In all, the story has spawned at least twenty-eight film adaptations, including versions starring Bill Murray as a greedy U.S. television executive (Scrooged, 1988); a Disney version starring none other than Scrooge McDuck in the title role; and cartoon versions featuring the Flintstones, the Muppets, Alvin and the Chipmunks, and the Jetsons.
Nor is there any sign that the practice is at an end. In 2007 director Robert Zemeckis (Back to the Future, Forrest Gump, The Polar Express) announced plans for a major animated version of the story starring the voices of Jim Carrey, Christopher Lloyd, Bob Hoskins, Gary Oldman, and others. The story has also inspired at least two operatic versions in the twentieth century, including one by Thea Musgrave in 1978; a one-man Broadway show with Patrick Stewart in the 1990s; a widely performed Christian-themed version called The Gospel According to Scrooge; long-running adaptations at regional theaters (thirty-three seasons at the Raleigh, North Carolina, Theater in the Park, twenty-five at the Indiana Repertory Theater); numerous sound recordings; and parodies by the likes of Lord Buckley, Stan Freberg, and even Beavis and Butthead.
According to a count made in the late 1980s, at least 225 live stagings, films, radio dramas, and television plays based on Dickens’s “little Carol” had been produced after 1950, and that number does not take into account the untold number of amateur and regional productions staged every year. Not only has A Christmas Carol become the most “adapted” of all the author’s works, but it would be hard to name any other work of fiction that has thereby become so ubiquitous a part of Western popular culture.
Undoubtedly Dickens would have been chagrined that he never saw a penny from all this modern-day “re-originating,” but surely the man who had vowed to deliver a “sledge-hammer blow” upon the consciousness of an insensitive public around him would also have been gratified to see how intertwined—indeed, how synonymous—his “little Carol” has become with the “season of giving.” Celebrating Christmas without some reference to A Christmas Carol seems impossible, a remarkable fact given that the book was published more than 150 years ago. Indeed, the resonance of the story has remained so strong through the generations that commentators have referred to Dickens as the man who invented Christmas.
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Certainly, Dickens would not have made such a claim on his own behalf. As the record makes clear, he was well aware of the traditional celebration of the Christmas holiday, he enjoyed it, and he had written of it with enthusiasm on a number of occasions before he wrote A Christmas Carol. And the work of many of his illustrious predecessors demonstrates that Dickens did not singlehandedly dream up the concept of a yuletide season with its various accouterments.
As early as 1712, in his Spectator installment “Christmas with Sir Roger,” Joseph Addison has his fictional narrator wax eloquent regarding the holiday, “when the poor People would suffer very much from their Poverty and Cold, if they had not good Cheer, warm Fires, and Christmas Gambols to support them. I love to rejoyce their poor Hearts at this Season, and to see the whole Village merry in my great Hall.”
Nearly a century later, in 1808, Sir Walter Scott published his long poem Marmion, which begins its sixth canto with a vivid description of a Christmas feast: “The fire, with well-dried logs supplied / Went roaring up the chimney wide…The wassel round, in good brown bowls / Garnished with ribbons, blithely trowls / There the huge sirloin reck’d; hard by / Plum-porridge stood, and Christmas pie. / Nor failed old Scotland to produce / At such high tide, her savoury goose / Then came the merry maskers in / And carols roar’d with blithesome din.”
Such celebration and sentiment was further glorified by Washington Irving, who begins the Christmas section of The Sketchbook of Geoffrey Crayon by noting that “The English…have always been fond of those festivals and holidays which agreeably interrupt the stillness of country life; and they were, in former days, particularly observant of the religious and social rites of Christmas.”
Irving goes on to enumerate any number of the features that characterize what are now thought of as belonging to the “Victorian” or “Dickensian” Christmas, but were actually practices that Irving thought had been too long neglected in England, including “the complete abandonment to mirth and good fellowship, with which this festival was celebrated. It seemed to throw open every door, and unlock every heart. It brought the peasant and the peer together, and blended all ranks in one warm generous flow of joy and kindness…. Even the poorest cottage welcomed the festive season with green decorations of bay and holly—the cheerful fire glanced its rays through the lattice, inviting the passenger to raise the latch, and join the gossip knot huddled round the hearth, beguiling the long evening with legendary jokes, and oft told Christmas tales.”
It is probably true that Irving and others who appreciated the ideals of Christmas and the rituals formerly associated with its practice had reason to complain. In those days, when December 25 rolled around in London—and given the assaults of Cromwell and the Puritans and the grind of an industrialized society’s life—it must have seemed at times a bloodless, unromantic place. But though there had been this gloomily evocative writing by Addison and Scott and Irving and the industry of artists and scribes and publishers who had concocted Christmas annuals and seasonal periodical issues (including Dickens himself), never before December of 1843 had there appeared a piece of writing of the nature of A Christmas Carol.
One thing that sets Dickens apart is that unlike a wistful predecessor such as Washington Irving, who seemed content to lament the passing of those grand and glorious celebrations of yore and the general malaise of the society around him, Dickens was convinced that he had the tonic for what ailed his countrymen. His approach was to restore Christmas, not lament its passing.
Furthermore, Dickens’s tale does not merely describe the season or its aspects as much as it embodies them in its characters and actions. And its form—that of a “ghost story,” or fairy tale—is perfectly suited to transmit such concepts as good fellowship, compassion, and charity from the realm of the abstract into a tangible shape that can be experienced by an ordinary audience. At the same time, when the writer employs a ghost as a character, and introduces the supernatural into a narrative, he forms an implicit contract with the reader that while the proceedings are realistic, they are not real, and are not to be taken too seriously. Thus, a reader can journey into the “ghost story” safely, seeking his entertainment, and with no suspicion lurking that the writer is trying to convince him of anything.
Of course, most writers who use the form of the ghost story have absolutely no serious designs upon their readers. In escapist literature of the kind, the aim is simply to thrill and amaze, and indeed there is plenty of that in A Christmas Carol. But the real work of the volume, as Dickens made abundantly clear, was to deliver that “sledge-hammer blow” on behalf of the poor and unfortunate. The beauty of the book is, then, his use of a deceptively innocent form to do such serious work. Many other writers since have married the “ghost story” genre to serious intent, including Henry James (The Turn of the Screw) and Shirley Jackson (The Haunting of Hill House). But as history would have it, Dickens was the first to do it so adeptly, and he came to the rescue of a downtrodden holiday that a repressed Western world was fairly bursting to revive.
There may have been other factors to account for the widespread public embracing of Dickens’s story, including Queen Victoria’s marriage to a German husband, who brought with him an affinity for certain aspects of the season’s symbology and practice, and popularized them among the English people, including the now-obligatory Christmas tree with its ornaments and its presents piled high, not to mention the great value Germans placed on family unity and communal celebration.
But one of the primary gifts that Dickens gave his contemporaries was a secular counterpart to the story of the Nativity—which is, after all, the basis for the celebration.
Dickens, though nominally an Anglican, was a vocal critic of organized religion, especiall
y where he saw hypocritical divergences between the preaching and the practice of Christian charity. Many critics have suggested that in his little Christmas fable—whether consciously or unconsciously—he complemented the glorification of the nativity of Christ with a specific set of practices derived from Christ’s example: charity and compassion in the form of educational opportunity, humane working conditions, and a decent life for all. Just as vital as the celebration of the birth of a holy savior into a human family was the glorification and defense of the family unit itself.
In A Christmas Carol, the chief focus of the reader’s sympathy becomes the crippled Tiny Tim, rather than a Christ child. When Scrooge is treated to a vision of a world in which that child has died, readers instinctively understand that the most important question for the remainder of the narrative concerns just how an earthly child might be saved.
The portrayal of Tiny Tim—derived from Dickens’s memories of his sickly younger brother, whom he called “Tiny Fred”—has proved “real” enough to prompt modern-day physicians to puzzle over the exact nature of the fictional child’s affliction. One researcher suggests that Tiny Tim suffered from a kidney disease known today as renal tubular acidosis, a condition that can retard growth and weaken bones. In 1844, had the child been presented for care, doctors might not have used that name, but they would have recognized his symptoms and would have had effective dietary methods of treatment at hand.
More likely, however, Tiny Tim and Tiny Fred suffered from rickets, a common affliction of that time in cities where smog frequently blocked sunlight, the natural source of vitamin D. In the days before vitamin supplements, children were particularly susceptible to the disease, which leads to loss of bone density, muscle weakness, and osteoporosis. Such symptoms could have been reversed by an improvement in diet, which the Cratchit family would have enjoyed once Scrooge gave his clerk a raise.
Medical diagnosis aside, the sanctification of the family found in A Christmas Carol would become one of the chief tenets of Victorian thinking, and it is one reason for the virtual deification of Dickens by some intellectuals of the time. Inspired by the secular humanism he so admired in Dickens’s work, the Jewish writer Benjamin Farjeon authored some sixty novels between 1866 and 1904, including a number of Christmas tales in a similar vein, and earning high praise from the British press that described him as “a preacher of the brotherhood of rich and poor, more powerful, graphic, and tender than any since Dickens.” Today as well, there are Jewish families who, in the Farjeon manner of thinking and with no affinity whatsoever toward the Christian underpinnings of the holiday, might still put up a “Chanukah Bush” for a season devoted to togetherness and love.
At the same time that Dickens was writing A Christmas Carol, intellectual forces were gathering that would strike a series of mighty blows at traditional religious thought. The publication of Darwin’s On the Origin of Species was only sixteen years away, and while the world would have to wait a bit to hear from Freud, it would not be long before the vision of man as an exalted creature, descended from a holy spark and only six days in the making, would be replaced by one of him as a dust mote in history’s whirl, or slithered up from prehistoric ooze, possessing not an iota of the divine, his consciousness formed by the accident of stimulus and response, and his fate at the mercy of a universe indifferent to his presence.
Given the batterings of modern scientific thought on the ordinary psyche, Dickens’s version of the Gospels offers something of a comforting compromise, and they did so not only for his contemporaries but for modern readers as well. There are no “holy” ghosts in A Christmas Carol, but the secular apparitions that appear offer a comforting counterpoint to the reader in need of some compass by which to set his moral bearings in an age of upheaval. If there is a deeper reason why Dickens’s tale survives, beyond its obvious delights, then that honorable intention is as good as any.
Whatever the moral underpinnings of its appeal, Dickens’s story has had a lasting practical impact on our culture well beyond the ubiquitous yearly dramatizations. The name of Scrooge has entered our vocabulary as one of the more colorful synonyms for “miser” (scrooge was a verb used in Dickens’s day, meaning “to squeeze, or crush” and derived from the Old English scruze); and “Bah! Humbug!” has become a favorite rejoinder to any declaration that strikes a listener as ridiculous or overly sentimental. Furthermore, when Scrooge dispatched a street urchin to buy that prize turkey for the Cratchit family (the big prize turkey, not the little one, mind you), it had a profound impact upon the British economy, one that has trickled down to that of the United States as well:
“Go and buy it, and tell ’em to bring it here, that I may give them the direction where to take it. Come back with the man, and I’ll give you a shilling. Come back with him in less than five minutes, and I’ll give you half-a-crown.”
The boy was off like a shot. He must have had a steady hand at a trigger who could have got a shot off half so fast.
“I’ll send it to Bob Cratchit’s!” whispered Scrooge, rubbing his hands, and splitting with a laugh. “He shan’t know who sends it. It’s twice the size of Tiny Tim….”
The hand in which he wrote the address was not a steady one, but write it he did, somehow, and went down stairs to open the street door, ready for the coming of the poulterer’s man….
“—Here’s the Turkey. Hallo. Whoop. How are you? Merry Christmas.”
It was a Turkey! He never could have stood upon his legs, that bird. He would have snapped ’em short off in a minute, like sticks of sealing-wax.
“Why, it’s impossible to carry that to Camden Town,” said Scrooge. “You must have a cab.”
The chuckle with which he said this, and the chuckle with which he paid for the Turkey, and the chuckle with which he paid for the cab, and the chuckle with which he recompensed the boy, were only to be exceeded by the chuckle with which he sat down breathless in his chair again, and chuckled till he cried.
Prior to this small moment at the end of Dickens’s tale, the traditional bird for the well-provisioned Christmas table in England was the goose, and the impact of A Christmas Carol was said to have sent the nation’s goose-raising industry to near ruin. By 1868 the authoritative voice of Isabella Beeton, in Mrs. Beeton’s Every Day Cookery and Housekeeping Book, was assuring readers,
A noble dish is a turkey, roast or boiled. A Christmas dinner, with the middle-class of this empire, would scarcely be a Christmas dinner without its turkey; and we can hardly imagine an object of greater envy than that presented by a respected portly paterfamilias carving, at the season devoted to good cheer and genial charity, his own fat turkey, and carving it well.
In the United States, wild turkeys were always abundant, and the creatures found their way, along with geese, to early American holiday tables. Today, however, geese are generally left alone, while some 270 million turkeys annually are raised and carried to market, about one-quarter of them during the month between Thanksgiving and Christmas. Perhaps in the tradition of a reborn Scrooge, the bounty of an American host is often expressed in terms of the height of his Christmas tree and by the size of the bird trundled home from the local market.
Many of the decorative elements and amusements mentioned in A Christmas Carol at the Fezziwig party and elsewhere were not so much Dickens’s inventions as traditional elements given a fresh gloss by their appearance in such splendid literary surroundings: blazing fireplaces, mince pies and wassail bowls, carol-singing, plum puddings, holly sprigs, mistletoe, fiddling and dancing, blind-man bluffings, and the parlor game of forfeits had been seen in holiday festivities previously, but the effect of Dickens’s tale was to make the incorporation of such elements seem obligatory for anyone’s proper Christmas.
Incidentally, it is interesting to mention—for those who are tempted to lay blame for the contemporary orgy of gift-giving at Dickens’s doorstep—something that is not in the book: for all its emphasis on the concept of charity, no gifts or gaily wrapped p
resents appear in A Christmas Carol. Aside from that magnanimous gesture of Scrooge’s to Bob Cratchit at the story’s close, the most valuable gifts exchanged between its characters are those of love and goodwill.
There are other customs associated with Dickens and the Victorian Christmas. The first commercially printed Christmas card, for instance, appeared in that same holiday season in which A Christmas Carol was published, the work of Sir Henry Cole and John C. Horsely. It was not unusual for the aristocracy of the period to include season’s greetings in personal correspondence or on calling cards. Queen Victoria sent a letter to Lord Melbourne in 1841, its paper “adorned with many quaint and humorous Christmas devices,” and, gentleman that he was, Melbourne wrote back at once to offer, “most sincerely and most fervently, the good wishes of the Season.”
But as to the Christmas card itself, the story is generally told that in 1843, Cole, a noted civil servant and industrial designer credited with the design of the first postage stamp, found himself strapped for time as the holidays approached. To speed the task of sending out all those personal greetings, then, he employed his friend, the artist J. C. Horsley, to produce 1,000 lithographed images on cardboard stock.
The card depicts a family of distinctly Fezziwiggian mien, raising a toast above a banner wishing “A Merry Christmas and a Happy New Year” to the card’s recipients. And while the image of adults and children alike tossing back goblets of wine drew some criticism from the nation’s temperance leaders, Horsley also added side panels that depicted the charitable acts of feeding and clothing the unfortunate—in all a most Carol-like diorama.
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