The Battle for Christmas

by Stephen Nissenbaum

  There was more. Brace reported that in Germany such close-knit, nurturing families were to be found much further down the social ladder than they were in America—indeed, down nearly to the bottom of the working class. Like so many Americans of this period, Brace saw Germany as the one place in the world where true family values had permeated almost the entire society. And the consequences were even apparent in public—for example, the German working class was far more polite and deferential than its American (or English) counterpart. Brace cited a vivid example. He had once “asked an English groom for directions in the streets of London, and was told in answer, “How the h—11 should I know?’” An American laborer, he added, would be almost as rude. But in Germany things were different: “A German stands—says to you with a half bow, ‘Be good enough to take the second street,’ etc., and touches his hat as he goes.” (Brace added that such a response might “perhaps” be “a little too much” for a Yankee to take, but he added that it was still “a very pleasant thing.”) Brace attributed that difference to a single point: the lessons in the natural “expression of any feeling” that almost all German children learned from their families; the kind of feelings that were “laughed at in childhood” by the parents of their American counterparts. (Brace added that in the United States such feelings were “pruned” away.)2 In other words, Brace attributed working-class rudeness in the United States to a home life that was “cold, unsocial, disagreeable.”

  In a way, this was what most impressed Brace about the German Christmas itself: how far down the social ladder it reached. That was just how he introduced his chapter on the German Christmas. The Berlin lodging house at which Brace had been staying over the holidays was owned by a man who was “hopelessly in debt;” nonetheless, Brace watched this man “bringing home an armful of presents.” Then there was the local shoemaker, whose family lived in the basement of Brace’s lodging house; the family was so poor that the children often seemed to go hungry. But, sure enough, Brace spotted “through the low window, a green Christmas tree, and the children are tying on the bits of candle.” Brace summed up his point by asserting that in all of Berlin, “There are not a dozen families so poor, as not to have their [Christmas] tree.”3

  Brace did not need to add the obvious: Men who celebrated Christmas like the Berlin shoemaker who lived in the basement were the kind of men who would never talk back to their betters, who would never say, “How the h-11 should I know?” They were, on the contrary, precisely the kind of men who were likely to answer a stranger’s question with a polite half bow and a deferential touch of the hat. And they would raise their children to do the same.

  EBENEZER SCROOGE AND THE CRATCHITS

  There is a very famous fictional family of the mid-nineteenth century—and a British family, at that—which resembles that of Brace’s real-life shoemaker. It is the Cratchit family, the central household in Charles Dickens’s classic 1843 novella A Christmas Carol. Too poor to provide adequate medical care for their children (the youngest of whom, Tiny Tim, is for that reason a cripple), the Cratchits are intensely genial, close-knit, and nurturing—everything that Bob Cratchits employer, Ebenezer Scrooge, is not. For Dickens, as for Brace, the social warmth of the Cratchit family achieves its apotheosis at Christmas. Despite their poverty, the Cratchits have a merry time of it. And their merriment is a celebration of domesticity itself. What Brace wrote of German families at Christmas makes for an apt summary of the scene Dickens paints. The Cratchits’joy has nothing to do with a “duty to be cheerful.” Rather, “they are cheerful, because they cannot help it, and because they all love one another.” They are “happy, because they had been making one another happy.”

  There is another characteristic of what Brace considered to be “German” culture that applies to the Cratchits. They are polite and well-mannered to their superiors, even in the face of incessant provocation (in their case, provocation by Ebenezer Scrooge). It is impossible to imagine Bob Cratchit snarling to Scrooge, “How the h-11 should I know?” Even in private, at the family’s Christmas dinner, Bob Cratchit refuses to say a mean word about his employer.

  To be sure, the Cratchits are fictional creations. But as social types, even though they are surely exaggerated, they are not altogether unreal. To begin with, they are not really members of the British working class. Every bit as much as Braces shoemaker, they are integrated into the larger society. (The shoemaker was an independent artisan, and he lived in a respectable neighborhood, in the same boardinghouse as Brace himself.) The actual working classes of mid-nineteenth-century Britain (and America) were composed chiefly of industrial laborers—men and women who worked in textile mills or coal mines. But Ebenezer Scrooge was apparently not an industrial capitalist, but rather a merchant. (We learn almost nothing about the nature of Scrooge’s line of work, except that he owns a warehouse.) Nor was Bob Cratchit an industrial laborer; he was a clerk. He worked not on an assembly line but in an office, an office of his own (however ill heated it may have been in the winter). Indeed, as far as we can tell, Cratchit was Scrooge’s only employee, and a trusted one at that. In modern parlance, he was (albeit barely) a white-collar worker, more like a bank teller than a coal miner or a mill operative. However badly Cratchit was treated by Scrooge, he was not apt to be laid off in hard times, as many industrial workers would have been. And however badly Scrooge treated Cratchit, the two men maintained a close working relationship (Cratchit’s office was located right next to Scrooge’s). Again, this stands in sharp contrast to the conditions of most industrial workers, whose employers would not even have been able to identify them, by either name or face.

  Cratchit is literate, too (indeed, that is one of the requirements of his job), and so is at least one of his sons. One reason for the literacy may be that Cratchit’s wife and their children all stay at home; unlike their counterparts in most working-class families of the time, they do not labor for wages to help support the family. Cratchit exhibits none of the behavior that respectable people of the time associated with working-class culture: He does not drink to excess, he does not spend all his wages on payday; he is not (we must assume) sexually promiscuous. In modern parlance, he is the head of a stable, child-centered family. All this is not to deny that Bob Cratchit is an exploited worker, but only to observe that he is hardly a realistic symbol of the industrial proletariat. It would be more accurate to identify him (in nineteenth-century terms) as a man who is struggling to become part of the respectable—and respectful—petite bourgeoisie.

  A Christmas Carol is often read today (and it was often read in the nineteenth century) as if it painted a vivid picture of alienated class relations in the period of the Industrial Revolution, and as if it evoked ways of bridging the vast gulf that had emerged between the top and bottom strata of society—through the kind of fellow feeling that Ebenezer Scrooge comes to experience after his conversion. But that is not the case. The vast and depressing face of the Industrial Revolution scarcely appears in this book. The poor themselves never make any demands of Scrooge, and for that matter he never encounters them. (We never see him approached by a beggar, for example.) In fact, the only contact Scrooge has with the poor is in his vision—a dream, as it turns out, that unfolds in the safety of his own bed. And even in that dream, none of the poor ever curse or threaten him. The most horrible vision Scrooge has—a vision evoked by the Ghost of Christmas Future—is the indifference expressed by his business acquaintances when they learn of his death.4

  In other books Dickens addressed other kinds of social relationships: the gap between bourgeois and proletarian in Hard Times, for example, or the inadequacy of institutionalized charity in Oliver Twist. What A Christmas Carol deals with, in a practical way, is something less vast but in its own way equally troubling. In A Christmas Carol Dickens addressed not the great social divisions among classes estranged from one another by wealth, distance, and occupation but the daily, intimate class differences among people who were much closer to one another on the soci
al scale.

  For if Bob Cratchit is not a member if the industrial working class, neither is Ebenezer Scrooge an upper-class industrial capitalist. This is true in a purely economic sense, since Scrooge seems to be a merchant and not an industrialist. And it is also true in a behavioral sense. In terms of his own lowly origins (he began as an apprentice to Old Fezziwig) and also his adult behavior, Scrooge, too, is essentially a member of the petite bourgeoisie, a self-made man who has spent his life striving hard (and at the cost of all human relationships, whether public or private) to attain a sense of security. He is a man who has not managed to grasp the point that such mighty striving is no longer required of him. No matter how wealthy he may be, Scrooge is not really a rich man; it might be more accurate to describe him as a poor man who has a lot of money.

  That is, until the end of the book. Whatever else Scrooge’s conversion represents, it also marks his realization that he has “made it,” after all—that he can finally afford to ease up on himself and others. Considered sociologically, Scrooge’s conversion may mark his entry into the easy culture of the upper-middle-class world, a world for which he has previously been eligible only in an economic sense, but which his temperament has heretofore barred him from joining. In the more contemporaneous language of Charles Loring Brace, Scrooge is finally ready to transform the emotionally hollow culture of sheer greed into a more fulfilling culture in which everyday activities and relationships are softened by family values. From both perspectives, one of the signs of Scrooge’s social rise is that he finally accepts his obligation to treat his clerk, Cratchit, in a more humane fashion.

  That obligation, however, has its limits, even at Christmas. For when, at the very end of the book, Scrooge signifies to the Cratchits that he has changed, he does so by giving them a Christmas turkey, the largest bird he can find. But he has the turkey sent to the Cratchits; he does not deliver it in person—despite what several of the movie versions of A Christmas Carol may suggest. Presents, yes, but not “presence.” Scrooge is the “founder of the feast,” but he does not participate in the Cratchits’ actual Christmas dinner. Instead, he chooses to take dinner with his own family—at the house of his nephew, Fred. The message was clear: It was enough to provide such known employees with a gift. (And while this is surely not the point of the book, it is of course evident that even the gift amounts to good business practice. For henceforth Scrooge will surely be able to count on Bob Cratchit’s heightened loyalty and diligence: Cratchit will become an even better employee.)

  In other words, A Christmas Carol addressed the relationship of the well-to-do not with the faceless poor but with the poor who were personally known and whose predicament might provoke pangs of conscience. It offered a perspective on how to deal with people who neither belonged to one’s own family or social circle nor were members of the anonymous proletariat. This was a real problem in a society where Christmas rituals were becoming domesticated and class differences themselves were being reshaped. Scrooge was not a country squire; Cratchit was not his tenant or apprentice. Maybe, had either been the case, each would have known just what to do at Christmas (and, of course, there would have been no story). But the creation, in England and America, of vast armies of middle-class people and wage earners produced a new type of society in which the old rituals of inversion and misrule no longer made much sense.

  Indeed, the relationship between the youthful Scrooge and his master, Old Fezziwig, had been a paternalist one, a relationship of patron and client. Scrooge was Fezziwig’s apprentice, not his employee. Indeed, Fezziwig held an old-time Christmas, too, attended by an array of his dependents. But as Dickens himself well knew, that was in an earlier age, in a precapitalist culture. Cratchit could never have been Scrooge’s apprentice. The economic system had changed, and with it the social relationships between patron and client. (In a still later age, employers might re-create Old Fezziwig’s Christmas in the form of an office party—but the employees’ families would not participate in that.) The fact that Scrooge did not share a meal with the Cratchits makes the point: The rituals were changing. What Dickens showed his readers was how to navigate the ritual waters of the Christmas season so as to avoid the dual shoals of the guilt that might stem from not giving at all across class lines and the messiness (not to say futility) that would result from giving to every beggar who walked the streets or knocked on one’s door.

  Still, and for all that, there is something elusive about A Christmas Carol. Its message has proven malleable, subject to different readings. During the century and a half since its publication in 1843, progressive liberals have claimed this book as a plea to ameliorate the evils of industrial capitalism. And free-enterprise conservatives have been equally able to claim it for their own. Thus the New York Times in 1893, in the depths of a very severe depression, used A Christmas Carol to make the point that private charitable resources were sufficient to relieve pressing want, and the commitment of the city’s most wealthy citizens to do so was strong: “[A]t no time in the history of the city has private helpfulness come more eagerly cr more prodigally to the reinforcement of good public deeds.” Philanthropically minded employers had “plunged into the fray with all the noble ardor of all the benevolent philanthropists ever fabled by Charles Dickens,” performing “prodigies of kindness” reminiscent of a “recreated and rejuvenated Scrooge.” For the Times, the message was clear: “Who … shall dare to say hereafter that corporations have no souls …?”5

  That editorial was based on a plausible reading of A Christmas Carol. But it was equally plausible to read the book as an attack on capitalism. The elusiveness of A Christmas Carol may in part be what has allowed it to become an enduring literary classic—or, actually, more than a classic, for this book has entered a legendary realm beyond the category of literature itself. The name Scrooge has entered the language as a generic descriptive, and his story has become part of the common lore of the English-speaking world.

  ON THE EVILS OF INDISCRIMINATE GIVING

  A Christmas Carol does deal, briefly, with larger questions of wealth and poverty, first at the very beginning of the book and once again at the very end. Scrooge is approached at the start by a pair of men who visit his office to solicit a cash donation to help the destitute. These men represent an unnamed charitable agency, and their own social status is clear: They are “gentlemen” (meaning that they are of a class above that to which Scrooge himself belongs). Scrooge, of course, turns these gentlemen down, in the famous exchange in which he retorts that there are prisons and workhouses to house the destitute, and that he is paying taxes to support these. Then, at the end of the book, after his conversion, Scrooge sees these same two gentlemen on the street, and he approaches them and proceeds to offer the contribution he had earlier refused. (We never learn how large a contribution, since Scrooge whispers the sum in their ear. All we know is that the charitable gentlemen are delighted.)

  In that sense, Scrooge’s conversion also has to do with his new ability to make a distinction between the different kinds of Christmas obligations he owes to different kinds of people. To members of his family he owes face-to-face participation, and (as we have seen) to the known poor with whom he deals regularly, he must send a present. But his debt to the unknown poor, the faceless suffering poor of industrial society, can be paid at a greater distance, by offering a donation to a private charitable agency; and the agency itself will provide the poor with “meat and drink, and means of warmth.” Scrooge’s conversion entails his ability to create a new categorical distinction. If the reborn Scrooge were approached by a beggar on the street, or at his door, he could now respond with a clear conscience by saying, in effect, I gave at the office.

  By the 1840s, Christmas giving was beginning to be polarized into just those two different activities. Gifts for one’s own family and friends now took the form of “presents,” while gifts that were given to the needy took the form of “charity.” There were important differences between the two. The gifts give
n to family and friends consisted of luxury items, ordinarily purchased by the givers and presented directly to their recipients, either face-to-face or accompanied by a personal note. The gifts given to the faceless poor consisted mostly of necessities, which were ordinarily purchased and distributed not by the givers but by a charitable organization, which mediated between the other parties and eliminated the need for any direct contact between donor and recipient.

  It had not always been that way. Before the era of the domestic and commercial Christmas in the nineteenth century, as we have seen, “presents” and “charity” were one and the same, and they were given to the same people—directly and face-to-face. Indeed, on a small scale such rituals persisted well into the nineteenth century (and beyond). For example, in 1837 the Lenox, Massachusetts, branch of the Sedgwick family held just such an event. It was centered, interestingly enough, around a Christmas tree—the first such tree that any member of the Sedgwick family had ever erected. Joining the children around this tree, in the parlor of Charles Sedgwicks house, was a group of the family’s local dependents who had been “collected” (the word used by Susan Ridley Sedgwick, Charles’ sister-in-law, who described the scene in a private letter to her husband). Among the dependents, Susan Sedgwick reported, were “several of Charles’ poor pensioners, several blacks, and among others the deaf & dumb lad, whom you may remember to have applied for, to get him in at Hartford [i.e., a School for the Deaf and Dumb].” The lad “looked perfectly delighted,” Susan Sedgwick noted, and she went on to report with pride that a little black girl named Josey (a crippled child, apparently) joined in dancing around the Christmas tree, “turning round &c round, now assisted by one, & now by another of the children—all fear of amalgamation [i.e., race mixing] entirely forgotten.” “It was really quite affecting to witness [Susan Sedgwick insisted] so much happiness, so diffused, and yet created from such simple materials….”6