Where Is My Turkey?

Dickens's daughter wrote in a letter to the playwright George Bernard Shaw, if you could make the public understand that my father was not a joyous, jocos, gentlemen walking about the world with a plum pudding and a bowl of punch. The myth-making process around Dickens goes right back to Dickens crafting his own image very deliberately. A lot of what we've discussed about how Dickens felt about his own Christmases comes from fiction and journalism he wrote. And yet prior to the 1970s or thereabouts, Dickens wasn't generally considered worthy of academic study in the first place. He was always popularly read but not always the big canonical writer that he is today.