The Crazy and Wonderful and Ridiculous A Christmas Carol by Charles Dickens
I had thought that A Christmas Carol would be a perfect segue into the holiday season after a Clinton victory. Despair intervened. Despair almost won. But I started to read the Carol again, and it lifted my spirits. I read lslgrm's Introduction diary for our series, and it also lifted my spirits. Could this be the perfect time for Charles Dickens? When hatred and greed and cynicism sit on the throne, we will need inspiration.
I'm not naïve enough to think that the words of Charles Dickens can transform Trump or many of his supporters. Humbug! But it has transformed my heart, and it can transform yours.
In this first bit, I’m going to relate some of my personal observations and theories about the first two staves (chapters) of the book. Then, we shall discuss what Dickens scholars have to say.
The Carol transported me because of its audacity and ridiculousness and dazzling atmosphere, and because, like an actual carol, the book crescendos into the dreamt-for “White Christmas” and “peace on Earth, mercy mild.” Shall we start with the book’s audacity?
The Audacity of A Christmas Carol
In the first ten sentences of a very short book about Christmas, Charles Dickens used the words "undertaker," "mourners," "burial," "coffin," "deadest" and "unhallowed." It doesn't end there. In those same ten sentences—which were short sentences for Dickens—he managed to squeeze in the word "dead" four times! In the eleventh sentence, there's another "dead." Who gets away with that in a Christmas tale? It's like a children's story about ducks and ponies and murder.
The twelvth sentence has a "dead" in it. The paragraph it shares has a "funeral," a "sad event," a "dreadfully" and another "mourner." What does that look like in black and white and yellow? Over there:
Why? Dickens explains in the fourth full paragraph with yet another "dead":
“There is no doubt that Marley was dead. This must be distinctly understood, or nothing wonderful can come of the story I am going to relate.”
Feel the power of those words. When Charles Dickens wants you to comprehend something, he doesn't mumble. You don't have to decipher a subtle interplay between allusion and allegory. He is teaching us how to be moral in the same way we learn multiplication tables. You will be dead soon; you've one short chance to be a decent human being. Now repeat that to yourself again and again and again and again. If it still doesn't take, he'll send along four ghosts because nobody learns a thing from one ghost.
A delicious secret to A Christmas Carol is how Charles Dickens decided to tell it. You likely noticed it in the quotation we've already used:
“There is no doubt that Marley was dead. This must be distinctly understood, or nothing wonderful can come of the story I am going to relate.”
The Narrator
This isn't your run-of-the-mill narrator, as Dickens chose to make his story cozy and personal and tell it in the first person. He said it was a story "I am going to relate." On that same first page of the Carol, a ghost story is advertised, and the narrator assumes the air of a storyteller sitting by an English fireplace with flames dancing in the background that punctuate the tale with unanticipated phizzes, pops and crackles. The narrator tells us this about Scrooge's late partner Jacob Marley:
“Scrooge and he were partners for I don’t know how many years.”
What does that tell you about our host? The average narrator is a trivia savant and would know that Scrooge and Marley had been partners—by way of illustration—for precisely thirty-six years, eight months and six days, but Dickens wanted you to feel comfortable around his narrator, who was a regular guy or gal with no mind for details.
Compare the narrator to Scrooge.
Just a couple of pages after our host had revealed no idea how long Scrooge and Marley had been partners, Scrooge tells the two liberal gentlemen soliciting for charity, “Mr. Marley has been dead these seven years,” and, “He died seven years ago, this very night.” We are to be comfortable with our narrator. Watch out for Scrooge!
The technique continues into chapter two, as Dickens' narrator describes a visit from the Ghost of Christmas Past:
”The curtains of his bed were drawn aside, I tell you, by a hand. Not the curtains at his feet, nor the curtains at his back, but those to which his face was addressed. The curtains of his bed were drawn aside; and Scrooge, starting up into a half-recumbent attitude, found himself face-to-face with the unearthly visitor who drew them; as close to it as I am to you, and I am standing in the spirit at your elbow.”
Not only do you have a friendly and down-to-earth narrator, but your friendly and down-to-earth narrator is a ghost! (Clue Number Two: On the first page, note the narrator’s “unhallowed hands.”) There's nothing for the Christmas Spirit like a Christmas spirit, said only Charles Dickens. Counting the narrator and the illustrations, that makes twelve ghosts Dickens has introduced to you in his Christmas story before the end of the first chapter. That, my friends, is the apogee of audacity.
What the Experts Have to Say About the First Two Staves
The greatest Dickens lover of our time is John Irving, author of The Cider House Rules and The World According to Garp. Irving believes that a central thesis connecting much of Dickens’ writing is that memory is what makes a human being charitable and empathetic. Memory is what makes a human, human.
Hey. That was my theory! While reading Dickens’ The Haunted Man and the Ghost’s Bargain (another Christmas story with g-g-g-g-ghosts!), it dawned on me that Charles Dickens wanted all of us to realize that memory of the good and especially the bad is what drives our better nature. Dickens, himself, had some fond and dark memories as a child, including work in a blacking factory. We are charitable because of the good memories of the charity of others. We are empathetic because of our bad memories.
You see, in The Haunted Man and the Ghost’s Bargain, kind but sad Professor Redlaw bartered all of his memories away to a ghost. From that minute forward, he became an empty shell of a man with no good will and a King Midas case of bad luck affecting everything he touched.
What does that have to do with the first part of A Christmas Carol? Well, the Ghost of Christmas Past is the very avatar of Memory.
Moreover, The Ghost of Christmas Past takes Ebenezer back to see both good and bad memories. First, he witnesses himself as a child in solitude during the Christmas holidays, while the other children are at play (A bad memory). Next, the room around the older Scrooge is magically transported to a year later, when his darling little sister, Fan, arrives to take him, unexpectedly, and happily, home for Christmas (A good memory).
The lesson taught by the Ghost of Christmas Past is that these are your memories, both good and bad; remember them and use them for good.
Jacob Marley and Capitalism
We skipped over Scrooge’s first spectral visitor, his late partner and business doppelganger, Jacob Marley. We will attend to him now. Like Scrooge, Marley was an archetype from the period of exploding Capitalism in England. For the first time in human history, events were happening faster than the human mind could process them.
At the Speed of Electricity and Steam
Around the time of A Christmas Carol, Samuel Morse uses electricity to send the first telegraph, kerosene and vulcanized rubber are developed; Neptune is discovered. Steam paddlewheelers and the first iron-hulled boats set sail, while England introduces the postage stamp. Its parliament licenses more than two hundred railroad companies to build 9,500 miles of track. Hypnotism originates. Dickens becomes proficient at mesmerizing friends and is reputed to have cured a friend’s chronic condition with it.
The Industrial Revolution had swept over the continent, and there were new Masters of Industry to supplant the nobles. Not everyone trusted the changes, though, including the Romantics, such as Coleridge, Keats, and Wordsworth. Twenty or so years before the Carol, Mary Shelley published her warning about the potential excesses of industrialization: Frankenstein; or, The Modern Prometheus.
Into the breach strode Charles Dickens with his Carol. But enough digression, let’s get back to Jacob Marley, Scrooge and Capitalism.
The Capitalism and Literary Experts at ValuesandCapitalism.com
Perhaps my third favorite review of A Christmas Carol comes from our good friends at the website valuesandcapitalism.com. I like it because it is charming. You see, the folks at valuesandcapitalism value capitalism, and they are affronted when others fail to value capitalism as they believe capitalism should be valued. The existence of a book that seems to indicate that spreading the wealth may not be a grave sin must be responded to. So, our friends at valuesandcapitalism want it to be known that,
“There would not have been a story if Scrooge and Marley were not successful businessmen. If they had been unhappy poor folk, instead of unhappy rich folk, the beginning would not have been possible…. More importantly, the conclusion would not have been possible if Ebenezer Scrooge had not been a successful businessman.”
Do you see now why I find that quite charming? It is like claiming that we would have dearly missed the sublime moments of the Civil Rights Movement if it weren't for Slavery. This smacks of desperation, and it reminds me of Douglas Adams. In So Long and Thanks for All the Fish, Adams created a professional lady with an interestingly niche market. It went like this:
“Do you want to have a good time?” said a voice from a doorway.
“As far as I can tell,” said Ford, “I’m having one. Thanks.”
“Are you rich?” said another.
This made Ford laugh.
He turned and opened his arms in a wide gesture. “Do I look rich?” he said.
“Don’t know,” said the girl. “Maybe, maybe not. Maybe you’ll get rich. I have a very special service for rich people…”
“Oh yes?” said Ford, intrigued but careful. “And what’s that?”
“I tell them it’s OK to be rich.”
The folks at valuesandcapitalism—who so desperately must value capitalism—continue as follows: "None of this generosity would have been possible had not Scrooge been a successful businessman and had not there have been a system of wealth creation such as capitalism." So long, Capitalists, and thanks for all the alms!
Everybody Sees Themselves in Dickens
It is easy to believe that your god believes as you do, that your economic theory will bring happiness, or that your hero has the same warts and desires and hatreds. But it is hardly ever true, and it is hardly ever true in the case of Charles Dickens. Only a successful businessman can afford to be happy according to the Capitalists. That’s false, and the Cratchits are Dickens’ testament to that.
Instead of attacking economies, religions and governments, Dickens’ efforts were directed at a more sublime goal. Look:
“’A small matter,’ said the Ghost, ‘to make these silly folks so full of gratitude.’
‘Small!’ echoed Scrooge.
“The Spirit signed to him to listen to the two apprentices, who were pouring out their hearts in praise of Fezziwig: and when he had done so, said,
‘Why! Is it not? He has spent but a few pounds of your mortal money: three or four perhaps. Is that so much that he deserves this praise?’
‘It isn’t that,’ said Scrooge, heated by the remark, and speaking unconsciously like his former, not his latter, self. ‘It isn’t that, Spirit. He has the power to render us happy or unhappy; to make our service light or burdensome; a pleasure or a toil. Say that his power lies in words and looks; in things so slight and insignificant that it is impossible to add and count ‘em up: what then? The happiness he gives is quite as a great as if it cost a fortune.’”
If you can get past the exalted quality of that last sentence, and if you somehow get beyond the fact that these ghosts practice the Socratic Method and manipulative psychological principles at a level akin to a Cambridge don, you see this: Dickens’ goal was grander than changing a government, a religion or an economy; he sought to change the individual, and that is, at the same time, both a smaller objective and a bolder ambition.
George Orwell
“Dickens is one of those writers who are felt to be worth stealing. He has been stolen by Marxists, by Catholics and, above all, by Conservatives,” and yet, Orwell continues, “his target is not so much society as ‘human nature’.” A recent contemporary example is the equality demanded by our LGBT friends. It didn’t happen at once, and it wasn’t because a law was changed. Individual hearts and minds were changed. Dickens, himself, changed hearts and minds about debtor’s prisons, the forerunner to contemporary Women’s Shelters, Slavery in America, orphanages, air pollution, and so on. Those changed hearts and minds then changed entire institutions.
G.K. Chesterton
Another great English writer who found Dickens worthy of essay was Gilbert Keith Chesterton. One of his keen observations dealt with a duality found in many works by Dickens:
“These two primary dispositions of Dickens, to make the flesh creep and to make the sides ache, were a sort of twins of his spirit; they were never far apart and the fact of their affinity is interestingly exhibited in the first two novels.”
I would suggest that they were even more evident in his later Carol. For example, to what does Dickens turn to when a ghost business partner first enters his Christmas story? Humor:
“’You don’t believe in me,’ observed the Ghost.
‘I don’t,’ said Scrooge.
...
‘Why do you doubt your senses?’
‘Because,’ said Scrooge, ‘a little thing affects them. A slight disorder of the stomach makes them cheats, You may be an undigested bit of beef, a blot of mustard, a crumb of cheese, a fragment of underdone potato. There’s more of gravy than grave about you, whatever you are!’
Scrooge was not much in the habit of cracking jokes…. The truth is, that he tried to be smart, as a means of distracting his own attention, and keeping down his terror; for the spectre’s voice disturbed the very marrow in his bones.
What many don’t realize is that Dickens was a master of the macabre. One of his biggest fans was Edgar Allan Poe, and on occasion, Dickens showed that he could out-Poe Poe, while still maintaining a droll sense of humor. About the Carol, Chesterton wrote persuasively,
“The beauty and the real blessing of the story do not lie in the mechanical plot of it, the repentance of Scrooge, probable or improbable; they lie in the great furnace of real happiness that glows through Scrooge and everything around him; that great furnace, the heart of Dickens. Whether the Christmas visions would or would not convert Scrooge, they convert us….
The story sings from end to end like a happy man going home….”
I think we should end with that.
Characters in Staves (Chapters) I & II:
- Ebenezer Scrooge
- Fred (Scrooge’s Nephew)
- The Two Liberal Gentlemen
- Bob Cratchit (Scrooge’s Clerk)
- The London Fog
- Jacob Marley’s Ghost
- A Revue of Other Restless Spirits
- The Ghost of Christmas Past
- Fan (Scrooge’s Sister)
- Scrooge’s Old Schoolmaster
- Old Fezziwig (Scrooge’s Old Boss)
- Dick Wilkins (Scrooge’s Co-Clerk)
- Belle (Scrooge’s Fiancée)
Discussion Ideas:
Childrens’ Story, Fable, Economic Polemic, Moral or Something Else?
Why Do People Still Watch and Read A Christmas Carol?
Charles Dickens: Great Man, or Greatest Man?
One Scholar Argues that the Carol is a “Conversion Tale”; Scrooge is (or was) Jewish. So …
Is Scrooge Believable?
Anything Else You Want to Say!