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Passage Illustrated: The Good Old Times with the Good Old Employer at Christmas

In came a fiddler with a music-book, and went up to the lofty desk, and made an orchestra of it, and tuned like fifty stomach-aches. In came Mrs. Fezziwig, one vast substantial smile. In came the three Miss Fezziwigs, beaming and loveable. In came the six young followers whose hearts they broke. In came all the young men and women employed in the business. In came the housemaid, with her cousin, the baker. In came the cook, with her brother's particular friend, the milkman. In came the boy from over the way, who was suspected of not having board enough from his master; trying to hide himself behind the girl from next door but one, who was proved to have had her ears pulled by her Mistress. In they all came, one after another; some shyly, some boldly, some gracefully, some awkwardly, some pushing, some pulling; in they all came, anyhow and everyhow. Away they all went, twenty couple at once; hands half round and back again the other way; down the middle and up again; round and round in various stages of affectionate grouping; old top couple always turning up in the wrong place; new top couple starting off again, as soon as they got there; all top couples at last, and not a bottom one to help them. When this result was brought about, old Fezziwig, clapping his hands to stop the dance, cried out, "Well done!" and the fiddler plunged his hot face into a pot of porter, especially provided for that purpose. But scorning rest, upon his reappearance, he instantly began again, though there were no dancers yet, as if the other fiddler had been carried home, exhausted, on a shutter, and he were a bran-new man resolved to beat him out of sight, or perish.

There were more dances, and there were forfeits, and more dances, and there was cake, and there was negus, and there was a great piece of Cold Roast, and there was a great piece of Cold Boiled, and there were mince-pies, and plenty of beer. But the great effect of the evening came after the Roast and Boiled, when the fiddler (an artful dog, mind! The sort of man who knew his business better than you or I could have told it him!) struck up "Sir Roger de Coverley." Then old Fezziwig stood out to dance with Mrs. Fezziwig. Top couple too; with a good stiff piece of work cut out for them; three or four and twenty pair of partners; people who were not to be trifled with; people who would dance, and had no notion of walking.

But if they had been twice as many — ah, four times — old Fezziwig would have been a match for them, and so would Mrs. Fezziwig. As to her, she was worthy to be his partner in every sense of the term. If that's not high praise, tell me higher, and I'll use it. A positive light appeared to issue from Fezziwig's calves. They shone in every part of the dance like moons. You couldn't have predicted, at any given time, what would have become of them next. And when old Fezziwig and Mrs. Fezziwig had gone all through the dance; advance and retire, both hands to your partner, bow and curtsey, corkscrew, thread-the-needle, and back again to your place; Fezziwig "cut" — cut so deftly, that he appeared to wink with his legs, and came upon his feet again without a stagger. ["Stave Two: The First of the Spirits," pp. 59-62]

Commentary: Revisiting Himself

In some ways, Mr. Fezziwig's Ball, a Christmastide dance set in a warehouse, is the key to understanding what Scrooge once had in his life, and now lacks: camaraderie, a congenial workplace, fellow feeling, and a future full of hope in both business and private life. After his father's exiling him to a lonely schoolroom over the Christmas holidays, being a clerk in Fezziwig's warehouse must have seemed like paradise to young Ebenezer Scrooge. The next scene after Fan's rescuing him and bringing him home is the communal Christmas celebration in Stave Two, a suitable subject for the frontispiece since it reveals Scrooge's memory of one of the best times of his life — and of himself as he was.

Then Scrooge revisits apprenticing at Fezziwig's warehouse and celebrating Christmas Eve there; it is a scene of music, dancing, and rejoicing such as Dickens himself recreated on several occasions. After the party is over, the apprentices clear away, and go to sleep in their quarters; the master's home was where an apprentice lived during those seven years away from the natal "home." [Patten, 87-88]

All too soon the idyll ends with Alice breaking off the engagement, because growing avarice has replaced his fiancée Belle in his heart. Here, then, Scrooge revisits not merely where he apprenticed, but where he was a fulfilled human being. And his employer's leading the "Sir Roger De Coverley" shows Scrooge what he might yet become, at least to the Cratchits. "However, although the Ghost of Christmas Past can re-run scenes of those past times, it has no power, nor can it grant Scrooge power, to interfere with what has passed. Change can only affect the future" (Patten, 88).

However, in the frontispiece we are clearly in the past of two generations previous, the Regency, if we may judge by the fashions. The implication is clear: to understand how Scrooge became a notorious miser we must explore his past. And yet, as Paul Davis points out in The Lives and Times of Ebenezer Scrooge, in setting one of the story's chief flashbacks at Fezziwig's warehouse on Christmas Eve, Dickens is actually "modernizing" Christmas in that he has moved it from the baronial hall to the workplace of the lower and middle commercial classes, a city warehouse. "Leech's rendering of this image . . . has the solidity and earthiness of the caricature tradition, showing the Fezziwigs as substantially reminiscent of their predecessors in the well-fed gentry. Dressed in the clothes of an earlier period and dancing the traditional Sir Roger de Coverley, they represent the persistence of tradition in the plain and humble setting of the urban warehouse. (Davis, 69-70).

But what else is in the frame serving as supporting detail for the colourful, dancing, middle-aged "substantial" couple, centre? In place of the traditional mistletoe the inventive caricaturist has placed a miniature Christmas tree, a nod perhaps to the new fashion of greening the house introduced by Prince Albert from Germany. The artist has relegated the mistletoe to the wings, where a young couple are engaged in an embrace underneath it. The bespectacled fiddler plays upon an eminence, almost as if he is a minister in pulpit rather than a musician at a "lofty desk." The old lady sits in a prominent position (down right), the honoured senior generation attended by the children of some employees if not her own grand- or great-grandchildren, who represent those now reading the book. Otherwise, all those couples whom Dickens has particularized are lost in the maze of the background, and we can identify neither Scrooge and his fellow clerk, Dick — they may be the two young clerks immediately behind the old lady. Leech inexplicably gives downstage emphasis to the children present, left and right — representing not merely the next generation, but (perhaps) the children that Scrooge and Belle will never have.

Bibliography

Davis, Paul. The Lives and Times of Ebenezer Scrooge. London and New Haven: Yale University Press, 1990.

Dickens, Charles. A Christmas Carol in Prose, Being A Ghost Story of Christmas. Illustrated by John Leech. London: Chapman and Hall, 1843.

Patten, Robert L. Chapter 6, "Marley Was Dead." Dickens, Death, and Christmas. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2023. 74-126. [Review]

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Created 25 February 2014

Last modified 21 May 2024