I recently watched a movie called "The Man Who Invented Christmas," which was a wonderful movie about Charles Dickens and how his writing of A Christmas Carol gave England a new idea of Christmas, which prior to that had been celebrated as a decadent holiday. It was Dickens who virtually remade the way we understand Christmas even in America.
I have made watching "A Christmas Carol" in one version or another one of my annual holiday traditions. I always enjoyed the version starring George C. Scott in the role of Scrooge until I saw the one with Patrick Stewart, who made the part seem written specifically for him. That being said, I tend to shy away from newer versions that seem to come out every three or four years. This year, I also recently took the time to reread the book for the first time in at least a decade, having found it available for free on my Kindle. It was like revisiting an old friend as I read through it again.
I read a comment on Goodreads that said Dickens wrote A Christmas Carol when he was running out of cash and it was a last-ditch effort to make some money. That is, in some ways true, as the first editions sold out by Christmas Eve in 1843. He was also performing readings on the side in an effort to obtain income.
None of Dickens’ other works is more widely recognized or celebrated within the English-speaking world. Some scholars have even claimed that in publishing A Christmas Carol, Dickens single-handedly invented the modern form of the Christmas holiday in England and the United States, as the movie stated.
Indeed, the great British thinker G. K. Chesterton noted long ago, with A Christmas Carol, Dickens succeeded in transforming Christmas from a sacred festival into a family feast. In so doing, he brought the holiday inside the home. He thus made it accessible to ordinary people, who were now able to participate directly in the celebration rather than merely witnessing its performance in church.
But A Christmas Carol’s seemingly timeless transcendence hides the fact that it was very much the product of a particular moment in history, its author meaning to weigh in on specific issues of the day. In this case, it was focused on child labor in England. Dickens first conceived of his project as a pamphlet, which he planned on calling, “An Appeal to the People of England on behalf of the Poor Man’s Child.” But in less than a week of thinking about it, he decided instead to embody his arguments in a story, with a main character of pitiable depth. So what might have been a polemic to harangue, instead became a story for which audiences hungered. Dickens was very much an anti-revolutionary, implying that revolutionary was the fearsome consequence of not solving the problem.
“This boy is Ignorance. This girl is Want. Beware 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.”
Dickens was not a “systems” thinker, nor was he proto-socialist, as many of his contemporaries accused him of being. Yet what Dickens did propose in A Christmas Carol, which he scribbled out in less than two months in the fall of 1843 - intending it, in his words, as a “sledge hammer” blow - was still radical, in that it rejected the “modern” ideas about work and the economy.
“You may be a bit of undigested beef,” Charles Dickens wrote, presumably sometime in late October or early November of 1843, “a spot of mustard, a crumb of cheese, a fragment of an underdone potato.”
Then he must have paused thoughtfully over the manuscript, despite feeling the hot breath of his publisher on the back of his neck, for A Christmas Carol would not be completed until early December of that year and published on December 19, barely in time for holiday sales. Dickens crossed out the word “spot” and replaced it, in the tight space just above the line, with “blot.”
Christmas, its generalized, secular pleasures aside, may not be part of the religion of many people, but Dickens certainly manages to find a place in many hearts around this time of year. That lovely self-edit - not only swapping out an ordinary, somewhat colorless word for one so evocative you can virtually smell it, but also tagging onto the b’s of “bit” and “beef” one more bumpity b sound - is worthy of worship.
I was a late convert to the works of Dickens. In adolescence, I had made halfhearted attempts at Oliver Twist, A Tale of Two Cities and Great Expectations whose plots, or at least abbreviations of them, I already knew from movie adaptations that I could absorb in hours rather than weeks. Eventually, in my late 20s, as I recall, I picked up Bleak House, about which I knew absolutely nothing except that I liked the foreboding title.
I was immediately - as the English would say - besotted. Certainly, by the procession of stately, muddy, foggy sentence fragments with which the novel opens, and by the irresistibly complex and sensational story of a dead man’s conflicting wills and an interminable lawsuit, with a particularly memorable detour into spontaneous human combustion (one of the great “Wait, what?”s of literature). Dickens, I discovered, nourishes the deeply human craving, entrenched in many of us as we are first being read to in childhood, to find out what is going to happen next. And his joy in the English language is catnip to anyone who savors the written word, as I myself can attest.
You can visit Dickens’s original manuscript of A Christmas Carol right now in a very unexpected place: in New York City at Morgan Library & Museum, where it has lived since the late 1890s and is displayed each year opened to a different page.
Or you can flip through the entire thing online, as I recently did, in all its scrawled-over glory, from the majestically punctuated opening line, “Marley was dead: to begin with,” straight through to Tiny Tim’s conclusive “God Bless Us, Every One!” The scrumptious quotableness includes my all-time favorite, Scrooge’s icy benediction to the hapless poor who will not avail themselves of prisons and workhouses - “If they would rather die, they had better do it, and decrease the surplus population” - which serves to remind us that the attitude of the haves, at least some of the haves, toward the have-nots is eternal.
You can also make a party of A Christmas Carol, which begs to be read aloud, as Dickens himself did in his lucrative side hustle as a performer. It is a performance immortalized by the creator of collectible houses, Department 56, of which I have on display somewhere in my house every Christmas. In fact, it was the fable of Scrooge and the spirits that composed, along with an excerpt of The Pickwick Papers, the author’s final public reading, shortly before his exhausted death, at the age of 58, in June 1870. (I can only imagine that he trimmed the text; reading the whole thing aloud, depending upon how much Christmas ham you pile on, takes a good three hours.)
For further fun: Imagine the author’s sweaty realization, as he is hastily pulling into the home stretch, that he has delivered the promised progress of the Three Spirits - Jacob Marley makes it abundantly, explicitly clear that only one will appear per night - over the course of a single evening. “The Spirits have done it all in one night,” Scrooge exclaims. “They can do anything they like.” And then adding, for good if desperate measure: “Of course they can. Of course they can.”
Nice save, Charles.
I cannot even begin to estimate how many times I have read A Christmas Carol. Though an anxious timidity makes me averse to doing things I have never done before, I find great pleasure in doing things a second time, third time, fifth time, hundredth time. And each and every reading of Dickens’s novella delivers both the pleasure of the familiar and, as great pieces of writing invariably do, fresh surprises and insights.
As the end of a long and often grueling year approaches, I am happy to turn once more to a tale of damnation averted, wrongs reasonably righted and that big prize turkey hanging in the window of “the Poulterer’s in the next street but one, at the corner.”
And with each new telling, it awakens the true spirit of what Christmas is all about. And as Tiny Tim would say, "May God bless us. Every one."
Comments