The Holly-Tree Book

Inn-trospection?

The Holly-Tree Inn is a collection of short stories by Charles Dickens and other writers that was originally published in the 1855 Christmas edition of Dickens's Household Words. It consists of seven parts, three of which were written by Dickens himself, one story, The Ostler, by Dickens's friend Wilkie Collins, and three others by William Howitt, Adelaide Anne Proctor and Holme Lee. My Delphi e-reader collection only contains the bits written by Dickens himself, but a full version of the collection can be read on Wikisource.

The main character in this collection is a young man named Charles, who presents himself as a bashful man and one that was thwarted in love and therefore means to emigrate to the United States via Liverpool. On his way there, however, he is surprised by heavy snowfalls and has to stop at the eponymous Holly-Tree Inn, where, at first rather reluctant to press himself on the innkeeper and his family and servants, he whiles away some time in solitude before he starts taking an interest in the lives of the other people at the inn and listening to their stories. In the hour of his departure, when the roads have been freed from the snow - which may well serve as a symbol of his tendency to bury himself in his own shell -, his love troubles are resolved in a rather implausible ending in which, all rather unpremeditatedly falls into place.

Dickens contributed the introduction, a rather quirky piece of writing in which the narrator tries to kill his time by following all his memories of every inn he ever stayed at or heard of, which are sometimes delightfully ironic - for instance the tale of an innkeeper who turns his unsuspecting guests into pies, making them drowsy by feeding them - you might have guessed - pie - and which illustrate a bored man's train of thought quite well. He also wrote the ending as well as the tale of the Boots, which focuses on a runaway couple of eight-year olds who want to get married at Gretna Green but are artfully detained at the inn by a former servant of the boy's father.

All in all, these three chapters are quite interesting but far from the best that Dickens has ever written. It may be surmised, however, that the work as a whole followed the pattern established by Dickens in his immortal A Christmas Carol, where Ebenezer Scrooge, who is as much a miser as a social recluse, is made to realize that he has to take an interest in the people around him. Likewise, our bashful narrator seems to learn to be more out-going and to trust in people and to listen to them - the resolution of the story itself being an example of how useful this can be whenever you want to deal with your problems instead of just running away from them. This can be gathered from the concluding words of the last chapter:

"I began at the Holly-Tree, by idle accident, to associate the Christmas time of year with human interest, and with some inquiry into, and some care for, the lives of those by whom I find myself surrounded. I hope that I am none the worse for it, and that no one near me or afar off is the worse for it. And I say, May the green Holly-Tree flourish, striking its roots deep into the English ground, and having its germinating qualities carried by the birds of Heaven all over the world!"

Both in Scrooge and in the narrator of The Holly-Tree Inn, we can find deep distrust and insecurity, but when those two men learn to regard themselves as true members of the human family, they seem to be given an opportunity of reconciling themselves with society and of becoming happier individuals into the bargain.

TRIVIUM
When Dickens was in Boston in 1867, he apparently read The Holly-Tree Inn to an audience amongst which was the American writer Annie Adams Fields. Inspired by the idea of class-transcending human interest she found in Dickens's story, Fields founded a system of inexpensive eating houses for the poor working on a non-profit basis. These were called The Holly Tree Inns as a tribute to Charles Dickens.