Okay, it’s not Mr. Gaiman’s Christmas Carol — the honor belongs to Charles Dickens, who used to read an abridged version of the classic novella on his book tours. Six years ago I first posted this, Gaiman had only the previous year dressed up as Charles Dickens and read from Dickens’ own script in a performance for the New York Public Library, a performance he repeated last week. At the end you’ll find the link to the audio of Gaiman’s first performance, and a cracker it is! Therefore, without further fanfare . . . .
Charles Dickens might not have invented the English Christmas, but he is largely responsible for hauling it out of closet to which it had been consigned by the dour Puritans, who were known to have employed “sniffers” during the Christmas season, going through streets and alleys of towns and villages alike, sniffing out Christmas goose and thereby bringing to justice the unrepentant revelers of that banned holiday. With gusto Dickens dusted off the hollies and figgy puddings and generally rummed the place up. While he certainly shares honors with Prince Albert, Queen Victoria’s husband, who brought der Tannenbaum to the island, much of our Christmas tradition, including the appearance of Father Christmas himself, we owe to the redoubtable Mr. Dickens, whose most popular foray into Christmas publications was the 1843 A Christmas Carol in Prose: Being a Ghost Story of Christmas.
For most of us, A Christmas Carol was a story you watched on a screen. There are at least 50 film versions (no one seems to have a clear count) in dignity ranging from Christopher Plummer to Mr. Magoo. And then there are the television adaptations, which at this time of year run in syndication, including Bugs Bunny, the Muppets, and the Made-For-TV kitschfests on a loop on the Hallmark Channel. And then there are the stage versions. If ever there were a work defined by its derivatives rather than the original, it’s Charles Dickens’ A Christmas Carol. And given the derivatives, it’s all swooning hearts and flowers.
My first copy of The Real Thing was a cheap late-Victorian version, bound in fake leather, printed in a tiny font on yellowed fragile paper; the whole thing designed to be tucked discreetly in the palm of the hand and read decorously during boring public functions. I read it first in church, my minister at the time having been a world champion in the “boring and pointless” class of sermonizing.
The experience was as revelatory as any fantastic conversion story could have been. I had seen at least a dozen film and stage versions of A Christmas Carol, each one more elaborate and cheaply sentimental than the last. The first time I opened the novella, turned the title page and read,
Marley was dead: to begin with. There is no doubt whatever about that. The register of his burial was signed by the clergyman, the clerk, the undertaker, and the chief mourner. Scrooge signed it. And Scrooge's name was good upon 'Change, for anything he chose to put his hand to. Old Marley was as dead as a door-nail.
I knew this was something very different. Plain, muscular prose; tension from the first sentence. After all, the sub-title names it as “A Ghost Story” and Marley is dead. From the first, you know two things: Marley isn’t completely dead, and Scrooge isn’t as right about Marley as he thinks he is. No, this is not a sentimental tale about Christmas; it’s very different.
A Christmas ghost story, for one thing, one set squarely in the tradition of Victorian gothic tales. What is it about Christmas and ghost stories that made the tale so potent? What has made it so durable that the name “Scrooge” is instantly recognizable?
Written at the end of the Industrial Revolution, in a London overstuffed with the poor and disenfranchised, the hungry and the desperate, in the economically brutal and hard-nosed 1840’s when Thomas Malthus’ writings made it acceptable for decent folk to blame the poor for their own poverty, a condition frighteningly similar to today’s Republican and Libertarian parties, Dickens uses the holiday to put a human face on poverty. Scrooge begins by sneering about philanthropy, “Are there no prisons? Are there no workhouses?” only to have the ghosts first put a human face on poverty (the face of Tiny Tim, in whom Scrooge sees himself as a child) and then turn the question on him, breaking his heart.
We all know the story. Culturally it’s as much a touchstone as the tales of the Prodigal Son and the Great Flood, Arthur and Sword in the Stone, Ahab and the Whale, Luke Skywalker and Darth Vader. More than parable, A Christmas Carol treads the paths of myth. Scrooge is not so much converted at the end of the story as he is recovered, made new again. All the cynicism has been rubbed off his soul, and he is again born to the world:
He went to church, and walked about the streets, and watched the people hurrying to and fro, and patted children on the head, and questioned beggars, and looked down into the kitchens of houses, and up to the windows: and found that everything could yield him pleasure. He had never dreamed that any walk -- that anything -- could give him so much happiness.
We could talk a great deal about Dickens’ biting social satire and his keen wit, or his fascination with the grotesque and gothic, which are, in his writings, much more interesting and vivid than the virtuous; we can discuss how it is that, even in A Christmas Carol the wicked characters—Scrooge foremost among them—get all the best lines. Who among us can’t relate to his early observation
If I could work my will...every idiot who goes about with “Merry Christmas” on his lips, should be boiled with his own pudding, and buried with a stake of holly through his heart.
We can grump along with Edmund Wilson that, were Scrooge consigned to a therapist’s couch, he would be diagnosed as manic depressive and is surely no realistic character. Nor are the Cratchett’s anything other than a noble poverty, an idea. All of which is true, but it matters not at all. That’s the magic of myth—it slips the bounds of realistic fiction even as it picks the precise and perfect detail that grounds is sufficiently in lived experience that it remains real and vivid, vivid as the pervasive London fog so gelid that even the sound of the bell seems to shiver, wholesome as the smell of the wash house, or is it the pudding leaving its steam bath?
Despite countless attempts to catch the lightning magic of Dickens’ prose, A Christmas Carol is never better than in its original form, scrubbed of Hallmark card frills and deepened with the basso profundo notes of gothic fascination—chap-fallen ghosts and spectral graveyards. The delight of the Fizziwig family feast compared to the just-barely-enough Christmas supper for the Cratchetts in their near-destitution, and both counterpoint to the old woman freezing to death across the street from Scrooge’s counting house. It wouldn’t be Dickens if there weren’t sentimentality, but it’s a sentimentality grounded in outrage over the broken social contract of his time, with its horrific inequality and the wealthy’s self-righteous denial of assistance, of aid, education, even food, to the poor. There is much in Dickens 1843 novella that rings true today in our late capitalism, in our current political paradigm. In that, it’s a myth for today, a myth of redemption.
A Christmas Carol deserves a fresh read—accept no substitutes or adaptations; they are pale reflections of the real thing. If you have time this holiday season, I would point you toward Tortmaster and lslgrm’s terrific re-read of A Christmas Carol from 2016, part 1 and part 2, filled with insightful commentary and appreciation.
And because everyone deserves a treat, last year, Neil Gaiman dressed in Victorian finery and, using Dickens’ own prompt copy, delivered a public reading of A Christmas Carol according to Dickens’ performance notes. It’s a packed little holiday treat, full of deliciousness and spookiness and delight.
Ghosts and Christmas — it was a natural fit long before Tim Burton, right?