The Battle for Christmas (43 page)

But in the course of the novel, without any training or support, this boy turns out to be a saintly child. He refuses to try alcohol or tobacco
(“‘It’s agin my nater,’” he explains); he disdains to complain about his condition; and he befriends and supports—emotionally as well as financially—a variety of other outcasts, even becoming a surrogate parent to an adult woman. At one point the author is actually able to refer to her childish hero as “a miracle of goodness,” an instinctively perfect little boy.
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And at the end of the book he proves his worth by voluntarily sacrificing any prospect of marrying the wealthy girl he loves. If this newsboy begins the novel as a male version of Stowe’s Topsy, he ends it as a male version of another young character from
Uncle Tom’s Cabin
—little Eva. Such a child hardly resembled the kind of real-life newsboy that Charles Loring Brace had to deal with.

It was with sentimental fantasies such as that of Elizabeth Oakes Smith that charitable agencies had to contend, but also to exploit, during the second half of the nineteenth century. And on no occasion did those fantasies become more pervasive than at Christmas. The original model for such fantasies was another fictional character, Dickens’s Tiny Tim. This boy is a cripple, but spiritually he is a perfect model of humanity, a paragon of patient, cheerful selflessness. (He is even more forbearing than his father in the face of adversity, and with the added vulnerability of his lameness.) In fact, characters like Tiny Tim resemble nothing so much as the selfless German children we encountered in
Chapter 5
, the children idealized by Coleridge and Pestalozzi.

Two Images of Newsboys
. The street urchin on the right appeared in the 1872 edition of Elizabath Oakes Smith’s novel
The Newsboy
. The appealing little boy on the left was the subject of an 1857 picture by the New York painter James Henry Cafferty, titled “Newsboy Selling New York Herald.” For all the contrast between them, the two pictures are essentially mirror images of each other.
(Both illustrations: Courtesy, Harvard College Library)

It was fictional children like Tiny Tim—needy children who were forbearing and grateful, and sometimes disabled as well—who would become the ordinary objects of charity in scores of stories and sketches written in the middle of the nineteenth century.
A Christmas Carol
was only the first of a host of stories published over the next several decades (and beyond) that evoked the gap between rich and poor, and used young children to imagine ways of bridging this gap through acts of direct personal generosity at Christmas. One such sketch, a nonfiction account published in 1844 (the year after
A Christmas Carol
appeared), sets the scene. Traveling on the ferry between New York and Brooklyn, the writer has encountered a small girl, palpably impoverished, and is struck by something unusual in the girl’s demeanor, something that set her apart from “the whining, obtrusive beggars of this large city.” Sitting quietly amid the other, more prosperous patrons of the ferry, this child signified “poverty that complains not.” Her face conveyed “utter hopelessness,” but also a striking “resignation.” The writer was drawn to that, and other passengers were, too: “Children crushed to the earth with poverty and crime are common in large cities: they are painfully numerous. But it is seldom that such quiet, uncomplaining little sufferers are met there.”
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Here was the basis of the familiar, almost stereotypical genre in which poor children stand huddled in the cold outside the home of a rich family, gazing patiently through the window at the latter’s Christmas luxuries. As might be expected, these stories invariably deal with a Christmas encounter between someone rich and someone poor, an encounter in which the former is touched by both the plight and the patience of the latter (generally a child). The encounter is marked by a special Christmas gift that leaves both the giver and the recipient deeply touched. It is the old exchange of gifts for goodwill.

Again and again, it was the passivity, the uncomplaining resignation, of such fictional children in the face of pervasive, ambient opulence that rendered them fit objects of direct charity. It was because they asked for nothing that they proved themselves worthy of receiving something. In
one such story a little girl clothed in a dress that is faded but “clean” is looking into the window of a toy shop on Christmas Eve. But when a prosperous woman standing next to her wonders out loud whether the girl “‘wanted something she couldn’t get,’” the girl responds in “an unexpectant manner,” saying only that the toys were “‘good to look at.’”The prosperous woman thereupon offers the poor little girl a gift of $5, and the girl proceeds to give the money to her mother. After the prosperous lady learns about the girl’s selfless gesture, her
own
daughter, too, decides to pass along some of her surplus Christmas presents. At the end, the reader is assured that the poor little girl will “never forget” these gifts in times of future hardship.
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There is a deeper pattern to some of these stories, and it is a revealing one. It has to do with resolving the vexatious public issues of class division—issues that were essentially unresolvable within any version of the prevailing ideological language—by transforming them, under cover of fiction, into issues that
are
resolvable: private issues of family, morality, and forgiveness. I have not found a single nineteenth-century Christmas story that deals forthrightly with the dynamics of American class relations.

In the commonest version of this pattern, the poor children turn out, at the end, to be related to their benefactors by blood itself. Take, for example, a story published in
Godeys Lady’s Book
in 1858, with the title “Christmas for Rich and Poor.” This story was accompanied by a two-page illustration showing precisely the now-familiar stereotypical scene: the rich family inside on the left side, the poor children outside on the right. Any reader of this story would have been led to assume that the story dealt with class divisions. And indeed, as it happens, the two children
are
poor, and their mother is ill as well. They had been out earlier that evening (the story is set on Christmas Eve), attempting to buy a small present for their mother in a local shop, and there they had been approached by a wealthy older man who overheard their plight (and witnessed their selfless demeanor) and immediately invited them to visit his house later in the evening so that he could provide them with food to take to their sick mother. That they do (once inside the house they observe toys “scattered in careless profusion”). But as they stand conversing with the rich man’s daughter, waiting for their promised basket of food, it transpires that they are actually the children of the rich man’s
other
daughter, his favorite and most indulged daughter, a woman who had shamed the family fifteen years earlier by eloping (on Christmas Eve, at that) with a man whom her father had refused to let her marry. The wayward daughter’s husband had soon proved unable to support her decently, and after
his death she and her two children had fallen into abject poverty. All this while her wealthy father had refused to have anything to do with her. But now, on
this
Christmas Eve, he is eager to relent. The story ends with a scene of forgiveness and reconciliation.
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In other words, the division of social class that separated the “rich” from the “poor” of this story’s title was more apparent than real. Not only did these poor children behave like well-trained members of respectable society—that is actually what they were. The real problem that the wealthy man in the story had to deal with was not that of social class but of family dynamics. The cathartic gesture he makes at the end is one in which he forgives his daughter, after fifteen years of exile, and takes her back into the family. Of course, he feels relieved and cleansed by this act, but his catharsis, and that of the story’s readers, have little to do with the expectations raised by the story’s title and its accompanying illustrations.
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“Christmas for Rich and Poor.”
This pair of pictures were printed on two opposing pages of
Godeys Lady’s Book
for December 1858. They provided the illustration for the story of the same title.
(Courtesy, American Antiquarian Society)

At the same time that Christmas stories appeared about poor children who were patient and grateful, other stories were appearing that portrayed the jaded responses of more prosperous children. By the 1850s, fictional accounts about such jaded rich children were becoming commonplace. An 1854 children’s book written by Susan Warner, the author of the 1849 best-seller
The Wide, Wide World
, drove this point home. In this book,
Carl Krinken: His Christmas Stocking
, Warner indicated that the presents received by the children of the rich made them feel “discontent.” Such well-off children were hard to please, Warner wrote; they generally “fretted because they had what they did, or because they hadn’t what they didn’t have.” The Christmas stocking of a typical rich child was stuffed with “candy enough to make the child sick, and toys enough to make him unhappy because he didn’t know which to play with first….”Warner added sarcastically: “It was a woful [sic] thing if a top was painted the wrong color, or if the mane of a rocking-horse was too short, or if his bridle was black leather instead of red.”
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Several decades later, no less popular a writer than William Dean Howells would write a delightful story about a little girl who expresses a wish that Christmas could come every day—and who has her wish fulfilled in horrific fashion. After a few weeks, the girl and her friends become so sick of receiving “disgusting presents” that they begin to throw them out on the street unopened, and soon the police began to warn the children “to shovel their presents off the sidewalk, or they would arrest them.” Before long, the overworked garbage collectors of the city are refusing to pick up any more Christmas trash! Eventually, of course, the little girl learns her lesson.
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On a more modest scale there was the story that Harriet Beecher Stowe had written in 1850, “Christmas; or, The Good Fairy.” In that story (discussed in
Chapter 4
), Stowe indicated that Christmas shopping for one’s own family and friends had become difficult, since such prosperous folk were “sick, and sated, and tired with having everything in the world given [them]” at Christmas. But Stowe’s tale went on to propose a solution to this problem. Its plot hinged on just that point: It was easy enough, after all, to find people who had not been sated by Christmas presents, people who could be counted on to be intensely grateful for even the smallest trifle.

Those people, of course, were the poor. The language Harriet Beecher Stowe chose to describe them is quite suggestive. A poor person offered the prosperous shopper a “fresh, unsophisticated body to get presents for;” the poor as a class provided the rich with a supply of “unsophisticated subjects to practice on.” And that is just what this story is about. Its prosperous main character becomes a “good fairy” for a poor family who lives in the neighborhood—and, indeed, the poor family does respond with all the gratitude anyone could wish.

Unsophisticated subjects to practice on
. This may sound like strange language. But others were making much the same point. Take Louisa May Alcott, for example. The four young heroines of
Little Women
, in the opening chapters of that novel, do the very thing that Stowe proposed: They go off on Christmas morning (after receiving their own presents of the New Testament) and bring gifts to a poor family in the neighborhood. There is evidence that many Americans shared this concern. In the last two decades of the nineteenth century, there was something of a movement to form Christmas clubs for prosperous children, clubs that were designed to foster selfless behavior during the Christmas season by encouraging their members to hold Christmas parties for their less-privileged peers, and to give away some of their own old Christmas presents. The Children’s Christmas Club of Portland, Maine, organized in 1882, pressed its members “to save [old] toys, books, and games, instead of carelessly destroying them,” and to present these castoffs at a Christmas dinner held for the children of the local poor. A similar club was later formed in Washington, D.C., with the daughter of the U.S. postmaster general serving as its president, assisted by the daughter of the U.S. president himself, Chester Arthur.
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