The Christmas Carol is a phenomenon, an industry, and a ritual. It is also one of the most compelling tales ever written. The story, an archetypal journey from death to rebirth, recounts the cleansing transformation of a man who, deadened by experience, is suddenly brought into a new life through a miracle. In the Christmas Carol, Dickens attempted to create a tale that would move through past, present and future, and change us as it changes its protagonist, for the better. Our combination villain and hero is Ebeneezer Scrooge, and over the course of one memorable Christmas Eve he is visited by four spirits: first, the ghost of his long time partner, Jacob Marley, and then by the spirits of Christmas past, present and future. In the process of Scrooge’s transformation generations of readers have found the true spirit of Christmas.
Dickens was the first person to combine a ghost story with a Christmas message, to such great effect that he has been copied by authors ever since. His inspiration may have come from the old superstition expressed by Hamlet when he says that at the Christmas season no evil spirits are allowed to walk the earth. Thus it is safe, at Christmas time, to talk about ghosts, and spirits, without falling into their power. The Christmas celebration comes at the time of the winter solstice, when pagan superstition was at its greatest, and the combination of a Christian theme with pagan ghosts and spirits was (and still is) irresistible.
What Makes it Great?
Have you ever wondered what makes a great book great? How does a book become a classic, beloved by generation after generation? As we drop in on the ghostly visits to Scrooge, we’ll take a closer look at what makes Dickens such a great author, and what makes A Christmas Carol a timeless classic of literature. This is a story that begins with death and delves into creepy territory at every turn. Yet it’s never really terrifying, and one of the reasons for this is the friendly, conversational voice of the story, and the undercurrent of humor that never fails. From the first, Dickens is speaking directly to us, as if we were seated together by the fire. He begins with a great first line:
Marley was dead, to begin with. There is no doubt whatever about that. The register of his burial was signed by the clergyman, the clerk, the undertaker, and the chief mourner. Scrooge signed it. Old Marley was dead as a door nail… There is no doubt Marley was dead. This must be distinctly understood, or nothing wonderful can come of the story I am going to relate.
One of the things that separates a good book from a classic is the creation of character, and Dickens ranks among the finest at character development. How does a great author create a character that is more real than many of the people we know? Dickens had lots of practice at creating characters; because his novels were published in serial form, he had to create characters that people could remember, characters that stayed distinct in their minds for a week or a month while they waited for the next installment. In order to do this he marked his characters with certain physical traits and habits of movement and speech that were immediately recognizable. Dickens uses all five senses to bring a character to life. Like a great artist, he sketches Scrooge, his loving nephew Fred, and Bob Cratchit in just a few deft strokes. We not only see Scrooge, but we smell his musty rooms, shiver at his chilly demeanor, and even hear his growling rebukes repeated over and over, until his “Bah, Humbug” becomes a part of our lexicon. For Dickens, more is always better; he’ll use six adjectives in a row, and all in the gerund form so that we feel how Scrooge is currently squeezing and grasping and cheating his neighbor.
“Oh, but he was a tight-fisted hand at the grindstone, Scrooge! A squeezing, wrenching, grasping, scraping, clutching, covetous old sinner! Hard and sharp as flint, from which no steel had ever struck out generous fire; secret, and self-contained, and solitary as an oyster. The cold within him froze his old features, nipped his pointed nose, shriveled his cheek, stiffened his gait; made his eyes red, his thin lips blue; and spoke out shrewdly in his grating voice. A frosty rime was on his head, and on his eyebrows, and his wiry chin. He carried his own low temperature always about with him; he iced his office in the dog-days, and didn’t thaw it one degree at Christmas.” (12)
Now Dickens is going to let us know that this is a fairy tale, and as such we had better expect magic, spirits, scary monsters and, best of all, a happy ending. We can settle in and enjoy the ride; we know we will land safely with good triumphing over evil. He does this by using a simple phrase that evokes memories of all of the tales we have heard at our mother’s knee:
“Once upon a time – of all the good days of the year, on Christmas Eve – old Scrooge sat busy in his counting-house.” (12)
Within the first two pages, Dickens has sketched a picture of a cruel, miserly man, and we will expect the worst from Scrooge. Dickens often uses descriptions of physical surroundings to mirror his descriptions of characters, as he does here:
“It was cold, bleak, biting weather: foggy withal: and he could hear the people in the court outside, go wheezing up and down, beating their hands upon the breasts, and stamping their feet upon the pavement stones to warm them… the fog came pouring in at every chink and keyhole, and was so dense without, that although the court was of the narrowest, the houses opposite were mere phantoms. “ (13)
Dickens’s Most Interesting Character: Dickens
Charles Dickens was as interesting as any of the more than two thousand characters he created. Born in 1812 to middle class parents who loved to socialize and tended to live beyond their means, Charles was a deeply imaginative child, weak and somewhat sickly, who enjoyed observing others and exhibited an early gift for theatrics. His father (who used to take the five-year old Charles to the local pub and stand him on the counter, where he performed comic songs for the customers) was a flamboyant man who aspired to something higher but could not control his spending, and his prodigality caused the family to lose their home when Charles was eleven.
While his sister, Fanny, was sent to music school on a scholarship, Charles was sent into a dark, miserable blacking warehouse to work. He lived alone in London in a small rented room, spent a dozen hours a day pasting the labels on bottles of shoe polish, and was thrown together with a group of coarse boys who horrified him. This terrible season of his life had such an impact on Dickens that he never spoke of it, even to his wife, and in fact the details of that period were only revealed by his biographer after his death.
Within a year his father was released from debtor’s prison and Charles was brought home and sent to school again, until his father’s excesses caused him, at age fifteen, to leave school for good and start out on his own as a journalist. These and other childhood experiences combined to form a man of great ambition and energy coupled with a deep appreciation for the poor and downtrodden of the world. In a way, Dickens forever saw the world through the eyes of that child in the blacking factory: a world full of terror and hope, comedy and pathos. And like an eternal child, he believed in the power of Christmas to dispel the terrifying images that haunted his past.
The Spirit of Christmas Past: Voice and Dialogue
A wonderful combination of voice and characterization come in the moment when Scrooge meets the spirit of Christmas past. The ghost of Jacob Marley has told him to expect three visitors, and Scrooge lies sleepless, waiting for the first to appear. Anyone who has lain awake in the night knows how time seems to slow, almost to a stop, and Dickens slows the action to a snail’s pace as we wait with Scrooge for something to happen. When it does, he suddenly speaks again directly to us, keeping that intimate tone, in the chair opposite us by the fire.
“Scrooge went to bed again, and thought, and thought, and thought it over and over and over, and could make nothing of it. The more he thought, the more perplexed he was, and the more he endeavored not to think, the more he thought.
“… The hour bell sounded… with a deep, dull, hollow melancholy ONE… 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.” (29)
Along with voice and characterization, Dickens uses dialogue to give us a look into the heart of his character as he grows. In company with the Spirit of Christmas past, Scrooge visits the Christmas party held by his first employer, a benevolent man named Fezziwig. His conversations with the spirits expose his nature to us in an indirect way, as if we are allowed to eavesdrop. As we look into Scrooge’s past and see the lonely, neglected boy, he becomes a more sympathetic character, and the similarities between him and his creator are rather striking. The dreadful school looks like the blacking house, the sister is named Fanny, and a cold father has sent him into exile.
“They went, the ghost and Scrooge, across the hall, to a door at the back of the house. It opened before them and disclosed a long, bare, melancholy room, made barer still by lines of plain deal forms and desks. At one of these a lonely boy was reading near a feeble fire; and Scrooge sat down upon a form and wept to see his poor forgotten self as he used to be.” (33)
One of the ironies about A Christmas Carol is that this story about a miser was written with a goal to make some money. In the winter of 1843, Dickens’s current novel in serial form, Martin Chuzzlewit, was falling in sales, and in order to boost his flagging income, he dashed off a Christmas story in about six weeks, and had it in the stores by December 19th 1843. The manuscript was a scant 66 pages (as opposed to the average of 800 for his typical blockbusters) yet it is the biggest seller he ever wrote. Over the years he gave dramatic readings of the Carol throughout England and the United States, and his mini-masterpiece earned him more money than any of his books.
The Spirit of Christmas Present: Power of Description
An old saying that “God is in the details,” is illustrated by Dickens’s power of description. No one could describe daily life in better detail than Charles Dickens. Filled with restless energy, Dickens walked the streets of London by night, sometimes covering fifteen to twenty miles at a time. He attended executions and visited the prisons. He peered into the back streets and became intimately familiar with the primitive living conditions of the poor. What he saw was heartbreaking.
The London that Dickens perambulated had no social services, no public sanitation, and was rife with crime and social unrest. It is estimated that over 40,000 prostitutes walked the streets. Grave yards, unregulated and overfilled by their greedy proprietors, literally overflowed, causing a noxious stench to fill the surrounding streets. Children, unprotected by law, were forced to work long hours in factories, clamber up blackened chimneys as sweeps, or risk their lives in the mines. Unwanted and illegitimate children were sent north to schools where they were abused and underfed. Though his remarkable talent brought Dickens early and lasting success, his humble beginnings caused him to relate with these, the lowest classes of society. He was their champion and their voice, through characters like Bob Cratchit and Tiny Tim.
But Dickens also was a great recorder of happiness, and the wonderful bounties of daily life. And now it is time to stop and mention another quality that great books have, and that is poetry in the language. We might say that poetry is the connecting link between music and speech, because speech becomes poetry when we add a beat to the lines, and rhyme or otherwise arrange the words in such a way that they flow beautifully together, as lines of music do. Remember that the name of our tale is A Christmas Carol, and instead of being divided into chapters it is divided into “staves” or musical staffs. There is something musical about the way that Dickens writes, and when he is really on a roll, he lapses into iambic pentameter without even realizing it. An iamb is a heartbeat (pa-pum) and there are countless sentences that fall into that pattern: “The Grocers! Oh the Grocers nearly closed.” There are all sorts of technical terms for poetic language, but some of Dickens’s favorites are the internal rhyming of words, (like chink and keyhole, or squab and swarthy) and alliteration, (winking and wanton, pears and pyramids and walks and woods.) Personification turns onions into Spanish friars and enables lemons and oranges to call out to the passers by. Add in his wonderful humor, and you have a simple description of a grocer’s stall that is a purely poetic marvel:
“There were great, round pot-bellied 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… (47)
Here, in his description of the Cratchit family’s Christmas dinner, Dickens creates a version of familial happiness that became an ideal for generations to come. The formal Victorian dinner with silent children and stern adults is here replaced with a rollicking, loving family gathering.
We smell the goose, we love the children, we even agonize with Mrs. Cratchit over the pudding. Though the Cratchits are poor, they seem happier than anyone we know. This becomes our ideal home, our ideal family.
“At last the dinner was all done, the cloth was cleared, the hearth swept and the fire made up. The compound in the jug being tasted, and considered perfect apples and oranges were put upon the table, and a shovel-full of chestnuts on the fire. Then all the Cratchit family drew round the hearth, in what Bob Cratchit called a circle, meaning half a one… Bob served it out with beaming looks, while the chestnuts on the fire sputtered and cracked noisily. Then Bob proposed:
‘A Merry Christmas to us all, my dears. God bless us!’
Which all the family re-echoed.
‘God bless us every one! said Tiny Tim, the last of all.”(52)
Reinventing Christmas
G.K. Chesterton wrote, “The mystery of Christmas is in a manner identical with the mystery of Dickens.” And it is true that Dickens is inseparable from Christmas. It’s been said that when Dickens died, children all over England asked if the holiday would die as well. And he practiced what he preached. Each year he read A Christmas Carol aloud for audiences, often for charity. He loved parties, theatrics, got down on the floor and played with his ten children, and danced until he dropped. The year A Christmas Carol was published he held a yuletide party that no one ever forgot. He wrote to a friend, “We have been keeping Christmas, and such dinings, such theatre goings, such kissings out of old years and kissings in of new ones never took place in these parts before.”
Peter Ackroyd, the world’s foremost authority on Dickens, wrote, “A Christmas Carol may be said to have reinvented Christmas itself. The ghosts of Christmas past and present, the Cratchit family celebrating in their little home, Tiny Time (who did NOT die) seem to have become as much a part of the season as Santa Claus and the lighted tree. It was an extraordinary achievement on Dickens’s part – to take what was essentially a religious festival and to humanize it, and to instill the lessons of kindness and mutual forbearance. The religious elements of charity and mercy are incorporated within the motifs of the fairy tale, a religious fable combined with the ghosts and spirits of folklore and superstition.” (Dickens, 406.)
G.K. Chesterton theorized that Dickens’s genius lay in “that most exquisite of arts—the art of enjoying everybody.” Peter Ackroyd says of him, “it was his particular genius to represent, to bring together, more aspects of the national character than any other writer of his century.” Walter Bagehot called him “a special correspondent for posterity,” and Jules Verne summed it up when he said, “There is everything in Dickens.”
The Spirit of Christmas Future: A Deeper Message
Another quality that separates great books from good ones is a deeper message beneath the story, and A Christmas Carol certainly has that. Dickens was writing to entertain, but he had a deeper purpose as well. The previous summer Dickens had visited a “ragged school” in Northern England, where children of the poor were given a rudimentary education. It was such a foul place that Dickens was shocked. He wrote, “I have very seldom seen in all the strange and dreadful things I have seen in London and elsewhere, anything so shocking as the dire neglect of soul and body exhibited in these children. Side by side with Crime, Disease, and Misery in England, Ignorance is always brooding.”
Ackroyd concludes: “In a way the story is emblematic of his real genius: to use his own memories in order to lend weight and substance to his social concerns, so that his own life can be seen as a sort of lightning conductor for the nineteenth century.” (Dickens, 95-96)
Though A Christmas Carol began as an attempt to earn extra money, the story soon took hold of Dickens. He poured descriptions of his own childhood into it, giving Scrooge a surprising psychological depth. He worked on it very quickly, alternately weeping and laughing and weeping again, according to his friend and biographer, John Forster. Dickens’s desire was to touch the hearts of his countrymen and inspire greater compassion toward the poor and needy, in his words, “to strike a sledgehammer blow on behalf of the poor man’s child.” The moment when ignorance and want are shown to Scrooge was for Dickens the central point of the story.
“Forgive me… but I see something strange, and not belonging to yourself, protruding from your skirts.
‘Oh, Man! Look here. Look, look, down here!’ exclaimed the Ghost… This boy is Ignorance. This girl is Want. Beware them both, and all of their degree…” (60-61)
Charles Dickens died at the relatively young age of 58, exhausted by a life of extreme exertion, having written novels, papers and articles at a feverish pace for nearly forty years. His grave was left open for two days and thousands passed by to look at his simple oak coffin. Later his son said that among the many bouquets of flowers that were tossed into the grave, “were afterwards found several small rough bouquets of flowers tied up with pieces of rag.” (Dickens, xiv.) The common people loved Dickens; they felt he represented them and felt his loss as a loss of something in them.
A Man of Faith
As Scrooge sees the end of his own life, alone and unmourned, and the death of Tiny Tim, needlessly wasted from neglect and poverty, he reaches the bottom, and undergoes a complete change of heart. The fact that Dickens believed that such a change of heart was possible is key to understanding him, and is the reason he has fallen out of favor in modern literature. He did believe in the nobility of the human spirit, and the ability of heaven to touch our hearts.
During his lifetime Dickens was criticized for his a lack of religious devotion. Though he did not believe in organized religion he had a deep personal faith in Christ. He wrote to a son, “Never abandon the private practice of saying your own prayers night and morning. I have never abandoned it, and I know the comfort of it.” He took the sayings of Jesus seriously, and his fiction is full of truly Christian themes. He wrote a biography of Jesus called “The Life of our Lord,” for his children, that has since been published. Through all of the novels, and especially in this story, there is in Dickens an unchanging faith in the dignity of the human soul, the redeeming power of love, and the presence of God in the weakest and humblest of settings.
A Christmas Carol is designed not so much to make us think, or see or know, but to make us feel. Dickens expressed his objective in writing this ghostly tale in the preface. Here are his words:
“I have endeavored 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 by.
” In the 166 Christmases since it was penned, A Christmas Carol has given us pleasure and focused our hearts on the true meaning of the season. As long as there is Christmas, no one will wish to lay it by. The final lines of this beautiful carol, though so familiar, never ceases to open our shut up hearts.
“Scrooge was as good as his word. He did it all, and infinitely more; and to Tiny Tim, who did NOT die, he was a second father. He became as good a friend, as good a master, and as good a man, as the good old city knew, or any other good old city, town or borough, in the good old world. Some people laughed at the alteration in him, but he let them laugh, and little heeded them… his own heart laughed; and that was quite enough for him.
“He had no further intercourse with Spirits, but lived on the Total Abstinence Principle ever afterwards; and it was always said of him, that he knew how to keep Christmas well, if any man alive possessed the knowledge. May that be truly said of us, and all of us! And so, as Tiny Tim observed, God bless us, Every One!” (82)
Marilyn Green Faulkner is the author of Back to the Best Books: How the Classics Can Change Your Life.