Even his loyal fans were beginning to weary, not seeing the tortured main character, Professor Redlaw, as very compelling. Even Dickens seemed sick of the grind, at one point thinking of leaving Battle unfinished.īy the time he published The Haunted Man, yet another story of a spirit-addled misanthrope who turns over a new leaf, Dickens had clearly run out of steam with his Christmas series. The Battle of Life, a saccharine tale about a saintly maiden who allows her true love to marry her own sister, doesn’t even benefit from yuletide cheer, since the only holiday scene in the novel is an afterthought. The Cricket on the Hearth, about a miser named Tackleton who has a last-minute spiritual conversion, seems like warmed-over Carol, too-the nineteenth-century version of a by-the-numbers Hollywood sequel. Dickens biographer Angus Wilson, expressing what appears to be a critical consensus, lamented that this takedown “of a wicked social order never comes to life.” The Chimes, in which the poor Englishman Trotty Veck is haunted by visions of oppressive poverty that serve as a form of moral instruction, seems obviously derivative of Carol, but without its memorable characters. A quick survey of Dickens’s holiday also-rans provides some clues about their lack of staying power. “It will make a great uproar, I have no doubt.”īut posterity has been less kind to Dickens’s non- Carol Christmas tales, which also include The Battle of Life (1846) and The Haunted Man (1848). “I believe I have written a tremendous Book and knocked the Carol out of the field,” he told his friend Thomas Mitton. When he published The Chimes, a follow-up to Carol for the 1844 holiday season, Dickens was sure he’d topped himself. After publishing Carol in 1843, he produced four other Christmas novels in quick succession, deeming some of his handiwork even more appealing than his iconic account of Ebenezer Scrooge.
His well-received novel that year wasn’t A Christmas Carol, the tale that modern audiences consider his quintessential yuletide work, but The Cricket on the Hearth, a story few readers beyond diehard Dickens fans recognize today.ĭickens (1812–1870) might be surprised by how little Cricket and his other holiday stories besides A Christmas Carol are read.
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