Collaborative Dickens. Melisa Klimaszewski
homeland because, if they speak of England, think of “pretty cousins,” sing songs, and drink rum, the holiday can authenticate their true English values (300). Whether on a merchant ship or a naval vessel, Christmas at sea becomes a literal way of advancing the imperial interests that sustain Christmas celebrations at home.
Much more complex in its advocating for English supremacy is Charles Knight’s “A Christmas Pudding,” in which Mr. Oldknow contemplates “the mercantile history of the various substances of which that pudding was composed” (301). Inspired by his reading of travel literature, Oldknow dreams of faraway places and encounters the genii, or guarding spirits, associated with various ingredients.16 Defending Christmas pudding as an “emblem of our commercial eminence” against the Genius of the Raisin’s complaint that England is depriving Spanish and Mediterranean lands of “grapes which ought to be reserved for the unfermented wine which the Prophet delighted to drink,” Oldknow retorts that the demand created by English consumers is what causes the raisins to exist in the first place (301). Elevating an item’s market value, in this view, is a viable defense for unequal distribution of resources, cultural indifference, and disparities in labor conditions. Paul Young argues that “to Oldknow’s mind the Raisin represents Islamic irrationality and stagnation.”17 Oldknow’s insistence that the Genius of the Raisin should simply be grateful for English patronage is an approach exemplified by the Genius of the Currant, a “little freetrader,” and the Genius of the Nutmeg, an interspecies mix of contrite Dutchman and wood pigeon who thanks the English for leading him to renounce monopoly-protecting colonial violence (302–3).18
Illustrating how profoundly the standard Christmas rhetoric (and fare) is enmeshed in racial ideologies that glorify empire at the expense of humanity, the most problematic spirit is Sugar:
A West Indian sugar plantation is now mirrored—with its canes ripening under a tropical sun, and its mills with their machinery of cylinders and boilers. The Genius of Sugar is a freed Negro. It was said that in freedom he would not work; he has vindicated his privileges in his industry and his obedience. The grand experiment has succeeded in all moral effects. But the nation that demanded cheap corn would not be content with dear sugar. We must buy our sugar wherever the cane ripens. We use seven hundred millions of pounds of sugar annually, which yield a duty of four millions sterling. Mr. Oldknow thought about this, but was silent, when he saw the negro sitting under his own fig-tree; for the political questions which his freedom involved were somewhat complicated. He would trust to the ultimate power of a noble example, and in the meantime rejoice that the great body of the British people could buy their sugar at half the price that their fathers paid.
Mr. Oldknow, being somewhat at fault upon the sugar question, grew confused as new forms flitted before him. (303)
Through Oldknow’s confusion about the “complicated” postslavery questions embodied in the Genius of the Sugar, the story at once sidesteps and acknowledges the moral consequences of sugar production. Sugar’s form, however, is not combined with an animal, nor is he a fairy hybrid, like the others. He is a dark-skinned human being who has been enslaved, and the story takes great care to identify him as freed. He also differs from the previously presented genii in having no voice.
Given that Sugar occupies the most ethically fraught position, casting him as the first genius to be denied direct speech severely impairs the critique of industrial capitalism that Young locates in the figure of the Raisin. Noting its publication just five months before the Great Exhibition at the Crystal Palace, which advocated for free trade on a grand scale, Young sees “A Christmas Pudding” as a contrary text whose dialogue “works to destabilise Oldknow’s position as the voice of a pacific commercial rationale” but pays no attention to the other pieces in the Christmas number.19 Once the dialogism Young mentions is expanded to include those voices, the number’s stance clearly depicts British imperialism and its attendant white supremacy as contested and perhaps even contradictory but never fundamentally challenged as an ideological course preferable to all others. Although Oldknow is aware of his “fault” in uncritically joining the masses who blithely “rejoice” in the purchase of cheap sugar, he does not struggle to move quickly past the uncomfortable questions. Oldknow’s thoughts move to the next genius, an Irish egg collector, whose complicated role in the trade markets he responds to in a manner similar to how he reacts to the black man: by lamenting previous suffering, wishing for “just masters and wise rulers,” urging the Irish to forswear “agitation” in favor of working hard, and declining to grant the Irish woman a voice (303).20 At the climactic moment of pudding lighting, all the spirits dance around a giant bowl, and Oldknow’s song about the imaginary “social bands” forged by free trade creates a utopian vision that attempts to assuage the story’s concerns about inequity:
Britain, to peaceful arts inclined,
Where commerce opens all her stores,
In social bands shall league mankind,
And join the sea-divided shores.
(304)
This fantasy of mercantile domination that benevolently unites the globe, glossing over exploitative or outright abusive relationships to maintain a vision of Britain as “peaceful,” is an integral part of the Christmas number’s formulation of what it means to celebrate the holiday.
The second longest in the collection, Knight’s story exalts England, and the next piece, Frederick Hunt’s “Christmas among the London Poor and Sick,” abruptly changes that vision by documenting how much deprivation continues to exist in the country’s metropolis. Hunt lists the numbers of poor who eat at parish workhouses and hospitals on Christmas but delivers little social commentary beyond noting that a festive indulgence in any kind of excess tends to worsen the condition of sick people (304–5). Concluding with a sketch of drunken men whose condition is difficult to differentiate from apoplexy, Hunt’s contribution contrasts the idealized view of England underpinning the stories that surround it. Thus, reading the number in its entirety reveals an ongoing conversation among the pieces that makes each one less definitive than it appears in isolation.
Following Hunt’s contribution, “Christmas in India” by Joachim Heyward Siddons returns to extreme vaunting of English Christianity as a civilizing force. Siddons’s essay bounces off of the idea that Christmas in a land associated with Hinduism and Islam (denigrated as “idolatrous” and “rude”) is not a ridiculous concept. The projects of “zealous missionaries” and others have succeeded in transforming India so that “the tide of European conquest, and, better still, the tide of European civilisation, has carried to the benighted land knowledge, and a large spirit of toleration” (305). Ignoring the violence of conquest and imperialism, the speaker then explains how Indian culinary traditions and decorative plants are repurposed to enhance Christmas celebrations. In another linking of the Irish to racialized others, rural Indians’ worshipful offerings “resemble the contributions of the Irish peasantry to Father Luke or Father Brady” (306). The strength of the colonial rulers in this setting is so profound that they can even affect the experience of climate in Calcutta, where English households light Christmas fires and “there is a wintry feel about the atmosphere; and as the chairs are drawn round the fire-place, and the whiskey-punch is brewed, the cherished idea of home on Christmas Day is suitably and completely realised” (306). Siddons’s idyllic domestic fireside forecasts the frame concept Dickens develops for 1852 and reduces the materials necessary to create such an atmosphere to chairs, a fireplace, and some whiskey. The emphasis on “home” as both private and public, as a space for family celebrations as well as the achievement of England’s national dominance, also resonates with the voyeurism of the number’s opening piece, in which Christmas celebrations are surveyed to ensure that celebrants exhibit an appropriate level of cheer and introspection.
Dialogism continues to characterize the 1850 number as the imperial project moves from hot to cold in Robert McCormick’s and Dickens’s “Christmas in the Frozen Regions,” which relates an episode pertinent to an 1841 polar expedition. McCormick joined an expedition that explored the South Pole in the same two ships John Franklin would take on the ill-fated 1845 expedition in search of the Northwest Passage. The level of fictionalization in McCormick’s piece is unclear, particularly