As we know, Chesterton wrote a lot; among all that he wrote, he wrote a lot about Dickens: a complete study in 1906; essays in the various journals he contributed to, and introductions to "cheap" editions of Dickens' novels and collections.
Of Chesterton's 1906 work on Charles Dickens, Dale Ahlquist comments:
T.S. Eliot said that Chesterton’s book on Dickens is the “best on that author that has ever been written.”
One of the most surprising things about the book is that at the time it was written, the novels of Dickens were experiencing something of an eclipse in England. But Chesterton’s book helped spark a wide revival of Dickens, prompting J.M. Dent to publish new editions of all his books for the Everyman’s Library – and to invite G.K. Chesterton to write an introduction for each of the twenty-four volumes.
In 1942, The Readers Club (with an editorial committee comprised of Clifton Fadiman, Sinclair Lewis, Carl Von Doren, and Alexander Woolcott) brought out a new edition of Chesterton’s book on Dickens with the subtitle, The Last of the Great Men. In his introduction to this edition, Alexander Woolcott, says he feels qualified to describe the book as “readable” – since he himself has read it at least a dozen times.
It's when we turn to the introduction Chesterton wrote to the J.M. Dent edition of Dickens' Christmas Books, including The Christmas Carol that we see what Chesterton saw in Dickens' vision of Christmas: a man reviving a tradition--a Catholic and even Medieval tradition--in spite of himself:
The mystery of Christmas is in a manner identical with the mystery of Dickens. If ever we adequately explain the one we may adequately explain the other. And indeed, in the treatment of the two, the chronological or historical order must in some degree be remembered. Before we come to the question of what Dickens did for Christmas we must consider the question of what Christmas did for Dickens. How did it happen that this bustling, nineteenth-century man, full of the almost cock-sure common-sense of the utilitarian and liberal epoch, came to associate his name chiefly in literary history with the perpetuation of a half pagan and half Catholic festival which he would certainly have called an antiquity and might easily have called a superstition? Christmas has indeed been celebrated before in English literature; but it had, in the most noticeable cases, been celebrated in connection with that kind of feudalism with which Dickens would have severed his connection with an ignorant and even excessive scorn. Sir Roger de Coverley kept Christmas; but it was a feudal Christmas. Sir Walter Scott sang in praise of Christmas; but it was a feudal Christmas. And Dickens was not only indifferent to the dignity of the old country gentleman or to the genial archæology of Scott; [104]he was even harshly and insolently hostile to it. If Dickens had lived in the neighbourhood of Sir Roger de Coverley he would undoubtedly, like Tom Touchy, have been always “having the law of him.” If Dickens had stumbled in among the old armour and quaint folios of Scott’s study he would certainly have read his brother novelist a lesson in no measured terms about the futility of thus fumbling in the dust-bins of old oppression and error. So far from Dickens being one of those who like a thing because it is old, he was one of those cruder kind of reformers, in theory at least, who actually dislike a thing because it is old. He was not merely the more righteous kind of Radical who tries to uproot abuses; he was partly also that more suicidal kind of Radical who tries to uproot himself. In theory at any rate, he had no adequate conception of the importance of human tradition; in his time it had been twisted and falsified into the form of an opposition to democracy. In truth, of course, tradition is the most democratic of all things, for tradition is merely a democracy of the dead as well as the living. But Dickens and his special group or generation had no grasp of this permanent position; they had been called to a special war for the righting of special wrongs. In so far as such an institution as Christmas was old, Dickens would even have tended to despise it. He could never have put the matter to himself in the correct way—that while there are some things whose antiquity does prove that they are dying, there are some other things whose antiquity only proves that they cannot die.
Please note that this is the source of Chesterton's "democracy of the dead" quotation!
Chesterton ascribes three qualities to the celebration of Christmas in this tradition. There's an element of drama, that anyone making final preparations knows: we're trying to fit as much celebration and festivity as we can into a 24 hours or a weekend or even two weeks (when we observe the true Christmas Season). Then there's the weather, at least in our hemisphere: it's cold, snowy, and wintry. Finally, there's an element of the grotesque, of goblins and ghosts; of joy and ugliness (contrasted to sorrow and beauty). As Chesterton then concludes, Dickens brings all these elements to the fore in his Christmas books:
All Dickens’s books are Christmas books. But this is still truest of his two or three famous Yuletide tales—The Christmas Carol (sic) and The Chimes and The Cricket on the Hearth. Of these The Christmas Carol is beyond comparison the best as well as the most popular. Indeed, Dickens is in so profound and spiritual a sense a popular author that in his case, unlike most others, it can generally be said that the best work is the most popular. It is for Pickwick that he is best known; and upon the whole it is for Pickwick that he is best worth knowing. In any case this superiority of The Christmas Carol makes it convenient for us to take it as an example of the generalisations already made. If we study the very real atmosphere of rejoicing and of riotous charity in The Christmas Carol we shall find that all the three marks I have mentioned are unmistakably visible. The Christmas Carol is a happy story first, because it describes an abrupt and dramatic change. It is not only the story of a conversion, but of a sudden conversion; as sudden as the conversion of a man at a Salvation Army meeting. Popular religion is quite right in insisting on the fact of a crisis in most things. It is true that the man at the Salvation Army meeting would probably be converted from the punch bowl; whereas Scrooge was converted to it. That only means that Scrooge and Dickens represented a higher and more historic Christianity.
Again, The Christmas Carol owes much of its hilarity to our second source—the fact of its being a tale of winter and of a very wintry winter. There is much about comfort in the story; yet the comfort is never enervating: it is saved from that by a tingle of something bitter and bracing in the weather. Lastly, the story exemplifies throughout the power of the third principle—the kinship between gaiety and the grotesque. Everybody is happy because nobody is dignified. We have a feeling somehow that Scrooge looked even uglier when he was kind than he had looked when he was cruel. The turkey that Scrooge bought was so fat, says Dickens, that it could never have stood upright. That top-heavy and monstrous bird is a good symbol of the top-heavy happiness of the stories.
There are limitations even to Dickens' celebration of Christmas: while there are spirits aplenty, the religious and spiritual aspects of the solemnity aren't there: Dickens doesn't consider the doctrine of the Incarnation in any depth at all. A Christmas Carol both restricts Christmas to one day and then spreads its cheer throughout the year. Nevertheless, as Chesterton notes, it revived the celebration of Christmas in England after ages of neglect and ambivalence. As the title of book by Les Standiford avers, Charles Dickens is The Man Who Invented Christmas--at least our modern celebration of Christmas--and Chesterton admired him for that achievement.
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