During the 1840s, while his serial fiction began to show an increasing complexity in its analysis of contemporary society, Dickens embarked upon a new literary venture – the Christmas Book – which was to confirm his association with the middle-class family even further. Christmas is the great domestic festival we associate with Victorian society and Dickens was its specialist. Writing in Blackwood's Magazine in 1871, Margaret Oliphant described him as ‘the first [writer] to find out the immense spiritual power of the Christmas turkey’. Her wry comment refers to the kind of annual family festivity described in the sketch, ‘A Christmas Dinner’, published in Dickens's earliest work. Its narrator asks: ‘Who can be insensible to the outpourings of good feeling, and the honest interchange of affectionate attachment, which abound at this season of the year? A Christmas family-party! We know nothing in nature more delightful! There seems a magic in the very name of Christmas.’ The narrator gives an account of the grand preparations for the event – the purchase of the bird, stirring of the pudding, and cleaning of the table ware – before the day itself is described, with its family reunions, games, songs, stories, and magnificant dinner of turkey, mince-pies, pudding, plum-cake and wine. […]