| Then, when he's in the churchyard swigging his gin, suddenly this goblin appears and pulls him down underground into a huge cavern and shows him a sequence of wonderful things that are happening on this Christmas Day and what will happen to him if he doesn't change what happened in the past." Dickens chose as a starting point for the Carol a scene in which a young child of an impoverished family lies dying. The sickly child would represent the author himself, while John Dickens provided inspiration for the child's kindly but inept father. In the end, a self-centered, grasping old man—the father's boss—would learn the true meaning of Christmas, not quite the cliché it is today.
"As soon as he started working on A Christmas Carol, he adored it," says Gerald Dickens. "He wrote a letter that says, 'I wept, I laughed, I wept again as I read it.' He would go out walking in the depths of the night, 20 or 30 miles, muttering to himself, developing the plot, then coming back that morning to write it down as fast as he could."
During his 1999 tour, Gerald Dickens was privileged to read the first draft of A Christmas Carol at the J. Pierpont Morgan Library in New York City. "You can see the energy and pace in which he wrote it. It just rushes across the page, and there are lots of things crossed out and rewritten. I've always said that my most important line in A Christmas Carol is 'I shall honour Christmas in my heart and try to keep it all year round.' And looking at it, I discovered it was such an afterthought. My favourite line almost didn't make it at all!" Another last-minute change turned Little Fred into Tiny Tim.
By the time Dickens published A Christmas Carol, his financial incentive was almost forgotten. "He wanted the book to be available to as many people as possible. It was going to be sold for five shillings. It wasn't a great deal, especially with the production qualities he put into the book, with red cover, gold-blocked lettering and title, gilded edges to the papers, and green end papers. All the major illustrations were hand-coloured."
He finished the book on 2nd December; the first 6,000 copies sold out by Christmas Eve. It brought him a small income over the years and inspired him to write other Christmas tales, although none of them attained the same success as the original. People told him they read it aloud each year or kept it on a special shelf, like a sort of Bible. Buoyed by this reaction, he began giving readings of the Carol, all three hours of it, plus selections from his other works.
"He wanted to aim at a much wider spectrum of society than the rather genteel people who had been privy to literary readings up to that point," says Gerald Dickens. "He performed the pieces. Yes, he had a book in his hand, and he stood at a reading desk, but he performed them in a very graphic, atmospheric way," and his audiences wept, screamed, and swooned.
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| Among Gerald Dickens' performances will be a two-day stint at Colonial Williamsburg on 5th and 6th December. The Williamsburg Inn is also offering an afternoon tea with Gerald Dickens and a four-course dinner. Go to Schedule for complete details or visit Colonial Williamsburg's website at www.colonialwilliamsburg.org. |
"He judged the success of the readings by how many people fainted. He wrote a letter after one performance: 'Last night in Hastings we had a contagion of fainting–between 15 nd 20 ladies carried out quite stiff.' And he loved that; it was certainly exciting."
Gerald Dickens began his acting career by distancing himself as far as possible from Charles Dickens to avoid being seen as cashing in on his famous name. He and his wife, Lucy, formed Mrs. Humphries Productions, Ltd to do things such as historical re-enactments, but in 1993, the 150th anniversary of the Carol, a village historical preservationist society asked him for help with a fundraiser.
"So I said, 'Yes, I'll do that,' Just purely a one-off. Two performances—that's all. I got the book and started developing the voices. I found my Scrooge voice, which is the centre—everything else has to come from there. Then I started developing other voices. I found myself standing in front of the mirror, stretching my face, doing lines, trying to see what Cratchit was like. At that time I didn't know that Charles Dickens used the same technique. Those performances were so well received that I thought, 'There is something to be done here as an actor.'" Today his repertoire also includes "Mr. Dickens is Coming!" and "A Child's Journey with Dickens."
In 1999 Gerald Dickens found himself performing in the same American venue as his great-great-grandfather. Tremont Temple, a Baptist meeting hall in Boston, was a theatre when Charles Dickens appeared there in 1867. Its interior is unchanged.
"So I was looking at the same things Charles Dickens looked at. The really strong feelings came when we were doing mike checks and imagining how it had been in Charles Dickens' day, how the crowds were flocking up the stairways into the theatre. Just before the show my heart was jumping. It was almost like the ghosts were coming back and sitting down." He spent that night in the Parker House Hotel as Charles Dickens had done, and he looked into the same mirror.
Many people think Dickens gave us our modern Christmas, not by inventing traditions of merrymaking and mistletoe but by planting them firmly in our minds. Some have even theorized that A Christmas Carol spared England the revolutions occurring in other European countries by pointing out that the children Ignorance and Want could be dangerous if attention was not paid to them.
But Gerald Dickens says it would be wrong to give him total credit: "Christmas was changing at the time anyway. It was beginning to develop into a much more set-piece holiday. Prince Albert brought the first Christmas tree into Great Britain from Germany, and the first Christmas card was published in the same year as A Christmas Carol, so that commercial side was building up." He adds, "As with so many other things that he wrote about, he was in the right place at the right time and reported it in such vivid detail that that was the way it became." In any case, A Christmas Carol was a great and wonderful gift to the world. It's hard to imagine Christmas without it.
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