And to Dickens that genuine inward desire to help is of more real worth than any quantity of coin. G. K. Chesterton (best known for his Father Brown mysteries) rightly said of Dickens that he was not political. But Dickens saw through not merely politics, but also the underlying attitudes that enable politics of any stripe. The true miseries and deprivations and destructiveness of poverty were and are abundant and evident; there was nothing Dickens hated more than people who deliberately shut their eyes and pretended not to know or understand in order to promote their own already established attitudes. To one degree or another, all his “Christmas books” attack this closed mind-set.
A Christmas Carol
“Marley was dead, to begin with. There is no doubt whatever about that.” Thus begins Dickens’s most famous and yet poorly understood work. It does not start with a description of Scrooge as a miser, but with death. All of Dickens’s Christmas books revolve around death. Americans and Europeans of the twenty-first century are fairly sheltered from death—it seldom happens in our homes, for instance; we can bring people back from the brink of death in ways inconceivable to Victorians; we have powerful drugs to ease the pain of, say, cancer, and so forth. In Dickens’s day, one could die from an infected cut; today we simply slap on some antibiotic ointment and feel confident we’ll be all right. Death was very present and very haunting to the Victorians. Children and women were particularly vulnerable; we may find some of the sentiment over Tiny Tim cloying, but through him Dickens strove to present the special poignancy of the deaths of children.
Having started with Marley’s death, and Scrooge’s full knowledge and experience of it, Dickens goes on to say that Scrooge never painted over Marley’s name on the warehouse door: “Sometimes people new to the business called Scrooge Scrooge, and sometimes Marley, but he answered to both names. It was all the same to him” (pp. 9—10). Dickens then presents Scrooge’s miserliness, but he first presents Scrooge as so far astray he no longer even possesses a true sense of self. Scrooge is not a person, even to himself, but a business. It is that lack of self that leads to his miserliness and his alienation from humanity.
The theme of blindness or deliberate obtuseness, important in The Cricket on the Hearth and The Chimes, appears quite early in A Christmas Carol. Scrooge’s nephew, in bursting in upon him, precipitates Scrooge’s well-known contemptuous remarks upon Christmas. Upon the nephew’s departure two “portly gentlemen” approach; they are setting up a fund to “buy the Poor some meat and drink, and means of warmth.” Scrooge inquires of them as to the state of the prisons, workhouses, the treadmill, and the Poor Law. Prisons and workhouses alike were dreadful places, dank and dark, in which families could not live together but were divided up by gender and age. The treadmills, invented in 1818, originally were actual engines, designed to power mills that ground corn and the like; various laws dealing with the poor established the presence of treadmills in the workhouses. By Dickens’s time, however, the treadmills were merely objects in which the poor could be simultaneously contained and worked into exhaustion ; no product resulted but the further degradation of the workers. The Poor Law of 1834 divided the poor into the “deserving” and the “undeserving.” The “help” provided to the deserving was scant indeed, more theory than fact, and it was almost impossible to prove one was deserving. The decision truly rested with people who sat on the boards of directors of workhouses or other persons living in comfort that was derived from profits expanded, in part, by paying out only very little to help those in need. Whatever its intention, the Poor Law provided a mere facade of welfare; in fact, it was a series of impossible obstacles.
The portly gentlemen point out to Scrooge that prisons and workhouses “scarcely furnish Christian cheer of mind or body”—Dickens presumes that Christianity declares that all people are entitled to cheer of mind, not merely a life of subsistence—and that “many can’t go there; and many would rather die.”
“If they would rather die,” said Scrooge, “they had better do it, and decrease the surplus population. Besides—excuse me—I don’t know that.”
“But you might know it,” observed the gentleman.
“It’s not my business,” Scrooge returned (p. 15).
There it is, that claim to ignorance—only in this instance the illusion is punctured straight away by the two gentlemen who have made it their business to look about them and perceive the suffering of the world. Scrooge can only not know it by deliberate intent.
Scrooge goes home, content in his meanness of spirit and only slightly perturbed by seeing a phantom hearse drive up the inside stairs of his house. He is more perturbed when the ghost of his former partner marches in through the double-locked door of his room. He tries to brush off the phantom with wisecracks, but the ghost counters in kind: It removes the wrapper around its head and its jaw drops to the chest. This scene may elude the modern reader—why would this act seem so real and horrifying to Scrooge? In death, first the body stiffens (rigor mortis), then it loosens. The jaw must be fixed in place or it will drop down of its own accord; the muscles no longer have strength to hold it up. Any adult Victorian would have been familiar with this phenomenon. When the ghost displays this to Scrooge, it is tangible proof that it is a real phantom, and of someone well known to him. The dropping of the ghost’s jaw starts the opening of Scrooge’s mind. The ghost’s first act is to continue the work of the portly gentlemen—to smash Scrooge’s barrier of self-constructed ignorance. It informs Scrooge: “It is required of every man ... that the spirit within him should walk abroad among his fellow-men” (p. 23). Scrooge’s delight in alienation is contrary to what he is called upon to do simply by being a human being. Dickens does not require that everyone wander physically into areas of danger and disease, but he does insist that it is necessary for at least our imaginations to go there. When Scrooge, appalled at the misery of his former partner in business and in mind-set, cries, “But you always were a good man of business,” the Ghost retorts: “Mankind was my business. The common welfare was my business; charity, mercy, forbearance, and benevolence, were all my business. The dealings of my trade were but a drop of water in the comprehensive ocean of my business!” (p. 24). Dickens denies the idea that somehow one’s work and one’s morality can be separated, that the world of making money somehow exists independently of the social situation in which it dwells and to which it contributes. There is no escape through that route.
Perhaps the most striking thing about Marley’s Ghost is its departure. It leaves through the window, and Scrooge, pursuing, looks out and for a while sees and hears a multitude of spirits, wailing in tormented remorse. The spirit world, like the world of poverty, is around us all the time, whether we are cognizant of it or not.
The first Spirit (as opposed to a ghost of a real person) to appear is the Ghost of Christmas Past. There is good psychological sense to this, not mere clockwork chronology Just as, through the visit of Scrooge’s nephew, Dickens demonstrates that Scrooge’s antipathy to Christmas is not a matter of money, so in order to bring Scrooge out of his spiritual morass he must be brought back to a time before he had money: The root issue must be sought. The Spirit’s grip is ineluctable—do not we all know the irresistible pull of the past, that thing or moment we remember and wish we could not, or recall and wish we could relive? Note, too, that the Spirit’s most striking characteristic is light; previously we have seen Scrooge, in every situation, surrounded by darkness. This Spirit has a “bright clear jet of light” springing from its head. When it leads Scrooge toward the window, he protests he is “liable to fall.” “‘Bear but a touch of my hand there,’ said the Spirit, laying it upon his heart, ‘and you shall be upheld in more than this!’ ” (p. 31).
Instantly Scrooge finds himself in the country of his childhood, and in the daylight: “The darkness and the mist had vanished.” Moreover, he is delighted. The Spirit has worked upon his heart and carried him back before the time when his opinions were set, to the time when they were still f
orming.
In the films of A Christmas Carol, very little is made of Scrooge at school. But in the written story, the recollection of his boyhood existence opens Scrooge up. Left behind by his fellow students, he imagines the characters of books passing by. The scene exposes Scrooge’s imagination, both to the reader and to Scrooge himself For the first time, we see Scrooge expressing pity. Though it is for himself as a boy, in a sense it is not self-pity but the first drop of genuine thought for another human being, and it leads him directly to think of a boy who had tried to regale him with a Christmas carol that very evening, and Scrooge now wishes he had acted differently. The reclamation of Scrooge cannot happen by an appeal to the adult concept of money and its uses, but only by a reopening of Scrooge’s heart and mind, by the use of his imagination to extend beyond himself.
The young Scrooge is rescued from his misery by a child, his younger sister, but thereafter he quickly casts aside the qualities of childhood: eagerness and imagination and courage. He passes from the daylight of his childhood to the “evening” surrounding his young adulthood. In Fezziwig’s ball, we have one of the most delightful pieces of Dickensian writing: joy and humor and description piled one upon the other, a real party of writing, just as the writing describes the party. But its importance is in the ending. The Spirit, shining brightly, observes to Scrooge that surely this ball is a very small thing—why should Fezziwig’s apprentices praise him so much for giving it? Scrooge retorts:“He has the power to render us happy or unhappy; to make our service light or burdensome; a pleasure or a toil. Say that his power lies in words and looks; in things so slight and insignificant that it is impossible to add and count ’em up; what then? The happiness he gives is quite as great as if it cost a fortune” (p. 39).
Once again, money is not the issue. It is the mind-set that matters and that has, ultimately, more power over joy or misery than money does.
But the younger Scrooge cannot grasp this point. He falls into “shadow” and casts aside love because it neither comes with money nor leads to money. The adult Scrooge is tormented by the picture of the family life that his cast-off fiancée achieves. For the first time, Scrooge feels his vaunted alienation as torment, not pleasure. He attacks the Spirit, squashing it beneath its cap, but he cannot “hide the light, which streamed from under it, in an unbroken flood upon the ground” (p. 44).
The next Spirit is the Ghost of Christmas Present. The transformation of Scrooge’s barren room into the explosive cornucopia of plenty is a dramatic presentation of the psychological transformation working in Scrooge. Scrooge followed the Ghost of Christmas Past “on compulsion,” but he asks the Ghost of Christmas Present to lead him; he says he is learning a lesson. As he sets out with Christmas Present, his mind and spirit are more open to and appreciative of humanity. And that is what Christmas Present shows him, through a wide variety of places, not just the two usually depicted in time-strapped films. Again, money does not play a part. Whether on a dreary moor where miners live or at a storm-beaten lighthouse with only two keepers or among the London poor—or among the more well-off, such as Scrooge’s nephew—what the Spirit shows over and over again are people connected to each other, reaching out to each other, their spirits walking abroad among their fellow men.
In almshouse, hospital and jail, in misery’s every refuge, where vain man in his little brief authority had not made fast the door, and barred the Spirit out, [Christmas Present] left his blessing, and taught Scrooge his precepts (p. 64).
In contradiction to that, Scrooge earlier comments on the proposed law to shut down the bakeries on Sunday. Ovens were not common in households in Dickens’s time, not in working-class and impoverished homes. Bakeries, however, had to keep their ovens warm at all times. Since they did not bake on Sundays (a religious day of rest), the poor were allowed to bake their dinners in the ovens. Periodically, attempts were made to shut down this practice, as being against the Sabbath. Scrooge accuses the Spirit, as the expression of Christianity, of seeking such a prohibition. The Spirit rejects this firmly:
“There are some upon this earth of yours ... who lay claim to know us, and who do their deeds of passion, pride, ill-will, hatred, envy, bigotry, and selfishness in our name, who are as strange to us and all our kith and kin, as if they had never lived. Remember that, and charge their doings on themselves, not us” (p. 51).
Dickens loathed cruelty practiced in the name of Christianity. He had good authority behind him; Jesus several times acts on the Sabbath and rebukes those who complain about it as not understanding God’s message to us or God’s desires for us. We are supposed to take care of each other, no matter what day of the week it is. Anything else is to distort the word of God.
There is a sad irony in Tiny Tim saying that “he hoped the people saw him in the church, because he was a cripple, and it might be pleasant to them to remember upon Christmas Day who made lame beggars walk, and blind men see” (p. 53). Surely the people in a church ought not to need such reminders? But Dickens knew only too well how much they needed this prodding, and how few acted upon it. Scrooge, however, is opened and healed enough that he can care whether another child, not so unlike his own childhood self, will live or die. In 1843 social Darwinism had not yet been formulated, but the groundwork was well laid for it. Victorians were particularly concerned by Malthusian dire predictions of overpopulation—hence Scrooge’s retort to the portly gentlemen that if the poor did not wish to suffer in the workhouses they should simply die and “decrease the surplus population.” The easy tendency was to not care about the deaths of the poor (an attitude that is well attacked in The Chimes). When Scrooge expresses concern for Tim, the Spirit hurls his own words back at him:Scrooge hung his head to hear his own words quoted by the Spirit, and was overcome with penitence and grief.
“Man,” said the Ghost, “if man you be in heart, not adamant, forbear that wicked cant until you have discovered What the surplus is, and Where it is. Will you decide what men shall live, what men shall die? It may be that, in the sight of Heaven, you are more worthless and less fit to live than millions like this poor man’s child” (p. 56).
People are not numbers; they cannot be fitly accounted for or disposed of merely as calculations or entries in a register. The worth of any individual is not readily discernable by any one human. It is both arrogant and un-Christian to try to make such determinations. Each individual must be recognized as a person, a part of that web of interconnectedness the Spirits have been showing Scrooge. Scrooge may have done what was legal or moral—supporting prisons and workhouses and pushing the treadmill laws—but who acts in a more Christian manner: Scrooge, who supports cruelty, or Bob Cratchit, who toasts Scrooge as “the founder of the feast?” Dickens does not leave us in any doubt.
The last part of the visitation of the Spirit of Christmas Present is left out of all but two films (the 1984 Hallmark production with George C. Scott, which skims it, and the recent A&E adaptation with Patrick Stewart). It is a powerhouse scene, and leaving it out is to ignore the driving force behind Dickens’s passion for this story.
In the autumn of 1843, Dickens visited Samuel Starey’s Field Lane Ragged School, one of a number of pathetic attempts to provide a bare minimum of education for the thousands of poor children in London. Though not as brutal as the country schools Dickens dismantled via his portrayal of Mr. Whackford Squeers and Dotheboys Hall in Nicholas Nickleby, Field Lane and similar schools left Dickens completely appalled. Like the treadmill and the Poor Laws, they really were little more than an attempt to get gangs of children off the streets. Anything resembling useful education or hope was barely visible at such schools. Dickens saw clearly that, under the guise of help, impoverished children were being written off as both unsaveable and undeserving, mere brutes who needed to be kept from sight of the middle class and turned into docile slaves of the mills and factories. The concept that they were even children, or deserved Christian cheer of mind and body, seems to have eluded most of the people promoting th
ese institutions.
The people who took Dickens on this tour seem to have hoped he would write a pamphlet against a new set of laws being proposed against the poor. Dickens apparently thought he would write such a tract. Fortunately for us, his artistic sense wouldn’t allow it, and instead he penned A Christmas Carol.
Scrooge sees something protruding from under the Spirit’s robe; he cannot tell if it is a hand or a claw. He remarks upon it:From the foldings of its robe, it brought two children; wretched, abject, frightful, hideous, miserable....
They were a boy and girl. Yellow, meagre, ragged, scowling, wolfish; but prostrate, too, in their humility. Where graceful youth should have filled their features out, and touched them with its freshest tints, a stale and shrivelled hand, like that of age, had pinched, and twisted them, and pulled them into shreds. Where angels might have sat enthroned, devils lurked, and glared out menacing....
A Christmas Carol, the Chimes & the Cricket on the Hearth Page 2
