This lovely pair came to me, and thence to you, from those delightful publishers of classy, intelligent books, Hesperus Press. We all have the idea that Dickens invented Christmas as we know it today, and perhaps in some ways that is true. Certainly he invented the Christmas story, his extraordinarily persistently successful Christmas Carol. So successful was this in his own lifetime that he hit upon the idea of producing special Christmas editions of the journal Household Words, and inviting his regular contributers to produce seasonal stories. These two beautifully produced little books reproduce the contents of two such specials. CD himself contributed, of course, but the collections also included work by Elizabeth Gaskell, Harriet Martineau and George Sala as well as many other talented contemporaries. As the titles suggest, the stories are supposed to be told by a group of people sitting around the fire at Christmas. So in the first volume we get, from CD himself, 'The Poor Relation's Story' and 'The Child's Story', from Gaskell 'The Old Nurse's Story', and from Martineau 'The Deaf Playmate's Story', among many others. These are not, though, the sort of relentlessly jolly tales you might expect for Christmas. If you've read (rather than seen on TV or in the movies) The Christmas Carol, you will get the idea -- there is a strong dose of moralism here. The Poor Relation, despised by the rest of the family as a failure, reveals not only a strong bond of love with one of the children, but also the ability to comfort himself, and perhaps to shame the others, by revealing his secret life in a Castle -- a Castle in the Air, of course. The Child tells an allegorical tale of a journey through life, one which culminates in a tribute to the good old Grandfather sitting by the fire. Martineau, herself afflicted by deafness, writes about a boy whose happy carefree life is damaged by his growing loss of hearing and the inability of his friends and family to understand his disability. Gaskell's tale, the longest in the first volume, is a wonderfully atmospheric ghost story, one which is no worse for ending -- by Dickens' instruction -- with a moral. So, though not all that jolly by modern taste, these are wonderfully evocative and thought-provoking stories, and while some have been published elsewhere it is fascinating to read them in a group, as they originally appeared. Interesting and learned introductions by scholars of the period add the icing to the Christmas cake. Lovely.
