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Introduction
As with most Dickens tales, A Christmas Carol belongs to a tier of literature that yields precious new fruit in every re-reading. Many of us likely enjoyed a few film interpretations of the story as young children before ever reading the book itself. Today being Christmas Eve, we took the liberty of revisiting and reflecting from a fresh perspective of adulthood.
To know the celebration of Christmas in an English-speaking country is to know the story of A Christmas Carol. We don’t aim to repeat or summarize it, but rather to zoom in on one-to-two key elements that made the greatest impressions on us during our latest ride on Dickens’ emotional roller coaster.
The Spirit in Chains
On Christmas Eve in a Victorian London office, we encounter Ebenezer Scrooge, a friendless businessman who resents the holiday’s interference with the accumulation of wealth. Scrooge “bah-humbug”-s away Christmas carolers, charity fundraisers, his Christmas-spirited nephew and his clerk, poor Bob Cratchit.
When Scrooge arrives home, he’s confronted by the ghost of his deceased business partner and only friend, Jacob Marley. The tortured ghost of Marley hasn’t rested in the seven years since his passing and regrets the selfish life he lived. Marley has come to warn Scrooge off the same path via a haunting by three spirits, the Ghosts of Christmas Past, Present and Future. Marley appears to Scrooge wrapped in a long chain made of “cash-boxes, keys, padlocks, ledgers, deeds and heavy purses wrought in steel”, symbols of the pre-occupations that defined his life. He assures Scrooge that his own spirit is entangled in the same chain, albeit one grown even longer in the seven years since Marley’s death.
Marley also shows Scrooge other ghosts suffering with regret for the lives they lived – he in turn recognizes amongst them old business counterparts constrained by items of worldly distraction and bemoaning their inability to do any further good on earth. Dickens’ point here escaped our pre-adolescent minds the last time we read A Christmas Carol. As adults, we seem to go through recurring cycles of lengthening our own chains, punctuated by periodic reminders of the need to adjust course. Seduced by thoughts and emotions related to pride, many of us focus on ambition, on earning and spending and accumulating, on being exalted by the right people and becoming the best at our craft. Then the reminder comes from a life shock or from great literature and storytelling as in the case of Dickens. As he reminds us, the practicing Christian remembers that one’s resume, possessions or net worth aren’t as helpful upon approach to the afterlife as they are for acceptance into a country club.
Dickens’ Alternatives
Even the wise secular mind realizes how much more important the things Scrooge is missing are than the things he has at the beginning of A Christmas Carol. Among other lessons, the Ghost of Christmas Past shows Scrooge how he lost a devoted fiancé because he prioritized advancement over love.
The Ghost of Christmas Present shows him the innocent good nature and gratitude that Tiny Tim Cratchit approaches the world with, despite his dangerous disability and crushing poverty (Tiny Tim made us tear up, again). Scrooge also gets to see the pure joy and merriment he’s missed out on by rejecting his nephew’s Christmas dinner invitation.
The Ghost of the Future scares Scrooge with a vision of the aftermath of his eventual death should he not change his ways. On that future day, the businessmen he seeks the approval of are either ambivalent or looking to profit from his demise, and the only people who mourn his loss are the “little people” he’s bullied.
Charles Dickens seemed to love making readers uneasy about whether they were more like the good guys or the villains in his books. He holds up ideals in characters who often have the single-dimensional goodness of an innocent child or literally are an innocent child, like Tiny Tim. Our instinctual response to this was critical at first. However, he executes on storytelling so well, and it’s refreshing to experience some old-school moral clarity.
The Scrooge of the story’s beginning represents our own faults taken to extremes, and we’re treated to a highly entertaining and moving, if didactic, arc toward the lovable Scrooge of the book’s ending. If we’re still annoyed by Dickens’ simplistic or incomplete proposed alternatives to the selfish, worldly life, there are grounds for solace. Dickens composed A Christmas Carol from the perch of the 1840’s and was closer to us and to Scrooge in his adult life than he was to Tiny Tim. If you get a chance to enjoy his story again this Christmas, we hope it has its desired effect [below] on you, as it has on us. Merry Christmas!
I HAVE endeavoured in this Ghostly little book, to raise the Ghost of an Idea, which shall not put my readers out of humour with themselves, with each other, with the season, or with me. May it haunt their houses pleasantly, and no one wish to lay it.
Their faithful Friend and Servant,
C. D.
December, 1843.
All the best,
The Citizen Scholar Team
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