and a glass of beer," Mr. Green said when he arrived at his own cottage.  And so it was that Christmas-day was passed at Groby Park.

That’s the spirit, Mr. Green.

The Moomins, who are Finnish and apparently pagan, prepare “juice and yogurt and blueberry pie and eggnog” the one time they are accidentally awakened at Christmastime from their usual winter hibernation.

“At least I am not afraid of Christmas anymore,” Moomintroll said.

From “The Fir Tree,” Tales of Moominvalley (1962) by Tove Jansson.  Well said, Moomintroll.

Wuthering Expectations is about to enter its own Christmas hibernation.  It will awaken on January 2nd if I have recovered from those ill effects alluded to above.

Merry Christmas; happy New Year!

Not without a touch of poetry - sublime, savage Trollope

I do not always think of Anthony Trollope as a novelist of especially strong technical skill or imaginative power, but every novel of his I know contains a scene or two that shows otherwise.  If someone else would read Orley Farm and work through the big fox-hunting scene, chapters XXVII through XXIX, I would appreciate it - there you will find the skill.  I want to instead look at the “newly invented metallic tables and chairs lately brought out by the Patent Steel Furniture Company”:

“There's three tables, eight chairs, easy rocking-chair, music-stand, stool to match, and pair of stand-up screens, all gilt in real Louey catorse; and it goes in three boxes 4-2 by 2-1 and 2-3.  Think of that, sir.”

The salesman Mr. Kantwise is working the magic of his own craft on the lawyer Mr. Dockwrath.  We are  at this point only in the sixth chapter of eighty.  The lawyer is an enemy of Lady Mason, so I know he will be important.  But what am I supposed to do with this group of traveling salesmen he has encountered, Mr. Kantwise and his collapsible tables, the obese Mr. Moulder (“What did the firm care whether or no he killed himself by eating and drinking?  He sold his goods, collected his money, and made his remittances”)?  Will I need them later?  Trollope is more efficient than he first seems, so the answer is yes; the commercial travelers are eventually pulled into the plot, but just at its fringe.

Comic is not quite the right word.  Sublime relief.  Mr. Kantwise has assembled his wares and given us a paragraph to admire them:

The top of the table was blue, with a red bird of paradise in the middle; and the edges of the table, to the breadth of a couple of inches, were yellow. The pillar also was yellow, as were the three legs. "It's the real Louey catorse," said Mr. Kantwise…

And then he does something amazing:

And then Mr. Kantwise, taking two of the pieces of whitey-brown paper which had been laid aside, carefully spread one on the centre of the round table, and the other on the seat of one of the chairs. Then lightly poising himself on his toe, he stepped on to the chair, and from thence on to the table. In that position he skillfully brought his feet together, so that his weight was directly on the leg, and gracefully waved his hands over his head. James and Boots stood by admiring, with open mouths…

I am with Boots – what a performance.  “Gracefully” is a well-employed word.  Kantwise perched on the bird of paradise, flapping his wings, has become for me the emblematic image not of the Orley Farm Trollope actually wrote, but of the Evelyn Waugh-like novel hidden within it, a novel of high merit.  This set of furniture, for example, is put to almost savage use as it becomes (see Ch. XXIII) the worst Christmas gift in all of England.

Speaking of Christmas, I will join the grotesque Moulder and his wife for theirs.  Mr. Kantwise is a guest, but he stays off the table, which is already full.  Mr. Moulder is carving:

When he had done all this, and his own plate was laden, he gave a long sigh.  "I shall never cut up such another bird as that, the longest day that I have to live," he said; and then he took out his large red silk handkerchief and wiped the perspiration from his brow.

"Deary me, M.; don't think of that now," said the wife...

"And how does it taste?" asked Moulder, shaking the gloomy thoughts from his mind.

"Uncommon," said Snengkeld, with his mouth quite full. "I never eat such a turkey in all my life."

"Like melted diamonds," said Mrs. Moulder, who was not without a touch of poetry. (Ch. XXIV)

I of course omitted many other interesting bits about the turkey in order to have room for that one unimprovable line, by itself worth reading 825 pages of Trollope, pages worse than those found in Orley Farm.

Nothing, for here nothing was being heralded - Adalbert Stifter's Rock Crystal

OK, here's a real Christmas story.

Two children are trapped on a mountainside during a blizzard on Christmas Eve. They are saved by a miracle, or by chance, or perhaps the series of coincidences that allow them to survive are themselves the miracle.

This is Adalbert Stifter's sweet, mysterious Rock Crystal (1853). It's a real Stifter story - the landscape of two imaginary but perfectly credible mountain valleys and the pass between them is described in possibly tedious detail. Much of the story is really about the landscape, and the childrens' direct experience with it as they wander off the path and somehow make their way up the mountain. The story is a genuine example of the sublime - unmediated nature is beautiful and thrilling but also threatening, deadly. A truly Burkean sample, where the human bells are the Beautiful and Nature's silence is the Sublime:

"At this very moment all the bells were ringing, the bells in Millsdorf, the bells in Gschaid, and on the farther side of the mountain there was still another little church whose three clear-chiming bells were ringing out. In remote places beyond the valley there were innumerable churches with bells all ringing at this very hour; from village to village, the waves of sound were floating, and in one village you could at times hear through the leafless branches the chiming of the bells in another. Away up by the ice, however, not a sound reached the children; nothing, for here nothing was being heralded. Along the winding paths of the mountainslopes lantern lights were moving; and on many a farmstead the great bell was rousing the farm-hands,- unseen here, and unheard. Only the stars twinkled and shone steadily down."

Many of Stifter's stories seem to occur in a great hush. This passage is strangely both silent and noisy, with the web of sound connecting the villages below the children. Those final bells, the ones rousing the farm-hands, are, like the lantern-lights, part of the miracle, the search parties already on the childrens' path.

And something, it turns out, is being heralded, even in the void. Something happens immediately afterward, in the stillness of the ice, that I will leave to the reader. Rock Crystal is definitely a Christian Christmas story.

I read the original 1945 edition of the translation NYRB has republished, so I didn't benefit from the wisdom of W. H. Auden's introduction, although I get to see a dozen primitive, useless illustrations that I pray NYRB omitted.

Have a good holiday. Wuthering Expectations will be on vacation for a while.

Work - work - work! - a Carlylean Christmas poem from Thomas Hood

In case readers of The Chimes were hankering for more Thomas Carlyle in their Christmas, here's the beginning, and then some more, of Thomas Hood's The Song of the Shirt:

With fingers weary and worn,
  With eyelids heavy and red,
A Woman sat, in unwomanly rags,
  Plying her needle and thread -
    Stitch! stitch! stitch!
In poverty, hunger, and dirt,
And still with a voice of dolorous pitch
She sang the 'Song of the Shirt!'

***

"Work — work — work!
  My labour never flags;
And what are its wages? A bed of straw,
  A crust of bread — and rags.
That shattered roof — this naked floor —
  A table — a broken chair —
And a wall so blank, my shadow I thank
  For sometimes falling there!

And there's more, though not a lot more. This was a Christmas poem, in a December 1843 issue of the comic magazine Punch. My understanding is that it was genuinely popular, reprinted many times. The part that really links it to Thomas Carlyle (Past and Present dates from just a few months earlier) is that "Work -- work -- work!" line, echoing Carlyle's emphasis on labor.

The most reductive message of A Christmas Carol (published at the same time as this poem) or The Chimes is "Remember the Poor at Christmas." Punch published something similar every Christmas, by many different poets. I'm going to get out my credit card now and remember the poor.

The value of A Christmas Carol

I have a semi-crazy quote from Carlyle's Sartor Resartus permanently stuck at the bottom of Wuthering Expectations:

"Produce! Produce! Were it but the pitifullest infinitesimal fraction of a Product, produce it in God's name!"

I love the hysterical tone, and accept the goading, though I'll never Produce! Produce! like some of the great 19th century phenomena. Balzac and Dumas and Hugo; James and Twain; Trollope and Dickens. Unbelievable shelves of books. But of course any number of nearly forgotten writers have written just as much to less purpose. Some of those fractions of a Product really are infinitesimal.

I have been thinking about the example of A Christmas Carol in these utilitarian terms. It must be among the most economically valuable stories written in modern times. It did well enough for Dickens, especially when he began performing a 70 minute version of it. Since his time, think of the plays, the movies, the lazy television parodies. Scrooge McDuck and Mr. Burns. I myself, in the 9th grade, played Young Scrooge, a formative role. Actually, all I remember about it was my utter failure to learn to waltz decently, even for 30 seconds.

What other writers have created something so economically enduring? The Austen Industry is worth a lot now, although I think that's recent phenomenon. Meine Frau reminds me that performances of The Nutcracker are the means of survival for many ballet companies, so E. T. A. Hoffmann should get some credit for that. I'm amazed how little-read "The Nutcracker Prince and the Mouse King" actually is. It's as good as A Christmas Carol, which I unfortunately can't quite say about Dickens's other Christmas books.

Which reminds me to encourage reading of The Chimes. Commentary at The Valve begins Deember 19 or so. Only 100 pages! Be sure to get a copy with the illustrations.

Cease to be a hollow sounding-shell of hearsays, egoisms, purblind dilettantisms - Carlyle in The Chimes

One reason I haven't mentioned for reading Carlyle's Past and Present is that it is about Hard Times, and since we are in the middle of some Hard Times now, I thought the perspective would be interesting.

Our Hard Times are certainly nothing like those of mid-19th century England - massive unemployment with a minimal safety net, riots, and then, in 1845, the beginning of a true disaster, the Irish Famine. Remember that Carlyle was writing in 1843. Things got worse, and in some respects, he must have seemed prophetic.

What I really wanted to know, being a practical, utilitarian sort of fellow, was, what does Carlyle want people to do, what's his solution to it all. Well, how about this (the Morrison's Pill is a cure-all, of which, says Carlyle, with wisdom, there is none):

"If thou ask again, therefore, on the Morrison's-Pill hypothesis, What is to be done? allow me to reply: By thee, for the present, almost nothing. Thou there, the thing for thee to do is, if possible, to cease to be a hollow sounding-shell of hearsays, egoisms, purblind dilettantisms; and become, were it on the infinitely small scale, a faithful discerning soul. Thou shalt descend into thy inner man, and see if there be any traces of a soul there; till then there can be nothing done! O brother, we must if possible resuscitate some soul and conscience in us, exchange our dilettantisms for sincerities, our dead hearts of stone for living hearts of flesh." (Ch. 4)

This is probably wise advice whether Times are Hard or Soft. I'm not sure it would have the salutary effects Carlyle expected, though.

Not just Carlyle. If I understand this correctly, and if I understand The Chimes correctly, this is exactly the lesson Dickens has poor Trotty learn after his ghostly vision of the future. I was puzzled by what Trotty was supposed to learn. Scrooge, after all, is rich and powerful. When he reforms, he can actually do something, like buy a big turkey for his clerk. Trotty is powerless. Well, Trotty ceases to be a hollow-sounding shell and resuscitates his soul and conscience. No small thing.

The Chimes is in some ways a direct response to Carlyle. The red-faced gentleman who was nostalgic for the Middle Ages was actually my first clue, since the first half of Past and Present is an examination of life in a medieval abbey. By the end of The Chimes, though, there seems to be some direct connection to Carlyle's ideas.

I'll have to pay more attention to this in the future. I have been detecting a Carlylean strain in some of Dickens' writing, but since Dickens employed such a wide range of rhetorical moods and was a gifted mimic, I had thought it was parody. Which it may well be, but there is more contact with at least a certain strain of Carlyle than I had imagined.

I clearly need to read Hard Times. And Elizbeth Gaskell. And William Morris. And...

I can prove it, by tables - in which I discover that The Chimes is about something other than what I thought it would be about

In The Chimes (1844), an old porter, Trotty Veck, has an eventful New Year's Eve. As a result of either supernatural forces or a combination of stress and indigestion, he is shown a horrible vision of the future which leads him to reform his selfish ways.

This sounds a bit, just a bit, like A Christmas Carol, published the Christmas before, with two minor changes. First, Trotty, unlike Scrooge, is poor, and second, he's a fine fellow with no selfish ways whatsoever. Maybe these are not such minor differences. They sure do muddle the story, although not to the extent of the last Dickens Christmas novella, The Haunted Man and the Ghost's Bargain (1848), which approaches incomprehensibility. I suspect that running a poor man through Scrooge's trials was a challenge Dickens set for himself in The Chimes. Anyway, it allowed him to get at something else, something obscured in A Christmas Carol.

Early in the story, Trotty meets the three fellows to the left; Trotty's the one with the rumpled hat. The three gentlemen are investigating Trotty's supper of tripe.

"'But who eats tripe?' said Mr. Filer, looking round. 'Tripe is without exception the least economical, and the most wasteful article of consumption that the markets of this country can by possibility produce... I find that the waste on that amount of tripe , if boiled, would victual a garrison of five hundred men for five months of thirty-one days each, and a February over. The Waste, the Waste!'" (Ch. 1 aka "First Quarter")

Ah ha, Mr. Filer seems to be some sort of Utilitarian. The second fellow is another kind of reformer - a magistrate who is determined, whatever the problem, starvation, young mothers, suicide, to Put It Down. And the third is perhaps a nostalgist, or perhaps something else:

"'The good old times, the good old times,' repeated the gentleman.' What times they were! They were the only times. It's of no use talking about any other times, or discussing what the people are in these times. You don't call these, times, do you? I don't. Look into Strutt's Costumes, and see what a Porter used to be, in any of the good old English reigns.'

'He hadn't, in his very best circumstances, a shirt to his back, or a stocking to his foot; and there was scarcely a vegetable in all England for him to put into his mouth,' said Mr. Filer. 'I can prove it, by tables.'"

You tell him, Filer! I was actually planning to save my tables for later in the week. This talk of how things were better in the olden days by the unnamed gentleman with the red face and blue coat* sounds suspiciously like it was drawn from another book from the previous year, Thomas Carlyle's Past and Present. Which means - and there's more evidence than just this - that The Chimes is not just about charity or compassion or combatting one's selfishness.

No, this is a topical novel. A novel about social issues. A Condition-of-England novel! That's what Carlyle called England's Hard Times, the Condition-of-England question. For some reason, it stuck, and scholars still use it. I felt perfectly happy floundering around in the swamp - no, mire - no, no, cesspool - strike all that, crystalline fountain - of Victorian religion last week, and since many countries seem to be facing a new round of Hard Times, why not test my ignorance about the Condition-of-England question. Tomorrow: what exactly is Thomas Carlyle going on and on and on about?

* A little mystery with this fellow. He's never named, and later in the book only mentioned once more. My first question for The Valve: who is he?

I hope I'm attracting people to the Chimes event at The Valve, rather than scaring them away. I think those passages up there are hilarious.

Are the Christmas books of Charles Dickens Christian? How about Vanity Fair?

What got me thinking about all this was, among other things, Charles Dickens’s second Christmas book, The Chimes (1844), his follow-up to the huge success of A Christmas Carol. I came up with a simple-minded question – are the Christmas books Christian? I mean, I know that’s the background, but how far back? What ethical message do they contain that is not shared by non-Christians, secular or religious? Does Scrooge become a churchgoer? Does it matter?

I’ll just assume that everyone knows how A Christmas Carol goes, and save The Chimes for later. See below on that topic. Anyway, what does Scrooge learn? Be less selfish, more attentive, more charitable, less concerned with money. Who disagrees? Objectivists, please go away.

Dickens wrote A Christmas Carol right in the middle of the serialization of Martin Chuzzlewit, which is itself a dissertation on and classification of human selfishness. The novel contains a couple of proto-Scrooges. One of the selfless characters likes to play the organ during church, but otherwise the novel seems virtually religion-free.

I don’t know anything about Dickens’s own religious views, and don’t much care to lean more, but the ethics of his books are humanist. That seems pretty clear. Little Nell, in The Old Curiosity Shop, dies in a church. If I remember correctly, it’s an antique Catholic church that's been converted into a dwelling. That may be symbolical of something. This is in a novel that invokes The Pilgrim's Progress, my benchmark for at least one type of truly Christian fiction, by name. The ethics of Charles Dickens, whatever their source, are a long way from those of John Bunyan.

Two of Balzac’s finest stories, neither of which made it into the Big Balzac Blowout, unfortunately, are about the symbolic power of the Catholic Mass. “An Incident in the Reign of Terror” is about persecuted Catholics who secretly perform Mass during the French Revolution; “The Atheist’s Mass” is about just what is says in the title, a dedicated, public atheist who secretly attends mass once a year. Yet in some Balzac novels, there is hardly a reminder that the Catholic Church exists. Balzac seems like a humanist, as well.

I should stick with English or American examples. The Church in France is a tarpit for the outsider. I mean, the basis for Chateaubriand's great post-Revolutionary apology for Christianity is that he likes the sound of the bells. Let me turn to a remarkable letter from William Thackeray to Mrs. Carmichael-Smyth. Mrs. C-S has apparently been complaining that one of the characters in Vanity Fair is selfish, which is beyond hilarious, but anyway, here's part of his reply:

"What I want is to make a set of people living without God in the world (only that is a cant phrase) greedy pompous mean perfectly self-satisfied for the most part and at ease about their superior virtue... [The selfish character] has at present a quality above most people whizz: LOVE - by wh she shall be saved. Save me, save me too O my God and Father, cleanse my heart and teach me my duty." (Vanity Fair, Norton Critical Edition, p. 699)

I am wary about taking this letter entirely at its face value; nevertheless it was a great surprise to me. This is what I was getting at yesterday, I think, but I fear I have dived into a deep pool. I may have to spend next week splashing about in it.

Rohan Maitzen is going to host a discussion of The Chimes over at The Valve. When she's involved, the Zizek and Derrida stuff seems to stay away, so it should be a friendly and useful discussion. The Chimes has nothing like the perfection of A Christmas Carol, but it is most interesting. 100 pages, including illustrations, in the edition I read. Please join in. Note that this "Christmas" story is set on New Year's Eve, which I guess does put it somewhere in the Twelve Days of Christmas.

the pudding, like a speckled cannon-ball

Hallo! A great deal of steam! The pudding was out of the copper. A smell like a washing-day! That was the cloth. A smell like an eating-house, and a pastry cook’s next door to each other, with a laundress’s next door to that! That was the pudding. In half a minute Mrs. Cratchit entered: flushed, but smiling proudly: with the pudding, like a speckled cannon-ball, so hard and firm, blazing in half of half-a-quartern of ignited brandy, and bedight with Christmas holly stuck into the top.

A Christmas Carol, Chapter 3

Have a good holiday.