You should have seen him, writes Charles Dickens, of his eponymous hero The Haunted Man (1848), the fifth of his Christmas books.
“You should have seen him in his dwelling, about twilight, in the dead winter time. When the wind was blowing shrill and shrewd, with the going down of the blurred sun. When it was just so dark, as that the form of things were indistinct and big – but not wholly lost. When sitters by the fire began to see the wild faces and figures, mountains and abysses, ambuscades and armies, in the coals. When people in the streets bent down their heads and ran before the weather.”
Dickens introduced A Christmas Carol with a hymn to the frost, and The Chimes with an incantation to the winter rain. By the time he started his last Yuletide novella, he had gone into narrative autopilot and at least two dozen consecutive descriptive sentences begin with the same word. “When those who were obliged to meet it were stopped at angry corners, stung by wandering snowflakes alighting on the lashes of their eyes – which fell too sparingly and were blown away too quickly, to leave a trace upon the frozen ground.”
On and on he goes, evoking travellers by land, and the moment “when mariners at sea, outlying on icy yards were tossed and swung above the howling ocean dreadfully.” He turns hostile climate into literary atmosphere and makes heavy weather of it, for more than two pages of the Chapman & Hall Fireside Edition, to open a story that shamefully many of us have never finished.
