Simon Callow reads 'The Christmas Tree' by Charles Dickens

Christmas was with Dickens all his writing life. The famous Dingley Dell sequence in his first novel, Pickwick Papers, is an early instance. A Christmas Carol is obviously his major statement on the theme, an entirely characteristic alignment of the celebratory aspect of the occasion with deeper (and deeply Christian) themes of transformation and redemption. But his fascination with Christmas was many layered and included deep nostalgia for what he increasingly thought of as his idyllic childhood. In Household Words, the weekly magazine he founded and edited, he contributed a number of highly personal and more or less autobiographical pieces, of which "A Christmas Tree" is one. Like some of the other pieces of a similar character, it is an almost Proustian meditation on the past, simultaneously full of deep resonances and particular observation, and unexpectedly moving.