It is widely acknowledged that, on the basis above all of A Christmas Carol, Dickens had a hand in the invention of modern Christmas. I want here to put forward a lesser but not unconnected claim, the exploration of which brings into focus an equally rich and international cultural context. During my childhood in London in the years immediately following the Second World War, Christmas meant a great deal to me, as a time of then uncharacteristic cornucopia, of plentiful food and drink, present-giving and entertainment. Two Dickensian forms of the latter were de rigueur in my family: a visit to the pantomime at Golders Green Hippodrome, and above all my highlight of highlights, a visit to Bertram Mills's circus at Olympia.

Bertram Mills's circus originates from 1920, that is to say from the aftermath of another cataclysmic war, when likewise ‘normality’ gradually returned, and with it, a renewed and heightened craving for diversion and entertainment. Mills himself was a well-connected member of British society's upper crust, and he hoped to make money by filling expensive seats as well as cheap ones. So he garnered support from people like Winston Churchill and Ramsay MacDonald to try to overcome a traditional distaste for the circus amongst the middle and upper classes which we shall encounter here more than once. That the tide was already turning, at least in some sections thereof, might be shown by the fact that many of the ‘Bloomsberries’ were circus devotees.

This chapter challenges the assumption that Dickens belongs in some exclusive way to Anglo-Saxons by opening a window on to the enormous quantity of European writing that unmistakably acknowledges him as its master. I start by querying another commonplace – championed by no less authoritative a Dickensian than Philip Collins – that Dickens was profoundly English, with what George Augusta Sala calls ‘a good-humoured contempt of foreigners’. This is surely hard to square with such things as Dickens's ceaseless activity in promoting various foreign national independence struggles in Europe, or the trouble he took to become proficient in French and Italian. It seems particularly untrue of his relations with Italy, which clearly go beyond intense political engagement on behalf of the movement for Italian unification, the Risorgimento. After an initial period of generalised revulsion, Dickens quickly began to practise a sharp distinction between disgust at the deplorable social and political conditions of Italy and love of its people, not dissimilar to a later formula about Britain itself: ‘My faith in the people governing is, on the whole, infinitesimal; my faith in The People governed is, on the whole, illimitable.’ ‘Give me the smiling face of the attendant, man or woman; the courteous manner; the amiable desire to please and to be pleased; the light-hearted, pleasant, simple air – so many jewels set in dirt – and I am theirs again to-morrow!’ he writes in Italy, and later in London confesses a compulsion to ‘talk to all the Italian boys who go about the streets with Organs and white mice, and give them mints of money per l'amore della bell'Italia’.