Some call him the man who invented Christmas. The Brain Trust thinks he’s a pretty good writer and so did many composers. This week we quizzed on musical connections with Charles Dickens.

George Frideric Handel (1685-1759) Air & Variations on 'The Harmonious Blacksmith' Charles Dickens’ love of music is well-documented, not only in his letters and personal writings, where he describes his admiration for Chopin, Mendelssohn and Gounod, but also in many, many references throughout his published works. In Chapter 22 of Great Expectations, The main character Pip is given the nickname “Handel” by his roommate Herbert Pocket. Inspired by Pip’s upbringing under the hand of his gentle uncle, the blacksmith Joe Gargery, the nickname refers to one of Handel’s most popular keyboard compositions. The Harmonious Blacksmith is an air with variations that appears in Handel’s fifth keyboard suite, and though Handel fans may instantly recognize the quaint melody, the true origin of the curious title remains unknown.

Lionel Bart (1930–1999) Oliver!: Food Glorious Food It’s only fitting that the word “gruel” rhymes with “cruel.” Gruel, a thin, mostly tasteless porridge was the lamented meal  for the orphans in Charles Dickens’ novel Oliver Twist, subtitled The Parish Boy’s Progress. The character Oliver Twist is a young orphan who escapes a life of child labor, only to find himself working for a roving band of juvenile ne’er-do-wells, picking pockets. Oliver upgrades from his diet of gruel to one of fried sausages and gin while working as a pick-pocket for the gang-leader Fagin. After a variety of run-ins with several whimsical characters, Oliver finally ends up in the custody of the generous Mr. Brownlow and gets to eat the treats he wished for in this song from the 1960 hit musical. Oliver! wasn’t the first Dickens musical adaptation—that distinction goes to A Christmas Carol—but it’s likely the most successful.  

Ralph Vaughan Williams (1872-1958) On Christmas Night: Marley's Ghost, The Spirit of Christmas Ralph Vaughan Williams is no stranger to Christmas music. His Fantasia on Christmas Carols and Fantasia on Greensleeves are some of the most popular classical Christmas arrangements today. We just heard an excerpt from a much less well-known work by Vaughan Williams: a ballet he composed that is loosely based on Dickens’ Christmas Carol, titled On Christmas Night. The English Masque, as Williams called it, tells the story of Scrooge through dancing and singing, and mixes well-known carols with the composer’s unapologetically English style. We just heard the moment in the ballet where Scrooge receives Jacob Marley, the first of four spectral Christmas visitors. By the end of the ballet, they give him the greatest gift of all: a second chance to change his miserly ways. 

Paul Williams (b. 1940) The Muppet Christmas Carol: Overture Alistair Sim, Patrick Stewart, Derek Jacobi, Bill Murray, many an esteemed actor has brought the ill-tempered Ebenizer Scrooge from the pages of Dickens’ A Christmas Carol to the stage and screen. Only one has done it with the help of a famous green frog. Michael Caine plays Scrooge in A Muppet Christmas Carol; he is one of the few humans in the adaption. Kermit the Frog portrays his humble clerk Bob Cratchett, but more important to tonight’s show: the thingamawhatsit muppet Gonzo the Great portrays Charles Dickens in the film, serving as a narrator and audience surrogate. In speaking about the film, director Brian Henson (the son of Muppets creator Jim Henson) said that Gonzo was cast as Dickens because he seemed like the least likely choice to play Dickens. But aside from his  comedic effect, Gonzo also keeps this widely praised adaptation true to the source material, quoting lines directly from the book throughout the film, all, of course, with color commentary from his friend, Rizo the Rat. 

Arthur Sullivan (1842-1900) HMS Pinafore: Refrain, Audacious Tar Though he was friends with many musical contemporaries, the friendship between Dickens and Arthur Sullivan is particularly notable because of the generational difference. Sullivan was an up-and-coming composer in his 20’s, and the 60 year-old Dickens was already considered one of Britain’s most celebrated authors. The two met in Paris when they were both invited by a mutual music critic friend to attend a performance of Gluck’s Orfeo. They very much enjoyed each other's company and became travel companions. Sullivan wrote the following about the friendship in a letter sent from Paris: “I went about a good deal with Dickens. He rushed about tremendously all the time, and I was often with him. His French was not particularly good. It was quite an Englishman’s French, but he managed to make himself understood, and interviewed everybody. Of course he was much my senior, but I have never met anyone whom I have liked better...He always gave one the impression of being immensely interested in everything, listening with the most charming attention and keenness to all one might say, however youthful and inexperienced one’s opinion might be…In fact, he was the best of good company.”

Arnold Bax (1883-1953) Oliver Twist: Oliver at Mr Brownlow's House Arnold Bax began writing film scores very late in his career, and well after he stopped writing the grand symphonic poems that defined his reputation. In fact, his knighthood and appointment as “Master of the King’s Music” in 1942 came as a surprise to the composer as he had considered himself pretty much retired by then. However, his scores for Malta GC and a 1948 film adaptation of Oliver Twist became popular concert pieces in their own right.  Director David Lean’s film comes two years after his successful adaptation of another Dickensian work, Great Expectations, with much of the same cast from that film returning for Oliver Twist.   

Alexander Mackenzie (1847-1935) The Cricket on the Hearth, Op. 62 In what can be described as a Victorian-era celebrity sighting, composer Alexander Mackenzie once glimpsed Charles Dickens walking down Oxford Street. He writes that the writer wore a red waistcoat of an “assertive hue” and seemed preoccupied with reading signboards, likely searching for inspiration for the eccentric character names that fill his novels. In 1902 Mackenzie adapted one of Dickens’ “not quite as famous” Christmas-time stories into a three-act operetta. The Cricket on the Hearth is described as a sentimental domestic fairy tale, where a cricket chirping on the hearthstone in a common carrier’s house acts as a sort of guardian angel for the Peerybingle family. Their lives curiously intersect with a poor toymaker, who is employed by the miser Mr. Tackleton, whose fate is conspicuously similar to another Christmas-time miserly character we are all familiar with.

Henry Russell (1812-1900) Charles Dickens (1812-1870) The Ivy Green (lyrics by Dickens) We’ve already heard tonight that Dickens was a classical music enthusiast. He was even an amateur musician himself, both a singer of parlor songs and possibly a student of the concertina. His ambition didn’t stop there. Many original lyrics appear in Dickens novels. The song we just heard, The Ivy Green, is one of two which appear in The Pickwick Papers. Although Dickens did not originally provide music to accompany these lyrics, he eventually collaborated with English composer Henry Russell in 1838 to publish the verses from Pickwick Papers as parlor songs. Around the same time, Dickens also completed a libretto for a comedic operetta titled The Village Coquettes. Unfortunately a fire broke out in the theater where it was staged, and all of the music for the production was destroyed.  

Traditional English The College Hornpipe The College Hornpipe, an English country dance, first appears in dancing manuals from the late 18th century, although the melody was likely known in England even earlier. It was certainly known to Charles Dickens, who mentions it in both his novels "Dombey and Son" and "David Copperfield," where it is whistled by the optimistic Wilkins Micawber. Eventually, there were  other dance tunes  associated with Charles Dickens, including The David Copperfield Polkas and The Christmas Carol Quadrilles. These tunes had no genuine association with those novels and were simply trying to cash in on their popularity. The College Hornpipe endures, with this rousing arrangement by Mark O’connor.