“HUDDLED ‘ROUND THE HEARTH”: RITUALIZED GIFT-EXCHANGE AND CONVERSION IN TRANSATLANTIC NINETEENTH-CENTURY CHRISTMAS FICTION

This dissertation explores the cultural afterlives of the Puritan conversion narrative, a religious and narrative framework used throughout the seventeenth century. I argue that the conversion narrative secularized throughout the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, used by transatlantic Christmas authors — including Washington Irving in The History of New York (1809), Charles Dickens in A Christmas Carol (1843), and William Gilmore Simms in The Golden Christmas (1852) — to create a new narrative framework tied to nostalgia for the Christmas holiday season. This newfound Christmas conversion rearticulates its Puritan antecedent by replacing the Puritans’ performative declaration of faith with ritualized gift-exchange between social classes that acted as a symbolic repayment for work performed throughout the year. After the publication of Dickens’s A Christmas Carol, the Christmas conversion became the dominant holiday narrative structure within mid-nineteenth century writing tied to the holiday, reinterpreted by both British and American authors. Concurrent with narrative developments, Christmas celebrations ritualized, as gifting took on increased significance in transatlantic celebratory habits.