he Strange Proclivities of Mr. Dickens feels like staying at the Victorian Christmas party long after respectable people have gone home.

The streets glow under gaslight while music and laughter spill from an old Galveston building. You step inside dressed for another century and immediately someone presses a steaming cup of mulled red wine into your hands.

Cranberries bob at the surface. Orange peel curls through the steam. Cinnamon, ginger, and star anise warm the air.

Then Mr. Dickens appears.

He is cheerful. Suspiciously cheerful.

A pipe burns nearby, polished wood surrounds the room, and whatever serious literary conversation you imagined having has somehow turned into stories, another glass of wine, and a debate involving pirates who nobody can quite explain.

That is The Strange Proclivities of Mr. Dickens.

It begins with hot mulled red wine, cranberry, warm spices, and orange zest, rich and festive without becoming syrupy. As the evening settles in, pipe tobacco and dark woods emerge beneath it, while a traditional chypre base brings mossy, polished elegance.

The result is warm, woody, boozy, slightly eccentric, and wonderfully atmospheric.

Like meeting one of literature’s great minds after hours and discovering he is much more fun than the textbooks suggested.

Notes: Hot mulled red wine, cranberries, warm spices, orange zest, traditional chypre, pipe tobacco, and woods.