Paul Johnson

The plum pudding trick

A magical Christmas party, starring Charles Dickens

Which was the best Christmas party ever? Perhaps it took place on Boxing Day, Tuesday 26 December 1843, at the home of Nina Macready, wife of the famous actor. It was her birthday, but her husband was away on tour, and to cheer herself up she decided to give a children’s party, but invited a lot of grown-ups too. One of them was Jane Carlyle. Her grumpy husband, battling with his book on Cromwell, refused to go. She was feeling dyspeptic, having been obliged, for the first time, to stuff a turkey. Feeling horrible on the morning of Boxing Day, Jane was about to send an apology when a note arrived from a distraught Mrs Macready, imploring her not to ‘disappoint my poor little daughter’. So she dressed up, and ordered a fly, and was given a characteristic parting accolade by her grinning husband, ‘My dear, I think I never saw you look so bilious. Your face is green and your eyes all bloodshot!’

Was it surprising, asked Jane in a letter to her niece Jeannie. ‘I was very ill. Had been off my sleep for a week and felt as if this might almost finish me.’ But, she added, ‘little does one know in this world what will finish them or what will set them up again?’ She thought not even ‘a long course of mercury would have acted so beneficially on my liver as this party, which I had gone to with a sacred shudder! It turned out to be the very most agreeable party that ever I was at in London.’

Star of the party was Charles Dickens. He was, as he put it, ‘mad with excitement’. His A Christmas Carol had appeared on 19 December, and by Christmas Eve had sold 6,000 copies.

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