The first Christmas card and Dickens' enduring gift

London: So it turns out Charles Dickens probably had a hedgehog in his kitchen.

A copy of the 1843 book "A Christmas Carol' by Charles Dickens, who wrote in the preface: "I have endeavoured in this Ghostly little book, to raise the Ghost of an Idea, which shall not put my readers out of humour with themselves, with each other, with the season, or with me. May it haunt their houses pleasantly, and no one wish to lay it".Credit: Gutenberg.org

This feels appropriate. The hedgehog is, after all, the most English of animals. Prickly, self-reliant, and currently in catastrophic decline.

When Queen Victoria was on the throne, these spiny, ancient mammals, who have been doing their thing for around 15 million years, moved into kitchens across the country, eating cockroaches and earwigs. And as they beetled around downstairs, upstairs Dickens was inventing Christmas.

It’s 176 years since Dickens sat down to write A Christmas Carol, the inspired novella that has become the template for Christmas in weather, imagery and sentiment (filtered, these days, through the saccharine-romanticism of 1950s America).

It was the tail end of Europe’s Little Ice Age, which used to freeze parts of the Thames. As the snow and ice closed in, Dickens sat at his desk and fumed at the lack of generosity towards children at a time of year when, surely, people should be most Christian. He was particularly disgusted by the “sleek, slobbering” wealthy men of the City of London, who hoarded rather than shared their fortunes, and he was appalled by a recent parliamentary report on Britain’s child labourers.

He intended to write a political pamphlet titled An Appeal to the People of England on Behalf of the Poor Man’s Child.

But instead he came up with a story, in which he told readers he had endeavoured “to raise the Ghost of an Idea”.

It wasn’t just the ideas in the book that were to define Christmas. The book, itself, was a commercial idea: a Christmas present. And as soon as it went on sale a week before Christmas, people snapped it up, for themselves and as gifts.

The world's first printed Christmas card is displayed at the Dickens Museum in London. The hand-coloured lithograph card was produced in 1843 and sold for one shilling.Credit: EPA

It is not a coincidence that this was the same year that civil servant Henry Cole invented the first Christmas card, a hand-coloured, printed work that shows a family gathered around a table enjoying some wine, with the message “A merry Christmas and a happy new year to you”. The 1843 card, illustrated by artist John Callcott Horsley and belonging to a series of 1000 commissioned by Cole, went on show at the Dickens Museum in London this week.

Thanks to the Penny Post and new printing technologies, the greeting card industry was taking off. By 1877, more than 4 million Christmas cards were posted in Britain.

Industrialisation was changing the country, and it was changing Christmas. Department stores began to publish Christmas catalogues. Books were an ideal and popular present. Dickens’ were among the most popular.

Dickens wove the old and the new together: the plum puddings, the turkey (an American innovation, replacing the English goose), the decorations of ivy, holly and bay.

The books’ appeal, subconsciously, was that it showed how Christmas could work in this new world. How tradition and sentiment could survive the cold wind of modern commerce.

Such was the success of Carol, almost every year for the next 24 Dickens produced a Christmas special.

“I am sick of the thing,” he told a friend, towards the end.

He wrote to his editor: “I can see nothing with my mind’s eye which would do otherwise than reproduce the old string of stories in the old inappropriate bungling way, which every other publication imitates to death.”

But Dickens wasn’t turning into Scrooge, he was just fighting writers’ block.

The Dickens Museum in London, crammed into a house he lived in as a young writer in the first flush of popularity, has his writing desk.

You can picture him, sitting there (not in this house, but at this desk), coming up with Ebeneezer Scrooge, placing him in pen sketches of the snow-covered London around him that would become the defining scenery of the season, reinventing a religious festival in the terms of what he loved best: good food, good company, and compassion for those less fortunate.

As, on the floor below, the hedgehogs snuffled for their supper.