CHARLES DICKENS is often said to have “invented the modern Christmas”. He would not be happy about it. I don’t believe he would have regarded his reformed miser Scrooge’s gift of a turkey to the struggling Cratchits – “the prize turkey… not the little prize turkey; the big one”, as Scrooge instructs – as ushering in the monumental blow-out of over-spending and over-consumption that we call Christmas.

It is remarkable how strongly Christmas figures in the writings of our greatest novelist. In Great Expectations, it is a Christmas dinner that is interrupted by soldiers searching for the escaped convict Magwitch. Their arrival spares young Pip an investigation into a missing pie, which he has secretly taken to the fugitive, out on the marshes.

In The Pickwick Papers, his first novel, Dickens devotes what he entitles “A good-humoured Christmas Chapter” to the seasonal festivities at Dingley Dell, where their host is noted for “keeping ” Christmas – and every other worthwhile tradition. The Pickwickians dine, play games and skate chaotically. “Happy, happy Christmas,” pronounces their creator.

Dickens set out his cheery Christmas stall in an early essay – A Christmas Dinner. Those present still gather today. Grandparents and excited kids of course. But the star is probably a universal “Uncle George”. Dickens pictures him – among similar moments – “carrying bottles into the dining parlour, and calling for corkscrews, and getting into everybody’s way”.

The author reflects: “There seems magic in the very name of Christmas. Petty jealousies and discord are forgotten; social feelings are reawakened… Would that Christmas lasted the whole year through (as it ought).”

Anticipating A Christmas Carol, which immortalises Scrooge, that essay even includes a reference to a dead child, as Dickens says “one little seat may be empty…”.

But he urges his readers to consider more “your present blessings, of which every man has many, than your past misfortunes, of which all men have some”. It was not the festive side of what he called “this Saint Christmas” that motivated him. Introducing a collection of the five tales, including A Christmas Carol, that he wrote specially for Christmas, he described his purpose as “to awaken some loving and forbearing thoughts, never out of a season in a Christian land.”

Nearly 20 years later, in an article written shortly before his death but not published until after it, he reiterated that he had endeavoured “to inculcate some Christian lessons in books”.

By then, however, he was dismayed that the huge success of his Christmas books, especially A Christmas Carol, reprinted six times within five months of its publication, had not fostered the charitable Christmas spirit he had hoped for. Exactly 20 years after ‘Carol’ was published, he reported finding in London, “close to all the institutions that govern this land, shameful instances of neglect of children…paupers…wretched cripples…a disgrace to civilisation and an outrage to Christianity”.

Christmas figures in Dickens’ last book, The Mystery of Edwin Drood – but very different from as in his first. An uncle appears to have murdered his nephew – on Christmas Day. Dickens’ death before finishing the book leaves the crime, and thereby the uncle’s guilt, uncertain.

But though Dickens himself always “kept Christmas” well, it’s hard not to speculate that he now took a darker view of “Uncle George” and his merrymaking.