A Dickensian Christmas in the East End
If your idea of Christ-mas is mince pies, sleigh- bells in the snow, and a family feast round a roaring fire, then you’re dreaming of a Dickensian Christmas.
For all the elements of what we now think of a traditional Old English Yuletide were largely the invention of that greatest of English writers, Charles Dickens, in his 1847 masterpiece A Christmas Carol.
Ebenezer Scrooge huddles alone and miserable, hiding as a solitary youngster “gnawed and mumbled by the hungry cold” sings God Rest Ye Merry Gentlemen through the old miser’s keyhole.
Throw in that other great Christmas invention of the Victorian era, the Christmas tree – imported from Germany by Prince Albert – and you have all the elements of an English festive season.
Dickens, of course, took as his greatest source of research the people and places of London. And for Dickens, that meant the colourful characters and stories, cheerful despite the poverty and adversity they grew up in, who lived in the East End he visited as a child.
His first encounter with “this most colourful corner of the city” came with his childhood visits to his godfather, Christopher Huffam, who lived in Church Row, which became Newell Street, in Limehouse.
And Dickens’ childhood provided plenty of material for his later books such as Oliver Twist, with its hero cast out of a life of comfort and love into a horrific Thieves’ Kitchen.
In 1824, at the age of 12, Dickens’ hapless father John lost his job as a clerk in the Naval Pay Office. He was swiftly imprisoned for debt, joined in Marshalsea Prison by his wife and children.
With the exception of Charles that is. He was put to work in Warren’s Blacking Factory. It only lasted a week, but the experience scarred him for life.
And when he drew on it for Oliver Twist he also drew on his knowledge of the East End, placing the home of the evil Bill Sykes in Bethnal Green.
In 1829 Dickens became a reporter, and would spend the rest of his days dividing his time between a prodigious output of journalism, fiction and punishing lecture tours.
He continued to draw on his knowledge of the East End. Nicholas Nickleby’s family live in “a little cottage at Bow” – an interesting historical snap of 19th Century rural Bow, before the new estates snaked out across the farmland from Bethnal Green and swallowed up the old village.
David Copperfield has his first sight of London and stays at an Aldgate Inn. Our Mutual Friend pulls heavily on Limehouse as the home of many of the characters. And the Grapes pub, which stands in Narrow Street today, was used by Dickens as the model for The Six Jolly Fellowship Porters tavern.
For his journalism too, Dickens returned again and again – journeys in Mile End, Wapping and Limehouse are detailed in The Uncommercial Traveller.
Dickens punishing workload took its toll and after a series of minor strokes he suffered a fatal attack, on June 8, 1870, after a full day’s work on The Mystery of Edwin Drood.
The unfinished last novel, researched by the author in visits to the opium dens of Shadwell, appeared posthumously that September.
Dickens was buried in Westminster Abbey but his memorials were all around his beloved East End.
The hospital in Glamis Road, Shadwell, was financed by public contributions after Dickens’ heartrending picture of an East End in the throes of a cholera epidemic appeared in McMillan’s Magazine.
Today he is remembered by Charles Dickens House, Mans-ford Street, E2. But for most of us, his legacy is a Christmas of carol singers tramping through the snow, horsedrawn carriages racing cross-country, and a family exchanging gifts around a roaring fire.