Read The Man Who Invented Christmas for Free Online Page B

could more easily supplement his income by writing travel pieces. Perhaps he was simply overexposed, Dickens theorized. Perhaps once he had stopped writing and was out of the public eye, readers and critics would come to appreciate what they had lost. But, meanwhile, he had come to Manchester, and the show there would have to go on.

    A ccording to the memoirs of Sir E. W. Watkin, one of his Manchester hosts, there was no hint that the Dickens who arrived in Manchester was in any way out of sorts. To Watkin, whose recollections admittedly have the ring of enthusiasm, if not outright awe, for his subject, Dickens was the picture of affability and beneficence.
    “We were indebted for the presence of Charles Dickens to the kind influence of his elder sister—Mrs. Burnett—a self-denying saint, if ever one existed,” Watkin writes. The evening before Dickens’s appearance at the Athenaeum, Watkin and a few companions visited Dickens at the Burnetts’ home.
    Inside, the group found Dickens standing by the fireplace, ready with a decanter of wine. “In passing the decanter, [he] upset his own glass,” Watkin recalls, “and deluged a very pretty book lying on the table.”
    The mishap did not seem to bother Dickens, though, who was quick to press the delegation for details of the next day’s program and to inquire of Watkin who they thought to seat him beside. When Watkin suggested the author might be most comfortable with his sister and brother-in-law at hand, Dickens shook his head.
    “No, I should not wish that,” he told Watkin, “not by any means. You must look upon your object in choosing my supporters,” he explained.
    In that case, Watkin replied, how about Mr. Cobden on one side of Dickens, and Mayor Kershaw of Manchester on the other? And Dickens agreed that would do very well.
    From there, the talk moved along to Dickens’s hopes for a decent crowd (“You had ten thousand in at the Education meeting, had you not?” he asked one of Watkin’s group). And then, somewhat to Watkin’s surprise, Dickens himself launched into a fulsome and well-informed elucidation of the Athenaeum’s value, history, and current state of want.
    “In all this Dickens appeared to take great interest,” Watkin wrote appreciatively. When one of the group remarked upon the traditional opposition of conservatives to such grassroots educational undertakings as the Athenaeum, Dickens responded with vigor.
    “If a certain party choose to oppose the education of the masses,” he said, “we cannot help it. We must go on in spite of them.”
    Someone else wished to thank Dickens for his great generosity in lending his celebrity to their cause. An author of his accomplishment speaking on their behalf stood much more effectively than a mere politician, the Manchester man said, beaming.
    “He modestly disclaimed the merit we wished to attach to his visit,” Watkin reports. Dickens simply waved away such praise and reiterated that he was there because he supported the Athenaeum’s position: there was “a too general desire to get the utmost possible amount of work out of men instead of a generous wish to give the utmost possible opportunity of improvement.”
    “I shall enforce the necessity and usefulness of education,” Dickens told the group. “I must give it to them strong.”
    When talk turned finally to matters of pounds and shillings and pence, Dickens suggested that it would be a mistake to paint too dire a picture of the organization’s circumstances during his address, as donors might be more likely to support a cause on its way up than to toss money at one sinking surely toward the bottom. “I may say that the debts of the institution are in rapid course of liquidation, eh?” he told them. “That will be the way.”
    The group agreed with that tack, and also agreed that it would be a mistake for Dickens to ask outright for money. “Too much like making a commodity of him,” Watkin chimed in.
    Dickens nodded. “I