CHRISTMAS CAROL

     Below you see the Maclise drawing of Dickens at the time he wrote A Christmas Carol. Forster wrote that "nothing ever done of Dickens himself has conveyed more vividly his look and bearing at this yet youthful time."  

IGNORANCE AND WANT

     In 1843, an American friend of Dickens came to vist. Henry Wadsworth Longfellow arrived in London, and, of course, Dickens had to show him the worst of the city. From the Forster biography:

"[W]e had lately taken Longfellow to see in the nightly refuges of London, 'thousands of immortal creatures condemned without alternative or choice to tread, not what our great poet calls the primrose path to the everlasting bonfire, but one of jagged flints and stones laid down by brutal ignorance."

FORSTER BIOGRAPHY at 182.

     Dickens was a champion of education for all. Ignorance, he thought, was the absolute bane of society. Ignorance also became the name of one of his most extraordinary characters in the Carol. This, then, was his inspiration for one of the greatest scenes in literature and film.

     But it wasn't one trip to the skid rows of London that he managed. On the contrary, this he saw as his constant duty. Miles and miles at a time and on foot.

(Les, this goes to the incredible characters of "Ignorance and Want" in the Carol.).

DICKENS WRITING THE CAROL

"It was the work of such odd moments of leisure as were left him out of the time taken up by two numbers of his Chuzzlewit; and though begun with but the special design of adding something to the Chuzzlewit balance, I can testify to the accuracy of his own acount of what befell him in its composition, with what a strange mastery it seized him for itself, how he wept over it, and laughed, and wept again, and excited himself to an extraordinary degree, and how he walked thinking of it fifteen and twenty miles about the black streets of London, many and many a night after all sober folks had gone to bed. And when it was done, as he told our friend Mr. Felton in America, he let himself loose like a madman."

FORSTER BIOGRAPHY at 182, 186.

UNIFIED THEORY OF CHARLES DICKENS

     In my mind, the Dickens short story called The Haunted Man and the Ghost's Bargain is the chief manifesto of the author's beliefs. The richness of one's heart is built and maintained by the memory of the good AND the BAD times. Empathy depends upon memory. From Forster's biography about the genesis of the Carol, at page 182: " ... but for disappointments the year had also brought might never have been thought of." His great achievements were built on past disappointments.

     I thought that I was unique in this perspective, but I have since found out that author John Irving also believes that Charles Dickens preached the gospel of memory. Irving went further with the idea writing a book to explore the subject: "'In One Person' is a story about memory."

    I am not religious, though I enjoy Christmas. It allows me to give away things without looking crazy, which is a bit of sad commentary on America but nonetheless true. Whenever else can you have a "secret friend" and not be accused of untoward motives? At what other time do you hear about gold coins discovered at the bottom of a Salvation Army kettle? What is the best, and possibly only, season to touch the heart of a Scrooge?

     But Christmas wasn't always Christmas. The holiday got a major push with the publication of A Christmas Carol in 1843. About the same time, christmas cards were invented, and the royal family gathered around something called a "christmas tree." Christmas, as we know it, was a tradition built over time. Besides taking apart debtor's prisons, cruel orphanages, child labor and slavery, Charles Dickens was a builder. How many of the better parts to Christmas do we owe to what The Great Empathizer helped to construct?

     I don't know. I'm not a Dickens scholar, just a Dickens reader and lover. So, instead of pondering the imponderables and effing the ineffables, let's look at A Christmas Carol, shall we?




I.  What Was Dickens Trying to Do?

     In the first ten sentences of a very short book about Christmas, Charles Dickens used the words "undertaker," "mourners," "burial," "coffin," "deadest" and "unhallowed." But it doesn't end there. In those same ten sentences, which were short sentences for Dickens--one consisted of a single word--he also managed to squeeze in the word "dead" four times! In the eleventh sentence, there's another "dead"! Who gets away with that in a story about Christmas? It's like a children's story about ducks and ponies and vampires.

     The twelvth sentence has a "dead" in it. The paragraph it shares has a "funeral," a "sad event," a "dreadfully" and another "mourner." Why? Dickens explains in the third 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."

  Every time I think about those two sentences, I can feel the power of his words. When Charles Dickens wants you to comprehend something, Charles Dickens doesn't mumble or stutter. You don't have to decipher a subtle interplay between allusion and allegory to understand him. 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.  
II.  The Cast of Players
     One of the delicious secrets 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."

a.  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 hinted at, and the narrator assumes the air of a storyteller in a bar, around a campfire, or, in 1843 England, presumably about the fireplace with flames dancing in the background punctuated with unanticipated pops and crackles. In telling the story of 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 your 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 and one-third years on Tuesday of next week, but Dickens wanted you to feel comfortable around his narrator, who was a regular guy or gal with no mind for details. He wanted this to be a story you might hear around a campfire or in a pub. 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 now 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! 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, and we've barely started chapter two.


b. Ebenezer Scrooge

     The Scrooge of the first number of chapters is a bit of a bastard. The character raises in my mind critics of Dickens who have alleged that his players were too fantastic. I disagree. I see Dickensian characters, both for the good and for the worse, everywhere, in cities and on farms, in schools and universities and banks, in the Army and especially around courtrooms and post offices, and although many claim the author was engaged in mortal combat with the aphorism that truth is stranger than fiction, his characters and their characteristics are, in fact, universal.

     Take the Scrooge of the first two chapters and compare him to Mitt Romney. Both of them hate large swaths of the population; both squirrelled away large sums of money; Scrooge threatened the employment of one individual, whereas The Great Offshorer remuneratively relieved thousands from the burden of employment. They both whined about the Awful and Bloody War on Rich People:

"'This is the evenhanded dealing of the world?' he said. 'There is nothing on which it is so hard as poverty; and there is nothing it professes to condemn with such severity as the pursuit of wealth!'" -- Charles Dickens, Chapter 2, A CHRISTMAS CAROL (1843).

"[T]hey believe that they are victims ... who believe that they are entitled to health care, to food, to housing, to you-name-it." -- Mitt Romney

    There are plenty of Ebenezer Scrooges in the world. The Dickens character--unlike many of the others--was simply more honest in his vices and resentments. One of the reasons The Carol became so popular is because these traits were and are universal.

c.  Tiny Tim

     As crippled as Scrooge was of spirit, Tim Cratchit dealt with the physical equivalent. He was the obvious mirror image of Ebenezer Scrooge, having so little to give, yet giving so much. After the rest of his family had provided thanks for their paltry Christmas feast, including nothing but praise for such "a small pudding for a large family," Tiny Tim uttered the immortal, "God bless us every one!"
     The Ghost of Christmas Present let Scrooge witness the happy Cratchit family, and just before leaving, in response to a question from Scrooge about Tiny Tim's future, said,

"'I see a vacant seat,' replied the Ghost, 'in the poor chimney corner, and a crutch without an owner, carefully preserved. If these shadows remain unaltered by the Future the child will die.'"

d.  Food and Drink

     Dickens made food and drink a player in his macabre Carol, and they danced and sang their parts like no time before or since--enough to make a Food Network producer blush. It is the season to feast and be merry, and Charles Dickens took full advantage, likely causing audiences throughout the British Empire and the New World to re-read, with appetite, descriptives like this over and over again:

"It was [Scrooge's] own room. There was no doubt about that. But it had undergone a surprising transformation.... Heaped up on the floor, to form a kind of throne, were turkeys, geese, game, poultry, brawn, great joints of meat, suckling pigs, long wreaths of sausages, mince pies, plum puddings, barrels of oysters, red-hot chestnuts, cherry-cheeked apples, juicy oranges, luscious pears, immense Twelfth cakes, and seething bowls of punch, that made the chamber dim with their delicious steam."

    Just a couple of pages later, the ghost took Scrooge to witness this:

"There were great, round, potbellied baskets of chestnuts, shaped like the waistcoats of jolly old gentlemen, lolling at the doors, and tumbling out into the street in their apoplectic opulence. There were ruddy, brown-faced, broad-girthed Spanish onions, shining in the fatness of their growth like Spanish Friars, and winking from their shelves in wanton slyness at the girls as they went by, and glanced demurely at the hung-up mistletoe. There were pears and apples, clustered high in blooming pyramids; there were bunches of grapes, made, in the shopkeepers' benevolence, to dangle from conspicuous hooks that people's mouths might water gratis as they passed...."

    Remember that there were no Costcos, Krogers, Piggly Wigglys, Food Lions, A&Ps, or non-union (and certainly no union) WalMarts in 1843 England, and unless you lived in a major city like London, this kind of cornucopia of delights was rare if not unknown. For the Victorian Age, what Dickens described was like making love on a bed of hundred-dollar bills. Of course, the crowning glory was the turkey so big that it equaled in size the boy Scrooge dispatched to buy it for the Cratchits. This king of all poultry was so large it needed to be moved about by horse and cab. But just as Dickens used the infirmity of Tiny Tim to balance out the crippled Scrooge, he needed something to balance out the effects of festive food and drink. Those players were Ignorance and Want.  

e.  Ignorance and Want

     Two of the most memorable players in this fantasy were children who appeared from the folds of the robe of the Ghost of Christmas Present to terrify Ebenezer Scrooge. Dickens described them as follows:

"They were a boy and girl. Yellow, meagre, ragged, scowling, wolfish; but prostrate, too, in their humility. Where graceful youth should have filled their features out, and touched them with its freshest tints, a stale and shrivelled hand, like that of age, had pinched, and twisted them, and pulled them into shreds. Where angels might have sat enthroned, devils lurked, and glared out menacing. No change, no degradation, no perversion of humanity, in any grade, through all the mysteries of wonderful creation, has monsters half so horrible and dread. ... 'Spirit! are they yours?' Scrooge could say no more. 'They are Man's,' said the Spirit, looking down upon them. 'And they cling to me, appealing from their fathers. This boy is Ignorance. This girl is Want. Beware of them both, and all of their degree, but most of all beware this boy, for on his brow I see that written which is Doom, unless the writing be erased.'"

f.  The Rest of the Cast &tc.

     I am not going to describe the rest of the cast, the plot, the mood, or anything else, with a couple of modest exceptions. [SPOILER ALERT] I have always been too young or too old to countenance an unhappy ending. In that respect, A Christmas Carol will never disappoint. Not only did Tiny Tim not die, but Dickens wrote:

"Scrooge was better than his word. He did it all, and infinitely more; and to Tiny Tim, who did NOT die, he was a second father."

    It is impossible not to laugh at the thought of literary critics experiencing a throbbing embolism of rage and impotence at the pure and simple joy in those words, especially the use of capital letters! Tiny Tim is ALIVE!  

     My other exception is to mention Scrooge's little sister, Fan. Early in the narrative, our main protagonist is led by the Ghost of Christmas Past to a time when he was a student, when young Scrooge was still a "dear Brother," and when he enjoyed a tiny but lovely sibling. Scrooge wasn't always abusive, he had to strain to reach that mark. Like Ignorance and Want, but only in reverse, he gradually became fearsome and yet so pitiful. But during this earlier time of his life, Ebenezer Scrooge loved his sister and recognized her worth. He was good enough, especially for his age, to realize that little sisters are one of Earth's great blessings.




III.  Conclusion

     My gift to you in this season of Christmas, Hannukah and Kwanzaa is a whetting of the appetite for not just the traditional movie, in full here, which is great and classic cinema, but to tantalize you with the prospect of a ghost narrator telling you the story the way Dickens intended it be told. You can find it here on the internet for free. So, with that, let me finish by saying, "BEST OF THE SEASON TO YOU MY DEAR FRIENDS!"

Fri Dec 19, 2014 at 6:06 PM PT: I gave short-shrift to the ghosts in the Carol. After going back and re-reading parts of the book, I have to add something about them. There is a passage involving Jacob Marley's ghost that is perfect comedy. Scrooge has just met Marley's ghost, and it is his first experience with a full-fledged spirt, so he of course asked it to have a seat. After the ghost complies, there's this exchange:

"You don't believe in me," observed the Ghost.
"I don't," said Scrooge.