We turn first to Andrew Lang, with Prince Prigio (1889) and Ricardo of Pantouflia (1893), where W.M. Thackeray’s earlier mixture of satire and high spirits in The Rose and the Ring has given way to Lang’s sophistication and inward smile. Or almost so—for the fact is, Lang is in some ways better than he tries to be. On this matter of satire and high spirits in The Rose and the Ring, one of Thackeray’s Christmas books—there are five of these, published as a collection in The Christmas Books of Mr M.A. Titmarsh, in 1887 and 1891 and 1897 in Thackeray’s Works. I know Our Street (the second in the collection) was first published in 1848 and The Rose and the Ring (the last) in 1854. They are written for children, in the manner of children’s books of the time, we would say, except that (barring John Ruskin’s The King of Golden River) we have no children’s books of the time much beyond Sunday School tracts—and none of these really provide Thackeray with the model either for The Kickleburys on the Rhine (1851) or The Rose and the Ring, or The History of Prince Giglio and Prince Bulbo (1854).
We will look briefly here at The Rose and the Ring. In the midst of wars and rumors of wars, at Christmas-time in 1854, Thackeray (under the name M.A. Titmarsh) gave to the world, as his Christmas book for that year, The Rose and The Ring, in which—it will be recalled—the first chapter “Shows How the Royal Family Sate Down to Breakfast” and opens with the words “This is Valoroso the XXIV, King of Paflagonia, seated with his Queen and only child at their royal breakfast-table, and receiving a letter which announces to his Majesty a proposed visit from Prince Bulbo, heir of Padella, reigning King of Crim Tartary” (p. 1). Of course, a letter from Crim Tartary would appropriately arrive at an over-groaning board (notice the number of egg-cups in front of the Queen), and we should keep in mind, as we tread warily through the Italianate names of Thackeray’s fable, that King Bomba of the Two Sicilies (Ferdinand II, 1810–1859) had been headline and breakfast-table news in England for a dozen years in 1854, and would be for nearly half a dozen more.
So had been the Russians and the Poles, and the Russians were fighting the British in the Crimea (home of the Crimean or Crim Tartars)—though it is uncertain whether it is this, or a recollection of Marshal Kutusov in the Napoleonic Wars forty years before, that has given us Count Kutasoff Hedzoff (pp. 27ff). The point is that Thackeray’s Christmas-book is in part a topical satire. All these foreigners are faintly ridiculous—and some, like Bomba, are quite ridiculous and also cruel and evil and illiberal (it is a very English view)—so if we are to write about ridiculous people who are also cruel, we will write about foreigners. But note that the edge of the edged weapon, and the recognition of the satire, comes from a knowledge of what was going on in 1854: it does not inhere in the book itself. What does inhere in the book is a certain magic, a classical fairy-tale pattern (the lost princess), the character of the Fairy Blackstick, and the tearing high spirits of the whole performance. “‘Well, hang the prince.’ ‘I don’t understand you,’ says Hedzoff, who was not a very clever man. ‘You Gaby! He didn’t say which Prince,’ says Gruffanuff.
It is far from accidental that The Rose and The Ring was published as a Christmas Book, and indeed the Victorian—and particularly the early Victorian—institution of Christmas is one of the few examples of Victorian carnival. And even later, there were the great English Christmas parties given (among others) by Friedrich Engels in the last decade of his life. In his story of Scrooge, as certainly in his earliest work, Dickens enters that realm of carnival, of bouleversement, of suspension of normal rules: the very name of Scrooge has the sound of carnival, and while the story is comedic (in Northrop Frye’s sense), it is told very much in the comic vein. Of course, it too is a Christmas book. These Christmas books existed before Victoria’s reign, but they are essentially an early Victorian phenomenon. We may briefly look at some of Thackeray’s (or Titmarsh’s) own remarks on the phenomenon of Christmas books. After all, these Christmas books are one part of the creation of children’s literature. The quotations given here are from his “About a Christmas Book” from Fraser’s in December 1845 (Vol. 32, pp. 744–48), and from his “A Grumble about Christmas Books” in Fraser’s in January 1847 (Vol. 35, pp. 111–126).
From the first comes the following, in the persona of M.A. Titmarsh to Oliver Yorke, Esquire: “Do you not remember, my dear fellow, our own joy when the 12th came and we plunged out of school, not to see the face of Muzzle for six weeks?” (p. 744). And again, of the Christmas-book illustrators, “Messrs. Cope, Redgrave, Townsend, Horsley, &c., who go back to the masters before Raphael” (p. 745). And again, “Mr. Tenniel’s ‘Prince and Outlaw’ represent a prince and outlaw of Astley’s . . . the ballads to which the pictures are appended are of the theatrical sort, and quite devoid of genuineness and simplicity” (p. 748).
And from the second come these, also in a letter from M.A. Titmarsh to Oliver Yorke, Esquire:
I have read Christmas books until I have reached the state of mind most deplorable. “Curses on all fairies!” I gasp out; “I will never swallow another one as long as I live! Perdition seize all Benevolence! Be hanged to the Good and the True! Fling me every drop of the milk of human kindness out of the window!—Horrible curdling slops, away with them! Kick old Father Christmas out of doors, the abominable old impostor! Next year I’ll go to the Turks, the Scotch, and other Heathens who don’t keep Christmas. Is all the street to come for a Christmas box? Are the waits to be invading us by millions, and yelling all night? By my soul, if anybody offers me plum-pudding again this season, I’ll fling it in his face! (p. 111)
Now while all this is pleasurable to quote (and Scrooge did no better than the second—Bah! Humbug! Indeed!), it is quoted here not for the pleasure of it, but because it shows Thackeray’s conviction of the nature of Christmas, as of the Christmas book. There is a serious point to all this. We may add one more line, from the “Grumble” (p. 125): “Love is the humorists’ best characteristic, and gives that charming ring to their laughter in which all the good-natured world joins in chorus.” So the Christmas book should be genuine and loving, humorous in the best sense, simple (perhaps even “homely” in the British meaning of the word), calling back the days of one’s own childhood, or boyhood, or girlhood.
And so, presumably, Mr. Titmarsh’s own Christmas book was intended to be and do, though there seems to be some alloy—even of sarcasm—in the laughter. But surely this is a very mild form of carnival, almost (so to speak) an ordered form, that Thackeray is writing about. Quite so—yet when he wrote his own Christmas books, just as when he wrote these passages, his high spirits are themselves the spirits of carnival, of excess, of turning things topsy-turvy. That’s true, but for our purposes here, there’s more. We talk about Lewis’s conscious decision to write a children’s book—but it is at least arguable that Thackeray was the fore-runner here, with his conscious decision to write children’s (Christmas) books back a hundred years before Narnia. Or perhaps we should say Christmas (children’s) books. The point is, as with Lewis, that what he wanted to say demanded a certain form, though it’s arguable Thackeray played a greater part in designing that form than Lewis did. There is, for example, an influence of Narnia on Harry Potter (admitted, I think, by J.K. Rowling), but the Harry Potter books are school-stories with a fairy-tale