Charles Dickens visited Dublin to give one of his famous readings, the sold-out public performances in which his acting talents were set free, when he summoned up a selection of his great cast of characters and either froze his audiences' blood or made them helpless with laughter. Hungry for applause and hooked on the shows that were finally to exhaust him and hasten his death, he stood at the podium in the Rotunda, Dublin's most famous maternity hospital, no doubt dressed extravagantly with gold chains, a gorgeous waistcoat, a velvet coat, his hair and beard neatly combed. The public had been alerted by Freeman's Journal of August 23rd, 1858. They were told they had the opportunity of hearing "this distinguished gentleman read one of his inimitable works. The subject for this evening is A Christmas Carol".
Now, 140 years later, A Christmas Carol is being performed again in The Gate theatre, housed in part of the Rotunda hospital.
When Dickens entertained Dubliners with scenes from the greatest of his Christmas books, A Christmas Carol was 15 years old. In introducing it to his readers he wrote, "I have endeavoured in this ghostly little book to raise the ghost of an idea which shall not put my readers out of humour with themselves, with each other, with the season, or with me. May it haunt their house pleasantly, and no one wish to lay it." He signed this message, "Your obedient servant C.D."
The truth is that when he sat down to write A Christmas Carol Dickens had other things in mind than entertaining his public, creating a hilarious and moving ghost story, or giving free rein to his extraordinarily original and glittering prose. He was the Dickens who attacked the Poor Law in Oliver Twist, the horrors of the Yorkshire schools in Nicholas Nickelby, and the law's interminable delays in Bleak House. He wrote A Christmas Carol out of anger at the hopeless neglect of poor children in London.
In the same year a report for the Children's Education Commission had inspired Elizabeth Barrett to write her poem, "The Cry of Children":
And may the Children weep before you
They are weary 'ere they run!
They have never seen the sunshine or the glory
Which is brighter than the sun . . .
In the autumn of 1843 Dickens had visited Samuel Starey's Field Lane Ragged School, which was attempting to provide some sort of education for slum children. In October, 1843 he went to Manchester to preside at the first annual meeting of the Manchester Athenaeum, founded to bring culture and education to the "labouring classes". "Thousands of immortal creatures," he told his audience, "are condemned . . . To tread, not what our great poet calls the `primrose path to the everlasting bonfire', but ever jagged flints and stones laid down by brutal ignorance." He contemplated writing a pamphlet to be called An Appeal to the People of England on behalf of the Poor Man's Child.
Happily he changed his mind and decided to channel his anger into a Christmas story which would last forever. So Ebenezer Scrooge was forced to turn his reluctant eyes on the phantoms of Ignorance and Want, mankind's children, "yellow, meagre, ragged, scowling, wolfish; but prostrate too in their humility".
Our problems may seem less dramatic than in Dickens's day, but poverty, deprivation, homelessness, impersonal government and creaking justice are still with us and call for a Dickens to denounce and deride them. His irresistible stories were a great deal more effective than a thousand pamphlets or reports of committees. The anger at poverty and social inequality has never been better expressed than when he described the death of Little Jo, the boy crossing sweeper in Bleak House, and burst out with the great threnody, "Dead, your Majesty. Dead, my Lords, Ladies and Gentlemen. Dead, Right Reverends and Wrong Reverends of every order. Dead, men and women, born with Heavenly compassion in your hearts. And dying thus around us every day."
Dickens didn't always get good notices and, in later years, he gave up reading them in case they should destroy his confidence and cause him unnecessary pain. However, A Christmas Carol was greeted with universal acclaim.
Thackeray, writing in Fraser's Magazine, called it a "national benefit". The Sunday Times called it "sublime" and an American factory owner gave his workers an extra day's holiday when he had finished reading it. Even Carlyle ordered a large turkey and was, his wife reported, seized with a "perfect convulsion of hospitality and arranged two dinner parties". Lord Jeffrey understood the depth of the social message beneath the ghost story, the comedy and the pathos of Dickens's tale. He wrote to tell the author that his book had "done more good than a year's work by all the pulpits and confessionals".
Dickens's anger at poverty sprang from a knowledge of it in his own life, and it was an ever present terror, even when he was dressed in velvet and gold chains and being applauded in the Rotunda, that it might, one day, return. His civil-servant father had been hopeless with money and the family had to move, for a while, into a debtor's prison. At the age of 12 young Charles was sent, with the full approval of his mother, whom he never forgave, to work in a boot-blacking factory near Hungerford Bridge on the Thames in London. When he was famous, applauded and the father of a family he could not pass this spot without tears of shame and anger at the memory of his humiliation. This was the past that led him to support the Ragged Schools of London. But he was, of course, a far more interesting and contradictory character than the simple social reformer or endlessly productive genius.
At the time of his Dublin visit his marriage had drifted into hopeless unhappiness and the writer who apparently idolised family life was the husband who nailed up the communicating door to his wife's bedroom. No doubt he had a prolonged affair with the young actress, Ellen Ternan. He was capable of strenuously denying that he ever committed adultery and, when he wrote an account of a train accident in which he was involved, he described two of his fellow passengers as though they were complete strangers and not Ellen and her mother. When a drunken Irish girl shouted at him in the street he instituted a private prosecution and was angry that the magistrate was unable to take a severe view of the case.
When he became friendly with Wilkie Collins, his trips abroad perhaps included visits to the less reputable houses in Paris. Should these facts make us suspicious of Dickens, the great reformer? No doubt he was vain, insecure, flamboyant and capable of being besotted with a young actress. The Dickensian ideal of happy and secure middle-class life with its cheery Christmases and laughing children, was one which, perhaps, left him unsatisfied. There's no reason, however, to doubt his genuine passion for social justice, or the validity of his anger at our tolerance of the children of Ignorance and Want.
Nor do his personal failings detract from the extraordinary generosity of his talents. Like Shakespeare, he was able to embrace a whole world, from the chilling aristocracy to the oppressed little crossing sweeper, as Shakespeare's world stretches from palaces to the taverns of Eastcheap. He could describe the pain of being ashamed of your humble origins as well as the single-minded social snobbery of the Veneerings.