A Christmas Carol

Scrooge. And “Bah, humbug.” The name and phrase instantly conjure up the familiar tale retold from year to year. We all know Scrooge’s story, his wondrous transformation from “a squeezing, wrenching, grasping, scraping, clutching, covetous old sinner’’ to a man who “knew how to keep Christmas well.’’ His very name has entered our dictionaries as a synonym for miser.

Since Charles Dickens (1812-70) created this memorable character in his 1843 story, A Christmas Carol , we’ve met him in countless guises – as portrayed by Alistair Sim in the 1951 film classic or updated by comedian Bill Murray in the movie Scrooged, in the radio version of the story featuring Lionel Barrymore or the musical starring Albert Finney, even in the cartoon figures of Scrooge McDuck and Mr. Magoo. Scrooge and A Christmas Carol are indelibly imprinted in the heart of western culture.

Like most of Dickens’ works, A Christmas Carol was born of both expediency and deeply felt conviction. Its 31-year-old author was already the toast of England and America, with the phenomenally successful Pickwick Papers, Oliver Twist and Nicholas Nickleby to his credit. And yet, with a fifth child on the way, improvident parents and several siblings clamoring for support, and sales of his latest book, Martin Chuzzlewit, fizzling, Dickens needed a new best seller. A warm-hearted holiday story seemed a sure bet.

At the same time, the young writer seized on the Christmas tale as an apt vehicle for his characteristic social and moral concerns. Driven by his own memories of an impoverished youth, Dickens ever championed the victims of urban industrialism in his work. His speaking and fund-raising efforts on behalf of education for the poor inspired him to write A Christmas Carol . He wanted, he said, to “throw [himself] upon the truthful feeling of the people’’ at an abundant time of year when they were most open to change.

Scrooge, as he first appears, is the embodiment of the laissez-faire economic theories that shaped British public policy in the mid-19th century; Dickens biographer Edgar Johnson dubs the miser “the personification of ‘economic man.’” When solicited for a charitable donation, Scrooge sputters that prisons and workhouses should suffice for the idle poor, adding “If they would rather die, they had better do it, and decrease the surplus population.’’ Scrooge must learn the lesson that the ghost of his former business partner, Jacob Marley, comes to teach him: “Mankind was my business. The common welfare was my business; charity, mercy, forbearance and benevolence, were, all, my business.’’ Scrooge is forced to confront the consequences of social indifference in terrifying specters called Ignorance and Want.

While acutely aware that selfishness and greed infect materialistic society as a whole, Dickens focused in early works like A Christmas Carol on the need to transform individuals one by one. As novelist George Orwell observed, “he is always pointing to a change of spirit rather than a change of structure.’’ Dickens’ message, Orwell added, is a deceptively simple one: “If men would behave decently, the world would be decent.’’

A Christmas Carol was the first – and most enduring – of a series of Christmas books and stories that provided Dickens with a nearly annual forum for propounding similar themes throughout the 1840s. Most of these Christmas stories borrowed their forms from imaginative children’s literature. This was the age of the brothers Grimm and Hans Christian Andersen; fairy tales, ghost stories and ballads were gaining popularity in educated English circles during the 19th century. For Dickens, hearing and reading fanciful and folk stories had provided vital oases in his own otherwise barren youth.

A Christmas Carol borrows the fairy tale’s “once upon a time” beginning and “happily ever after” ending. Subtitled “A Ghost Story of Christmas,’’ it also shares the ghost story’s supernatural characters and sense of time and space. By means of the Ghosts of Christmas Past, Present and Yet to Come, Dickens can transport Scrooge instantaneously from scene to vivid scene, from his lonely school days to his former employer Fezziwig’s festive holiday ball to the humble home of his clerk Bob Cratchit to his own desolate grave.

The ghostly machinery brings Scrooge face to face with his painful, nearly forgotten past and, in a process akin to modern psychotherapy, leads him to reflect on the past experiences that shaped his selfishness; to develop a new awareness of the consequences of his behavior; and to resolve, “I am not the man I was. I will not be the man I must have been but for this intercourse.’’

Most critics agree that one of Dickens’ most profound personal myths is contained in his idealized memories of a sunny early childhood before his family’s steady slide into indigence. He was, notes Paul Schlicke, “the first major novelist to place children at the centre of novels.’’ In A Christmas Carol , Scrooge finds redemption in compassion for his own lost childhood as well as for the crippled but blessed Tiny Tim Cratchit. As scholar Harry Stone observes, Dickens evokes “the undefiled world of childhood and makes us feel that we, like Scrooge, can recapture it. Deep symbolic identifications such as these… give A Christmas Carol an enduring grip on our culture.’’ particularly potent are the links Dickens forges between childhood and the child- and family-centered feast of Christmas. He once proclaimed, “It is good to be children sometimes, and never better than at Christmas, when its mighty Founder was a child himself.’’ The marvelous transformations effected by Dickens’ ghosts are of a kind with both the magical thinking of children and the wondrous promise that surrounds Christmas.

Child psychologist Bruno Bettelheim asks about Christmas, “what could be more magical than the birth of a child, or the rebirth of the world? What holds more magic for mankind than the promise of a chance of a new beginning?’’ And it is just such a joyful promise that A Christmas Carol holds out for the closed, hardened, isolated Scrooge in all of us. Scrooge’s nephew calls Christmas a “kind, forgiving, charitable, pleasant time.’’ For Dickens, says scholar Joseph Gold, it’s a recurring invitation to rebirth.

Dickens’ vision of magical Christmas conversion is primarily a secular rather than a religious one. His contemporary John Ruskin grumbled that for Dickens, Christmas “meant mistletoe and pudding – neither resurrection from dead, nor rising of new stars, nor teaching of wise men, nor shepherds.’’ In fact, his holiday fable does depict the resurrection of a dead soul, but in moral and social terms. Decidedly anticlerical, antidogmatic and antisectarian, Dickens shared the liberal Protestant emphasis on Jesus’ humanity and was drawn to mesmerism and other non-traditional sorts of spiritualism. He longed for a human community infused with the grace of brotherly love.

It was Dickens’ singular talent to convey this longing for fellowship in the warm bond he struck with his public. According to critic Angus Wilson, “The Christmas articles and stories... were a yearly high point in Dickens’ relations with his tens of thousands of readers.’’ He affirmed this commitment to his audience in public readings of his works that absorbed his vast energies during the two decades before his death in 1870. In these readings – which began as benefits for worker education and from first to last almost always featured A Christmas Carol – Dickens created a sense of shared experience. When audiences roared at such lines as “and to Tiny Tim who did NOT die,’’ he felt “as if we were all bodily going up into the clouds together.’’

Whether read privately or brought to life dramatically as Dickens did in his own readings, A Christmas Carol still retains the power to communicate the force of its maker’s direct, engaged voice and childlike wonder. Men, women and children continue to experience the story as a personal holiday gift from Charles Dickens.

Margaret Lynch

Margaret Lynch holds a doctorate in literature from the University of Chicago.