Christmas Before Charles Dickens

A perennial myth about the traditional English Christmas claims it all began with Charles Dickens. It was out in full commercial force last year, with the appearance of the big-budget film The Man Who Invented Christmas, starring Dan Stevens gamely playing the young Dickens having his Big Idea. The myth says much more about us than it does about Dickens, though. On both sides of the Atlantic, Christmas has been Victorianised and the door quietly closed on deeper imaginative and cultural continuities.

Part of the problem is that, from Dickens onwards, Christmas has left a strong trace in print media of all kinds, from hymn books to greetings cards. That Christmas has been an important cultural and social focus since the 1840s is well documented. But it is much harder to get a sense of what Christmas meant to people in the two centuries between the Puritan attacks on nativity celebrations in the mid-17th century and the appearance of Christmas trees and Christmas cards in the early- to mid-Victorian era. Writers who mentioned Christmas in this earlier period acknowledged that it was being celebrated – albeit not by everyone – but there are few extended descriptions of how Christmas was celebrated and little in the way of illustrative material.

A 1795 manuscript by Charles Dibdin, entitled Christmas Gambols, rediscovered in 2017, goes some way to filling in the gaps. It was acquired by the Houghton Library of Harvard University in 1945, but had seemingly never attracted the attention of researchers. Dibdin was the leading British singer-songwriter of his time and he pioneered the musical one-man show, or ‘Table Entertainment’, as he called it. These shows were performed at his own small London theatre, the Sans Souci, on the Strand, where Dibdin would sit or stand at a piano (he is the first person in Britain known to have played the instrument in public), talking and singing to his audience. Christmas Gambols is one such ‘Table Entertainment’. It demonstrates, among other things, that Dibdin, a shrewd cultural entrepreneur, was alert to the commercial possibilities inherent in Christmas. Two of the songs in Christmas Gambols became particularly popular: ‘The Margate Hoy’ and ‘Jacky and the Cow’.

Festive spirit

Christmas Gambols is, however, much more than just a successful Christmas show available to Londoners half a century before A Christmas Carol appeared in bookshop windows: it is the fullest depiction of an 18th-century Christmas available anywhere. Dibdin describes evocatively the festivities taking place in the house of Sir Alfred English, an upstanding country gentleman and patriot. Sir Alfred was intended as an exemplary figure at a time when revolutionary France and its sympathisers were seen as a serious threat to what the political philosopher and MP Edmund Burke called ‘the spirit of our old manners and opinions’. Indeed, to make the political point, his first song has nothing to do with Christmas, but celebrates ‘Fair England’s Tree of Liberty’ in a way Burke would thoroughly have approved of. Like earlier 18th-century writers on Christmas, Dibdin suggests the festival was not celebrated as widely as in the past, but that ‘this good old custom’ continues in God-fearing, royalist homes, where things are as they should be.

The ‘Gambols’ of Dibdin’s title refers to fun and games and both the title and the concept of the piece seem to have been inspired by Joseph Addison’s 1712 Spectator essay, ‘Sir Roger in London’, which celebrates the Christmas hospitality of the fictional Worcestershire baronet, Sir Roger de Coverley:

Sir Roger, after the laudable custom of his ancestors, always keeps open house at Christmas. I learned from him that he had killed eight fat hogs for this season, that he had dealt about his chines [a cut of meat or fish]very liberally amongst his neighbours, and that in particular he had sent a string of hog’s-puddings with a pack of cards to every poor family in the parish. ‘I have often thought’, says Sir Roger, ‘it happens very well that Christmas should fall out in the middle of the winter. It is the most dead, uncomfortable time of the year, when the poor people would suffer very much from their poverty and cold if they had not good cheer, warm fires, and Christmas gambols to support them. I love to rejoice their poor hearts at this season, and to see the whole village merry in my great hall.

That generous vision of  ‘the whole village merry in my great hall’ is vividly brought to life in Dibdin’s Christmas Gambols, where neighbours, tenants and servants are invited to celebrate with an English family. A whole catalogue of games is mentioned, some organised, some improvised. Prominent among them is blind man’s buff, which also features in A Christmas Carol. But we also hear of hot cockles, hunt the slipper, questions and commands, hoop and hide, thread my grandma’s needle, cricket, quoits, prison barrs, puss and run for smocks. Though some of these games are apparently played exclusively by the servants, or the tenants, or the village maids, in general the suggestion is that the playing of games collapses distinctions of rank, allowing all social classes to intermix freely amid a general atmosphere of indulgent, gentle anarchy. The master of ceremonies and main character in Dibdin’s shaggy dog story is Stingo, the house steward, his name taken from a particular kind of strong ale (‘the stoutest, the brightest, the best’, a 1766 poem claimed). He just about manages to hold everything together.

Deck the halls

It being Christmas, there has to be a feast, the centrepiece of which is an ox ‘roasted whole in the orchard’. Mistletoe and holly are hung up for decoration, with kissing under the former. A pedlar arrives selling appropriate Christmas gifts, including various aphrodisiacs, and Sir Alfred and his family give out ‘favors’ to their servants and tenants. There is music and dancing, and, in the conclusion, the traditional mummers arrive, one of them dressed as Father Christmas:

See Father Christmas pleas’d appear,
To crown our institution;
While circling goes the humming beer,
In sportive revolution.

Dibdin makes no mention of the religious significance of Christmas and there is nothing of Tiny Tim’s ‘God bless Us, Every One!’. Neither does Dibdin democratise the notion of Christmas charity in the way Dickens would: as in Addison’s ‘Sir Roger in London’, the implied lesson of the whole thing is that the rich should make Christmas an excuse for hospitality and general largesse.

Christmas Gambols represents a rich panorama of an 18th-century Christmas, valuable for its sheer entertainment value alone. It may, also, finally lay to rest the ghost of the Dickens myth.

Yet, as Christmas is, ultimately, much more about continuities than inventions, it is also worth noting the links between Dibdin and Dickens. They have much in common: Dickens was always fascinated by the stage and considered a career as an actor, while Dibdin, in the later part of his career, began writing novels. Dickens came to specialise in the one-man show, as Dibdin had before him. Dibdin was fashionable in the 1840s, in large part because of the efforts of George Hogarth, Dickens’ father-in-law, who after many years’ labour published his Songs of Charles Dibdin in 1842, a collection of the entertainer’s lyrics with a memoir and notes. Unsurprisingly, Dickens was aware of Dibdin’s songs and several are quoted or alluded to in his novels. It is more likely than not that Dickens knew Dibdin had performed an entertainment called Christmas Gambols and seen the lyrics, which, unlike the spoken narration, had mostly been published. And it is certainly not impossible that, through Hogarth, he had seen the Harvard manuscript containing the spoken parts. In any case, there is certainly an affinity between these two champions of Christmas – one which demands we extend our sense of Christmas history, and Christmas entertainment, beyond the Victorians.

David Chandler is Professor of English at Doshisha University, Kyoto. A CD of the Christmas Gambols is available at: www.retrospectopera.org.uk