Charles Dickens and the Victorian Twelfth-Night Cake

Have you been reading along with A Dickens of a Christmas? If not, it's a blog hop dedicated to things Dickensian and Christmassy, from sugarplums to fingerless mitts to Smoking Bishop to a downloadable reading of the entire text of A Christmas Carol. You can click on the Linky links below to find out what's already been posted, and more installments will keep appearing until the end of this month.

My first piece explored the "immense twelfth-cakes" that the Ghost of Christmas Present conjured up in Scrooge's rooms. It turns out that they have a long and complicated history. In this post, some elucidation of how Charles Dickens felt about twelfth-cakes, and how they figured in Victorian Christmas observances and the Dickens family festivities.

Even those who have never read a word by Dickens associate him with everything cheerful about Christmas, although they may not know that, apart from A Christmas Carol, he wrote enough Christmas books and stories to fill two volumes of his collected works. They were the blockbusters of his day; A Christmas Carol sold 6,000 copies on its first day in print, and to the end of his life Dickens toured with public readings of A Christmas Carol and other Christmas books like The Chimes and Cricket on the Hearth (as per the image above).

Christmas was profoundly important to Dickens, as it addressed his most deeply felt emotional, spiritual and intellectual motivations. To understand Dickens' enthusiasm for Christmas in general, and Twelfth Night parties in particular, it's important to know something about his childhood. As a young boy, he was happily enrolled in a boys' school run by an inspiring teacher named William Giles, who provided his students not only with good instruction, but also with plenty of fun, including "Twelfth Night festivities, with twelfth-cakes and dancing till midnight" (Johnson, p. 20).

But his father's financial incompetence brought about a family crisis that sent him as a child labourer to a factory, a miserable period that horrified and depressed Dickens so much that he seems to have spent the rest of his life trying to recapture the joys of his early childhood, and to endow every child around him with friendly attention and nonstop rounds of delightful activities.

But Christmas also spoke to Dickens' political and ethical views. He saw it as a time that exemplified the responsibility of those of means to show charity in the best sense to those less fortunate than themselves. Angus Wilson writes that "he was always a moralist, and never more so than at Christmas. His favourite moral was that in an increasingly utilitarian, industrial world, we needed to cultivate the imagination, that fancy of childhood." (p. 14)

Dickens' approach to Christianity was far from Puritanical, and very contemporary in feeling. He describes, in Sketches by Boz ("A Christmas Dinner"), an ideal family Christmas party, which is celebrated "in a strain of rational good-will and cheerfulness, doing more to awaken the sympathies of every member of the party in behalf of his neighbour, and doing more to perpetuate their good feeling during the ensuing year, than half the homilies [church sermons] that have ever been written..."

As one might guess, the Dickens family celebrated Twelfth Night with enormously elaborate parties featuring a huge cake and numerous entertainments. Dickens would arrange for a magic lantern show, or else he would himself perform feats of conjuring (a skill at which he was fairly adept). Eventually, Twelfth-Night observances became full-fledged theatrical presentations in the nursery, with lavish trappings and hilarious scripts especially adapted by Dickens for the occasion. His colleagues like authors William Makepeace Thackeray and Wilkie Collins were among the guests, and apparently as much delighted with the proceedings as any of the children.

In 1892, Dickens' daughter Mamie wrote a series of family reminiscences in the Ladies Home Journal. She recalls that "My father was again in his element at the Twelfth Night parties... He would have something droll to say to every one, and under his attentions the shyest child would brighten and become merry. No one was overlooked or forgotten by him; like the young Cratchits, he was 'ubiquitous.' Supper was followed by songs and recitations from the various members of the company, my father acting always as master of ceremonies, and calling upon first one child, then another for his or her contribution to the festivity. I can see now the anxious faces turned toward the beaming, laughing eyes of their host. How attentively he would listen, with his head thrown slightly back, and a little to one side, a happy smile on his lips. O, those merry, happy times, never to be forgotten by any of his own children, or by any of their guests. Those merry, happy times!"

The Twelfth-Night cake seems to have held a special fascination for Charles Dickens, and indeed by Victorian times the twelfth-cake was supposed to be enormous and amazingly ornate, often covered with sugar decorations in the form of the satirical characters who were portrayed at the parties.

In the 1870s, Queen Victoria would ban rowdy Twelfth-Night festivities on the grounds that they were becoming a threat to civil peace (forcing the Twelfth-Night cake to evolve into the "Christmas" fruitcake and the ornate white wedding cake). However, she and her husband Albert were also responsible for importing German Christmas customs like the Christmas tree into England, and, along with Dickens, helping to transform what had previously been a much more austere religious observance into the festival we now know.

In 1849 (six years after the release of A Christmas Carol), the Illustrated London News reported that Victoria and the royal family themselves celebrated Twelfth Night with an evening at the theatre and a prodigious twelfth cake. It was "designed and carried out by her Majesty's confectioner, Mr. Mawditt. The Cake was of regal dimensions, being about 30 inches in diameter, and tall in proportion: round the side the decorations consisted of strips of gilded paper, bowing outwards near the top, issuing from an elegant gold bordering. The figures, of which there were sixteen, on the top of the Cake, represented a party of beaux and belles of the last century enjoying a repast al fresco, under some trees; whilst others, and some children, were dancing to minstrel strains.

"The repast, spread on the ground, with its full complemens [sic] of comestibles, decanters, and wine-glasses (the latter, by the way, not sugar glasses, but real brittle ware), was admirably modelled, as were also the figures, servants being represented handing refreshments to some of the gentlemen and ladies, whilst some of the companions of the latter were dancing. The violinist and harpist seemed to be thoroughly impressed with the importance of their functions, and their characteristic attitudes were cleverly given. As a specimen of fancy workmanship, the ornaments to the cake do credit to the skill of Mr. Mawditt, the Royal confiseur."

This image shows a crowd gathering around a Victorian pastrycook and confectioner's shop window displaying a monstrous twelfth-cake that seems to be topped with figures of a king and queen. Some troublemakers have tied the clothes of two onlookers together – a clue as to the kind of mischief that caused Queen Victoria to end Twelfth-Night celebrations. A similar image by George Cruikshank may be viewed at fotoLIBRA.

Victorian confectioners vied to show off their creations in shop windows to tempt those who could afford to buy them; those who could not might try to win one. In his last book, The Mystery of Edwin Drood, Dickens describes the somewhat doleful Christmas preparations in the cathedral town of "Cloisterham": "Lavish profusion is in the shops: particularly in the articles of currants, raisins, spices, candied peel, and moist sugar. An unusual air of gallantry and dissipation is abroad; evinced in an immense bunch of mistletoe hanging in the greengrocer's shop doorway, and a poor little Twelfth Cake, culminating in the figure of a Harlequin – such a very poor little Twelfth Cake, that one would rather called it a Twenty-fourth Cake or a Forty-eighth Cake – to be raffled for at the pastrycook's, terms one shilling per member."

Mamie Dickens wrote that "For many consecutive years, Miss Coutts, now the Baroness Burdett Coutts, was in the habit of sending my brother on this his birthday anniversary [young Charlie Dickens' birthday fell on Twelfth Night], the most gorgeous of Twelfth-cakes, with an accompanying box of bonbons and Twelfth Night characters. The cake was cut, and the favors and bonbons distributed at the birthday supper, and it was then that my father's kindly, genial nature overflowed in merriment."

The cake was such an essential part of the family's holiday observances that on a trip to Italy, Dickens arranged for a cake "weighing ninety pounds, magnificently decorated" to be delivered from England; it was displayed at a Swiss pastrycook's establishment "where it was sent to have some of its sugar ornaments repaired after its voyage. No Twelfth-Night confection had ever been seen in Genoa before, and the customers wondered mightily at its bonbons, crackers, and Twelfth-Night characters, all wrought in a marvel of confectionery." (Johnson, p. 539)

The innocent revelry and indulgence, the opportunity for laughter and camaraderie with friends and family, and the childlike delights that the Twelfth-Night cake and its attendant ceremonies offered were clearly dear to Dickens' heart, and represented for him the best of Christmas, as described by Scrooge's irrepressibly cheerful nephew: "a good time; a kind, forgiving, charitable time; the only time I know of, in the long calendar of the year, when men and women seem by one consent to open their shut-up hearts freely, and to think of people below them as if they really were fellow passengers to the grave, and not another race of creatures bound on other journeys."

Top image: Dickens at his last reading. It was originally published in the Supplement of March 19, 1870 to the Illustrated London News.

Sources and further reading:

• Charles Dickens: His Tragedy and Triumph by Edgar Johnson (Simon and Schuster, 1952).
• Dickens of London by Wolf Mankowitz (Weidenfeld & Nicolson, 1976).
• The Hymns and Carols of Christmas: "January 6: Epiphany".
• Scandal and Hysteria (Diary of a Mad Bodiceripper): "Victorian Christmas week: part seven - Twelfth Night".
• Victorian Christmas: "Christmas with Charles Dickens".
• The Victorian Web: "The Queen's Twelfth-Cake", as reported in The Illustrated London News, 13 January 1849, p. 21.
• The World of Charles Dickens by Angus Wilson (Penuin Books, 1972).