Frontispiece from the first edition of Dickens’s ‘The Cricket on the Hearth’

Dear Readers, I’ve seen three separate versions of Dickens’s ‘A Christmas Carol’ this year (including the highly-recommended ‘Muppet Christmas Carol’), but in fact the author wrote several pieces for the festive season, including ‘The Cricket on the Hearth’. Alas, this piece now languishes, unread and unappreciated. Could it be that this is because the eponymous Cricket is now rarely seen, and when it is it’s usually in boiler rooms or rubbish dumps, where the heat from the decaying midden keeps it warm?

House Cricket (Acheta domesticus) Photo By Geyersberg, Professor emeritus Hans Schneider – Own work, CC BY-SA 3.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=19915899

In the Dickens story, the cricket is described as ‘a little household god’, who watches over the family of ‘slow, lumbering, honest’ John Peerybingle and his pretty young wife Dot. Alas, John is jealous of his wife, and  has all sorts of ridiculous misgivings. In the end, the cricket transforms himself into a fairy to tell John that he is an idiot and his wife is not having an affair. I assume that Jiminy Cricket of Pinocchio fame is cut from the same cloth, what with his insanely happy personality and habit of dropping moral maxims whenever things get tough.

Crickets sang from the hearths of England for hundreds of years – as recently as 1890, W.H Hudson remarks on them shrilling from every cottage as he made his rounds above Selborne.  I suspect they were often brought in with the wood or coal or peat that was used to fuel an open fire, and once in they would ‘sing’ cheerfully away. In ‘Bugs Britannia’, by Peter Marren and Richard Mabey, it’s mentioned that you can tell the temperature by the number of chirrups that a cricket makes  – for Fahrenheit, you simply count the number of chirrups in fourteen seconds. To convert to Centrigrade, add 25, divide by 3 and add four. However, for accuracy it’s pointed out that you should have at least ten crickets and find the average number of chirrups. Good luck with that, people! And note that, wherever crickets were found singing by the hearth, it was considered very unlucky to harm them – the rumour was that the ghost of the dead cricket would inform all of their relatives, who would come and bite holes in the clothes of the cricket-murderer.

I feel a bit sad that crickets no longer pop in to keep us company on winter nights. Or do they? Is anyone still visited by crickets, or do they remember such a thing?