ABSTRACT
On Good Friday 1849, the imprisoned Chartist poet and orator Ernest Jones received a visit from two distinguished radical politicians. In June 1850, just before his release, Jones was barred from reading Christmas Shadows, an anonymous novel published by Newby in 1850. Clearly, the authorities regarded this text as dangerous, and the decision to censor confirmed the important role played by imaginative literature in the Chartist movement. Yet Christmas Shadows is not, like Thomas Martin Wheeler’s Sunshine and Shadow, a novel about Chartism. As this summary shows, Christmas Shadows uses pastiche both in its narrative method and paratextually in Alfred Ashley’s accompanying illustrations. These images show particularly clearly how the needlewoman myth has been woven into Dickens’s redemptive mythology of Christmas. Christmas Shadows, therefore, displaces Dickens into this new climate of popular imagining and post-1848 political debate in which the needlewoman trope is energized by unresolved conflicts of class, politics, gender, and even race.
