Some scholars and other thoughtful people see a Christian "conversion" story in the Carol. Ebenezer Scrooge, they argue, is "saved" by the end of the book in the religious sense. That's not at all what I see. First of all, G-G-G-G-GHOSTS! If Dickens intended for God to take time away from his busy day to personally challenge Scrooge's worldview, the traditional way was to choose angels (or sometimes demons) or vision of some sort. Not ghosts.
On the other hand, God has been pretty handy in the past with locusts, whales and rain. Still, except for a couple of allusions to Christianity, including the ultimate, "God bless Us, Every One!," there's a marked absence of Christian cant.
I believe that one of the reasons that the Carol is important in our time is because it can convert people from religion. Dickens spent a great deal of time lampooning the evangelicals of his day. He used quite a few words in his prefaces to printed volumes of his works explaining his attacks on them. That's not to say that Dickens was an atheist or an agnostic, just that he despised the extremes of religion. Charles Dickens can explain this best, himself:
"Lest there should be any well-intentioned persons who do not perceive the difference ... between religion and the cant of religion, piety and the pretence of piety, a humble reverence for the great truths of Scripture and an audacious and offensive obtrustion of its letter and not its spirit in the commonest dissensions and meanest affairs of life, to the extraordinary confusion of ignorant minds, let them understand that it is always the latter, and never the former, which is satirised here. Further, that the latter is here satirised as being, according to all experience, inconsistent with the former, impossible of union with it, for the time being, in Exeter Hall, or Ebenezer Chapel, or both. It may appear unnecessary to offer a word of observation on so plain a head. But it is never out of season to protest against the coarse familiarity with sacred things which is busy on the lip, and idle in the heart; or against the confounding of Christianity with any class of persons who, in the words of SWIFT, have just enough religion to make them hate, and not enough to make them love, one another."
Charles Dickens, THE PICKWICK PAPERS (Preface to the first Cheap Edition; 1847). Written more than 169 years ago, it could be a rebuke of Jerry Falwell, Jr. tomorrow, or any number of television evangelists and mega-church shepherds. Dickens' Carol can be read as a present-day attack on the prosperity gospel, greed and the lack of empathy among certain religious folk.
No comments:
Post a Comment