By Stuart Mitchner

He has too much talent for his genius; it is a dreadful locomotive to which he is bound and can never be free from nor set at rest. You would persuade me that he is a genial creature, full of sweetness and amenities and superior to his talents, but I fear he is harnessed to them.

—Ralph Waldo Emerson on Charles Dickens (1812-1870)

Charles Dickens published “A Christmas Tree” in the December 21, 1850 issue of his weekly journal Household Words. While there are references to “bright merriment, and song, and dance, and cheerfulness” that echo the spirit of A Christmas Carol (1843), the later, shorter work reveals a much darker vision of Christmas and childhood.

Just as Scrooge tries to dismiss the horror of Marley’s ghost as “a slight disorder of the stomach … an undigested bit of beef,” Dickens tells himself that the “prodigious nightmare” embodied by the Christmas tree may be “the result of indigestion, assisted by imagination …. I don’t know why it’s frightful — but I know it is. I can only make out that it is an immense array of shapeless things … slowly coming close to my eyes, and receding to an immeasurable distance. When it comes closest, it is worse.” The apparition reminds Dickens of “winter nights incredibly long; of being sent early to bed, as a punishment for some small offence, and waking in two hours, with a sensation of having been asleep two nights; of the laden hopelessness of morning ever dawning….”

The Mask

Angus Wilson begins The World of Charles Dickens (Viking 1970) with a long excerpt from “A Christmas Tree” in which Dickens envisions certain of his earliest, scariest toys “up yonder among the green holly and red berries.” Wilson shows how Dickens, at 38, was haunted and sometimes terrified by toys that prefigured the adult obsessions played out by characters in his novels.

The most terrifying object on childhood’s Christmas tree was the Mask. “When did that dreadful Mask first look at me? Who put it on, and why was I so frightened that the sight of it is an era in my life? It is not a hideous visage in itself; it is even meant to be droll, why then were its stolid features so intolerable? …. The mere recollection of that fixed face, the mere knowledge of its existence anywhere, was sufficient to awake me in the night all perspiration and horror, with, ‘O I know it’s coming!  O the Mask!’ ”

“A Fine Mystery”

The first chapter of Michael and Mollie Hardwick’s Charles Dickens (Harrap 1970), in the As They Saw Him series, opens by noting that in middle age Dickens “made a great bonfire of all the personal correspondence he could lay hands on, wishing at the same time that he might destroy every letter he had ever written.”

For the Hardwicks, Dickens’s obsessive behavior is related to his identification with the enigma of Shakespeare. The same opening paragraph quotes from a letter he wrote in June 1847: “It is a great comfort, to my thinking, that so little is known concerning the poet. It is a fine mystery; and I tremble every day lest something should come out. If he had had a Boswell, society wouldn’t have respected his grave, but would calmly have had his skull in the phrenological windows.”

In a later chapter on Dickens the actor, he’s shown masterfully directing his Amateur Company’s 1848 production of The Merry Wives of Windsor at Stratford-on-Avon. Given the letter-burning and the primal fear of the Mask in a man as sociable and renowned as Dickens, his directorial skills are less interesting than the account of his disappearance into the role of Justice Shallow, for which “the make-up of Charles Dickens was so complete that his own identity was almost unrecognizable when he came on to the stage … but after a moment’s breathless pause, the whole house burst into a roar of applausive reception, which testified to the boundless delight of the assembled audience on beholding the literary idol of the day actually before them.”

I wonder what the “literary idol of the day” was thinking as he shaped himself according to the creative will of the “fine mystery” in whose name he had endowed a perpetual curatorship at Stratford: here’s Dickens in his prime giving himself over to “the old, stiff limbs, the senile stoop of the shoulders” of Justice Shallow, “the head bent with age, the feeble step … all assumed and maintained with wonderful accuracy.” Even the voice was perfectly attuned to that of the mysterious ventriloquist: “part lisp, part thickness of utterance, part a kind of impeded sibillation, like that of a voice that ‘pipes and whistles’ in the sound through loss of teeth.”

Christmas Eve

Shakespeare rates a special share of Christmas as we head into the final week of 2023, the First Folio’s 400th anniversary year. On Christmas Eve he’s close at hand in the copy of Palgrave’s Golden Treasury I just opened to page 24, for the 24th day of December. Under the heading “Memory” is the sonnet that begins “When to the sessions of sweet silent thought,” which I’m reading softly to myself with the Christmas tree galaxy glowing nearby. By the time I get to the line “For precious friends hid in death’s dateless night,” I’m reading in a whisper no one but the tree could hear. It even begins to seem that I’m reading to the tree, which offers the illusion of a companionable “listening” presence, its small gold, green, blue, red lights blending all but audibly in a hushed chorale. Reading the words of the “mystery,” I’m so deep in the language that Shakespeare and the tree and the moment become one. Shameless, the liberties we take with innocent inanimate objects on Christmas Eve.

Finding a Book

A few days ago I was downtown browsing at Labyrinth, keeping an eye out for a book about Christmas trees, if only for an image to go with this column. On my way back to the car, I stopped by the Friends of the Library bookstore, where I found Davis Grubb’s A Tree Full of Stars (Scribner’s 1965). I knew I was going to buy it as soon as I saw the cover and the prefatory epigraphs, one from Yeats (for “those who would have prayed under the shadow of the Green Tree”), and one from King Lear: (“Here, Father, take the shadow of this Tree For your good host: pray that the right may thrive….”).

Grubb is best known for The Night of the Hunter, one of the scariest novels about childhood and fear ever written, so it’s no surprise that this little Christmas book isn’t quite the feel-good parable that it appears to be. The Dance family lives in a small town in the Ohio Valley during the Great Depression. Their Christmas tree is a “fine, fragrant spruce,” which Mr. Dance hammers into its tripod, little knowing that he’s installed a miracle. The young son falls in love with the tree and dreads the day it’s taken down, as do the rest of the family, for day by day it seems to grow more beautiful and more fragrant. When the day comes and Mr. Dance attempts to take it down, the tree is unmovable, so too are the ornaments.

As the Dance family happily adjusts to living from December to April with an enduring symbol of the Christmas spirit, the townspeople resent their refusal to close out the season according to custom (“they’ve mocked the Lord with their make-believe of Christmas in the spring”). The family store is boycotted, Mr. Dance loses the lease, and come April the Dances are driven out of town. A mob then storms the house, determined to destroy the tree, but it can’t be done. It is indestructible, and still stands “where once stood the house” — a “mighty tree high and grand against the mountain sky!”

Tree to Tree

Still, I like a tree I can commune with and even read to and that already has an aura of loneliness and mortality, as if aware that it’s destined to lie along the front curb without lights or ornaments or tinsel or any evidence of human company. Maybe so, but in my make-believe Christmas it has a place in a long line of trees dating back to Dickens and beyond, and it’s only fair to say that the Dickens Christmas tree is not all doom and dread, not when he writes, “And now, I see a wonderful row of little lights rise smoothly out of the ground, before a vast green curtain.  Now, a bell rings — a magic bell, which still sounds in my ears unlike all other bells — and music plays, amidst a buzz of voices, and a fragrant smell of orange-peel and oil.  Anon, the magic bell commands the music to cease, and the great green curtain rolls itself up majestically, and The Play begins!”

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I first cited Emerson’s “dreadful locomotive” analogy in December 2, 2020 (“‘Great Expectations’ — Charles Dickens in Performance”). The showpiece of his last round of public readings was his sensational recital of the murder scene in Oliver Twist during which he impersonated Bill Sikes “beating out the brains of the pathetic Nancy, as she cowered beneath the blows of his pistol-butt, blinded with her own blood and shrieking ‘Bill! dear Bill!’” The Shakespearean actor William Macready dubbed the murder “the equal of two Macbeths.” The energy Dickens put into the performance left him “in a state of great prostration” afterward. He died less than three months after his last London reading, on June 9, 1870, at the age of 58.