The Man Who Invented Christmas by Les Standiford

His nightly walks continued, even after his return from Manchester to London, his mind still whirling. He needed to return to plain storytelling, “without browbeating or scolding, or mounting a soapbox,” as had been his tendency of late: And so, as he walked the streets that night, a new story began to form. He “began to take stock of himself in a way that any accomplished and acclaimed writer would find extremely difficult, much less the most famous writer of his time.” As he subsequently told his close friend, adviser and future biographer John Forster, perhaps he had begun to take his public for granted. After delivering his remarks, he walked the city’s streets, thinking about his career. However improbably, he found what he was looking for that October night in Manchester. He was only 31 years old, but he had a large family to feed as well as other pressing financial obligations, and he feared that he was sliding toward oblivion. He needed something to reverse his slide but seems to have had no idea what it might be. But the book was poorly received by British reviewers and readers, and the novel he was publishing in serial in 1843, Martin Chuzzlewit, was doing no better. The second was American Notes, the result of a trip he had made to the United States, one that was meant to increase his American readership and gain publicity in England.

The first was Barnaby Rudge, an ill-advised attempt at a historical novel, which sold respectably but considerably less well than its predecessors.

His first five books - Sketches by Boz, The Pickwick Papers, Oliver Twist, Nicholas Nickleby and The Old Curiosity Shop - had made him “perhaps the world’s first true celebrity of the popular arts” and “far and away his country’s best-selling author, acclaimed as much for his themes - the misery of the poor and the presumption and posturing of the rich - as for his spellbinding powers as a storyteller.” Yet as he sat on a stage in Manchester, preparing to give a speech to raise funds for the local Athenaeum, “the industrial capital’s pri-mary beacon of arts and en-lightenment,” he was deeply worried about “how rapidly - and how unaccountably - his good fortune had fled.” Those first five brilliant successes had been followed by three disappointments. In October 1843 Charles Dickens’ “once unequaled popularity was at a nadir, his critical reputation in a shambles, his bank account overdrawn,” Les Standiford writes.

The Man Who Invented Christmas by Les Standiford