Turkey, above all of the traditional trappings of the festive table, is linked with the name of Charles Dickens. When Scrooge repents in A Christmas Carol, it is an outsize, prizewinning turkey that he sends over to Bob Cratchit’s home as a generous symbol of atonement.
But the author’s love of the seasonal bird was not confined to his fiction: it was central to his idea of family festivity in the real world, too. Previously unseen domestic notes, tableware and household letters reveal that Dickens lavished time and attention on the “astonishing capabilities” of his turkeys, planning lengthy roasting times and boasting of how another had produced several meals.
A new exhibition, Food Glorious Food: Dinner with Dickens, which opens on 28 November at the museum in Dickens’ former London house, will revel in the Victorian writer’s love of food and entertaining.
“People will be struck, I think, by how much genuine enthusiasm Dickens had for hospitality. And a lot of the correspondence at Christmas time concerned the turkey,” said the Doughty Street museum’s curator, Louisa Price, who has put together the exhibition with Pen Vogler, author of Dinner with Dickens.
One of the more revealing of Dickens’s private letters on show is an invitation written to his old friend Thomas Beard in December 1836, in which he describes how a late night out has dampened his anticipation of Christmas fun, but not of the turkey. It includes an emphasis on allowing the bird enough time in the oven – still a recognisable problem today.
He writes: “My Dear Beard. We propose giving the Turkey until 4 tomorrow, in order that he may be well done. Be punctual and don’t place too much reliance on our excellent friend Warburton. I arrived home at one o’clock this morning dead drunk, and was put to bed by my loving missis. We are just going to Chapman’s sisters’ quadrille party, for which you may imagine I feel remarkably disposed.”
Punctuality is another big theme in the famous author’s dinner invitations. Meals were generally served in the late afternoon or early evening and, with the standardisation of public clocks prompted by the introduction of railway timetables, the significance of being on time acquired a modern urgency.
“Although Dickens satirises dinner parties in several of his novels, he really needed these social events to fuel his imagination,” said Price. “His appreciation of good food comes from his childhood experience of hunger. At 12 years old, he had to look after himself in London, working during the day in a blacking factory. He often uses food in the novels to show the differences between the classes.”
Several of the “thank-you” notes in the exhibition show how often Dickens was given a turkey as a Christmas present. Gifts of luxury meat, fruit or preserves were common among the upper and middle classes.
Writing to thank his publishers for such a gift on 2 January 1840, Dickens’s account of how many meals the bird contributed to is also familiar today: “My Dear Sirs. I determined not to thank you for the Turkey until it was quite gone, in order that you might have a becoming idea of its astonishing capabilities. The last remnant of that blessed bird made its appearance at breakfast yesterday – I repeat it, yesterday – the other portions having furnished forth seven grills, one boil, and a cold lunch or two.”
In other letters, not in the museum’s collection, Dickens is known to have thanked Angela Burdett Coutts for a turkey he compares jokingly to a small baby. Occasionally, he even procured one for himself, but, as Price points out, this did not always run smoothly. “One year Dickens ordered a bird to be sent into London by train, but there was a fire in the railway carriage and the bird was burnt and pieces of the barbecued meat were handed out near the scene of the fire,” she said. “Before Dickens heard about the incident, he wrote an angry note in capital letters simply saying: ‘WHERE IS MY TURKEY?’”
The rival, smaller Christmas bird, the goose, was also a favourite at the time, appearing in A Christmas Carol when the ghost of Christmas present takes Scrooge to see the impoverished Cratchits eking out a small meal so that with “apple-sauce and mashed potatoes, it was a sufficient dinner for the whole family”.
Geese had been established as Christmas fare since the time of Elizabeth I, and poorer families saved for them by joining a goose club, like the one featured in the Sherlock Holmes story The Adventure of the Blue Carbuncle. The Cratchits’ goose would have been cooked at a baker’s, since few working-class households had ovens.
But turkey also had a long association with Christmas. Introduced to Europe in the 16th century, the birds were reared outside the capital in Norfolk, Suffolk and Cambridge and walked in to town over weeks, their feet bound in rags or coated with tar. This is why Dickens jokes the bird Scrooge bought for the Cratchits “never could have stood upon his legs”.
