A Christmas Carol: Dickens and the Little Ice Age

Scrooge’s third visitor, by John Leech, 1843. (From Wikimedia Commons)

Charles Dickens was born on 7 February 1812. He had only 31, when began to write A Christmas Carol in September 1843. The book was published on 19 December 1843. The novella tells the story of  Ebenezer Scrooge, a bitter old man who finds salvation through the visits of the three Ghosts of Christmas (Ghost of Christmas Past, Ghost of Christmas Present, and Ghost of Christmas Yet to Come). Dickens divided the story in five “staves”, where he describes the brutal winter and the horrors of social inequality. Scrooge is considered to be the very embodiment of winter: “No wind that blew was bitterer than he, no falling snow was more intent upon its purpose, no pelting rain less open to entreaty.”

Dickens describe the severe weather in many parts of the book: “…and they stood in the city streets on Christmas morning, where (for the weather was severe) the people made a rough, but brisk and not unpleasant kind of music in scraping the snow from the pavement in front of their dwellings, and from the tops of their houses, whence it was mad delight to the boys to see it come plumping down into the road below, and splitting into artificial little snow-storms.”

A Frost Fair on the Thames at Temple Stairs by Abraham Danielsz Hondius (Abraham de Hondt), circa 1684 (From Wikimedia Commons)

Dickens grew up during the coldest years of the Little Ice Age, between 1805 to 1820. Many of the Christmas stories that are popular today were written during that period and winter landscapes were commonly depicted by artists like Pieter Bruegel, Hendrick Avercamp,  and Abraham Hondius.

The Little Ice Age (LIA) was a period that extends from the early 14th century through the mid-19th century, during which the Northern Hemisphere suffered from severe and prolonged cold winters. The period between 1600 and 1800 marks the height of the Little Ice Age.

Volcanoes are a possible cause for the LIA. The Tambora eruption on April 10, 1815, released two million tons of debris and  sulphur components into the atmosphere.  The following year was known as “the year without summer”. Charles Lyell describes the eruption in his Principles of Geology: “Great tracts of land were covered by lava, several streams of which, issuing from the crater of the Tomboro Mountain, reached the sea. So heavy was the fall of ashes, that they broke into the Resident’s house at Bima, forty miles east of the volcano, and rendered it, as well as many other dwellings… The darkness occasioned in the daytime by the ashes in Java was so profound, that nothing equal to it was ever witnessed in the darkest night.”

Reconstructed depth of the Little Ice Age varies between different studies (From Wikimedia Commons)

Dickens revitalized the traditions of Christmas and to Victorian England, Dickens was Christmas. But he also contributed to the popularity of geology with the creation of ideas and images for public consumption, such as he did in Bleak House, with the description of the streets of London where ancient lizards roamed, and volcanoes and quakes shocked the earth.

 

References:

Charles Dickens, A Christmas Carol, Chapman & Hall, 1843.

BOER, de J.Z. & SANDERS, D.T. (2002): Volcanoes in Human History: The Far-Reaching Effects of Major Eruptions. Princeton University Press: 295

Brian M. Fagan, The Little Ice Age: How Climate Made History 1300-1850 (2001), Basic Books.

Buckland, Adelene , ‘“The Poetry of Science”: Charles Dickens, Geology and Visual and Material Culture in Victorian London’, Victorian Literature and Culture, 35 (2007), 679–94 (p. 680).