Dickens, Death, and Christmas by Robert L. Patten (review)

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Reviewed by:

• Dickens, Death, and Christmas by Robert L. Patten
• Natalie J. McKnight (bio)

Robert L. Patten. Dickens, Death, and Christmas. Oxford UP, 2023. Pp. xx + 344. $130.00. ISBN 978-0-19-286266-2 (hb).

In this beautifully illustrated, richly contextualized study, Robert Patten traces the often surprising and deeply-rooted connections between death and Christmas festivities in Dickens's Christmas books and in his own experiences of the winter solstice holidays. Patten begins with a vivid description of the Paris morgue and its theatrical display of corpses, a site Dickens frequently visited, often around the winter holidays. It's a striking Prologue with its gruesome details of dead bodies on display, sometimes as if in conversation with each other, and it effectively establishes the key intertwining themes of the book: death and rebirth, remembering and forgetting, ghoulishness and festivity. It also highlights that Patten is writing not just for scholars but for a broader audience of Dickens enthusiasts. The lively writing of the Prologue, which immerses the reader in the sensory details of the scene in a manner few scholarly works ever do, continues throughout the book, and makes Dickens, Death, and Christmas not only extremely informative but also a pleasure to read.

Patten divides the book into 12 chapters, one on each of Dickens's five Christmas books, plus ones on Dickens's visits to the morgue, his early experiences with Christmas, Yuletide as seen in The Pickwick Papers, the social evils that motivated Dickens to strike "sledge hammer blows" in his holiday narratives, Christmas celebrations in the 1840s (including celebrations of his oldest son's birthday on Twelfth Night), the Christmas numbers Dickens penned and performed after the publication of the Christmas books, and finally a closing chapter on endings and their implications in life and fiction. In every chapter, Patten's vast knowledge of Dickens's life and works, the social fabric of the times, the extensive theatrical adaptations of his fiction, and the varied critical reception of his publications provide illuminating contexts that will probably surprise even seasoned Dickens scholars.

Of course, no one should be surprised by such erudition from such a renowned scholar. Still, having written on A Christmas Carol myself, I foolishly thought there wouldn't be much new for me in the chapter devoted to that book. I of course was wrong. Patten's interpretation of the Carol as an epillion, or small epic, provides a helpful framework for Scrooge's journey [End Page 488] and "makes the voices channeled in the fourth Stave [and elsewhere] more resonant" (103). Patten's analyses of the illustrations – for the Carol and for the other Christmas books – are particularly revelatory, and the reproduction of the images is astonishingly good. He points out details and discrepancies in the illustrations I had not noticed before (such as the final image in the Carol being set in Scrooge's home, not the office, as the text originally indicated and as the scene is often portrayed in theatrical and film versions). In terms of biographical context Patten's depiction of the legal suit Dickens pursued against a piracy of the Carol painfully underscores how costly that legal action was for him both emotionally and monetarily and how it shaped Dickens's perspective on the law for the rest of his life.

In every chapter Patten provides enough colorful description of plot and character for readers to follow his line of thought whether or not they have recently read the works. His telling of the Cricket on the Hearth is so atmospheric and engaging that he has reconciled me to that tale, which had never been one of my favorites. Frankly, I like Patten's telling of the Cricket story better than Dickens's. And while even Patten cannot make The Battle of Life appealing (at least to me), he offers an intriguing speculation on the tale's two sisters, Marion and Grace, suggesting they might have been informed by Dickens's relationship with his wife's sisters Mary and Georgina Hogarth, possibly thinking "that some combination of the three Hogarth sisters' lives would have worked better for him" than his marriage to Catherine (231).

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