by Adam Gopnik
He thinks not just about writing a Christmas story but particularly about the idea that he will become an entrepreneur of Christmas. Through a complicated series of moves, including disentangling himself from Chapman and Hall, who have been his publishers since Pickwick, he sets out to finance the publication of A Christmas Carol by himself, for himself, believing that this is the way he’ll solve his economic difficulties. (It’s the classic doomed move of a cornered creative man — Francis Ford Coppola starting his own movie studio, Mark Twain setting up his own publishing house. It’s the kind of thing that appeals to energetic artists coming off a few big hits, and it’s the kind of thing that never works.)
So Dickens goes about writing A Christmas Carol not simply because he has this tale of renewal and reform to tell but also because he sees this as the one way of reconciling his own enterprise and altruism: restoring his pocketbook by saving his readers’ souls. A Christmas Carol is published to great success, but for complicated reasons — mostly having to do with the lavish way Dickens goes about publishing it — it makes much less money than he hoped.
We know A Christmas Carol so well, it’s such a familiar story, such a central fable of modernity, that we probably don’t reflect adequately on how odd its structure is and how peculiar its politics are. We all know what happens: Scrooge, the model of a wicked, grasping, money-obsessed self-made miser, the perfect capitalist merchant, believes in the free market in its most brutal and grasping form. Scrooge isn’t a reactionary; he’s on the side of the free-market reformers. Remember when the two charitable gentlemen visit him at the beginning and say this is the time of year when the poor need special provision, and Scrooge mocks them and asks if there are no workhouses, no prisons? Well, those workhouses, those prisons embodied reform, a kind of hard-headed, utilitarian reform that was meant to cure the mass poverty of the Industrial Revolution. (One of the things that is appealing about Scrooge is that he is personally witty and rather intelligent throughout the book. He’s not dumb, just mean. Intelligence is never a problem for Dickens’s characters; his bad people are always more than smart enough.)
Dickens’s point is that Christmas is a season of charity and compassion and companionship, that capitalism has left Scrooge dead to all three, and it’s through his experience of the three matched healing spirits — the ghosts of Christmas past, of Christmas present, and of Christmas yet to come — that he gets recalled to life. What these three spirits do is remind him not so much of his abstract responsibilities to other people but of the reality that he was once a man among men (and a boy among boys) — that earlier in his life he participated in a circle of commonality, and that when he did he was happy. He is saved by being reconnected to the feelings of his youth.
Scrooge’s illness isn’t just indifference to the poor; it’s that he suffers from amnesia about his own history. By restoring his memory, the three spirits restore his virtue. And that sense — that the necessary cure for the capitalist lies not simply in seeing the evil of his system but rather in being reminded that there is a larger humanity outside the narrow world of the counting house — is exactly what Dickens’s Christmas is all about. Scrooge falls asleep and is awakened to a realm of responsibility where he is once again “bound on that common journey” with the rest of us. Being connected makes us naturally charitable; the alienation of capitalism is worst of all for the capitalist.
The arc of the story is in that way simple, cleansing, and reformative, but it’s also unusual. It’s not Dickens’s point that moneymaking materialism is empty compared to the spiritual life. It’s that the spiritual life ought to be the spur and solace of moneymaking materialism, and then that moneymaking materialism ought to spur on the spiritual life, in an endless virtuous spiral. What Scrooge does the next morning, after all, is not to bring spiritual solace to the Cratchit family — he gives them a big turkey. The reason we should be engaged with material life is that our abundance can lead us to acts of altruism.
Dickens’s Christmas fable is completely secularized; there is just a single, sideways reference to Jesus buried in the middle of the book. (This secularization of the holiday was so complete that Dickens’s protégé and successor in Christmas storytelling, the novelist Benjamin Farjeon, himself born a Jew, called his holiday family the Silvers and gave them two daughters named Ruth and Rachel.) But the novel is fiercely reformist. In Penne L. Restad’s otherwise admirable Christmas in America, his claim that A Christmas Carol “underlined the conservative, patriarchal, individualistic qualities” of Dickens’s philosophy is the direct reverse of a rather easily ascertained truth. A familiar conservative, patriarchal society was the last thing Dickens wanted. Only by eliminating the general evil can Scrooge be made to see the specific truth. Change is what Christmas insists on.
Dickens was an individualist, though. He thought that good arrives one heart at a time, and spontaneously, not through inculcated abstract ideas of virtue — the utilitarian reformers who set up workhouses have those. Buying one particular turkey for one particular family is not the end of Scrooge’s good deeds or of his duties, but it is the necessary beginning of them.
In all of these ways A Christmas Carol would seem to be a perfect document for the great movements of liberal reform that were part of the texture of this time. You would expect A Christmas Carol to be the ideal fable for Dickens’s great contemporary and sometime friend John Stuart Mill. For it seems that this is Mill’s vision of the world — a vision of gradual, indeed sometimes radical reform, but set within the structures of capitalism as it was already understood, a vision in which faith in the free market and faith in human freedom are intimately joined. For Mill, as for the reformed Scrooge, emancipation and enterprise are one.
But Mill and his followers don’t care at all for the phenomenon — and it is a phenomenon — of A Christmas Carol. Pretty much the only bad review that A Christmas Carol gets in its own time is in Mill’s own journal, the Westminster Review, where the reviewer says — it reads rather comically now like something right out of Dickens’s later attack on utilitarianism, Hard Times — that the real question is: What hard-working family didn’t get that turkey because Scrooge bought it for the Cratchits? There are only so many turkeys in the world, and if people like Scrooge are going to pass them out haphazardly it’s going to destroy the whole structure of the free market, which allows turkeys to be an earned reward for the people who actually earn them through their work throughout the year — rather than getting them through unreliable acts of noblesse oblige in which turkeys are stubbornly bestowed upon the unworthy. The Westminster notice might be considered a reactionary review of A Christmas Carol; not at all, it’s a radical review — a review from Mill’s circle saying that this returns us to an old, feudal order in which we expect people to be saved through acts of individual charity rather than through the increasing prosperity of a liberal society. Getting a “free” turkey from the boss is a way of always remaining a peasant.
Mill throughout his life had a very complicated attitude towards Dickens, whom he found personally sympathetic but politically unreliable, good on poverty but terrible, for instance, on women’s suffrage. The Victorian prophet who embraced A Christmas Carol, who loved it and saw it as the embodiment of all his dreams of social salvation, was Thomas Carlyle, the great reactionary intellectual of the era. Carlyle’s Past and Present is a plaint against the hideous poverty of the early Industrial Revolution and also a call for some kind of half-defined radical overthrow of the existing order, particularly the existing free-market order. And when Carlyle read A Christmas Carol, his formidable wife, Jane Welsh Carlyle, reported that, for the first time in his life, “he was seized with a perfect convulsion of hospitality and actually insisted on improvising two dinner parties with only a day in between.” Temperamentally, Carlyle could be pretty much a scowling Scrooge himself, and so he is a perfect instance of the power of the imaginative transformation Dickens made seem so real. Ch
ristmas dinner with the Carlyles would have been a pretty grim business without the Dickensian epiphany (and probably still was, even with it).
What is it in A Christmas Carol that appealed to Carlyle? It’s the notion that the only way a commercial man can be remade is through a nightmare, through an epiphany, by being totally remade through the course of a single night. He has to be cured — we have to be cured — not by education and improvement but by vision and rhapsody. The missing term between enterprise and self-emancipation is epiphany. Mill and his circle mistrust Scrooge’s charity because it is so impulsive. That’s what Carlyle loves about it — this sense that the whole world needs to be turned upside down. There needs to be a total, radical remaking of man’s consciousness in order for Christmas to mean anything.
For Carlyle, as for Dickens, the concepts of reformist liberalism — the gradual, the incremental, the evolutionary, the empirical — all seem inadequate to cure what’s wrong with Scrooge. He needs an epiphany, not a bill of reform. In Past and Present, certainly, Carlyle argues from injustice and interrelation. We are all fellow passengers; to neglect the poor is to neglect our own welfare, not just prudentially but psychologically as well: typhoid in a poor neighbourhood will infect the whole West End. But just because our problems are so interrelated, programs of gradual reform are inadequate in their measure.
The Carlyle of Past and Present is a little frightening to read today, because his hope for social salvation is so absolute and apocalyptic. Having passed through the apocalypses that Carlyle — who was, it must be said, Hitler’s favourite historian — helped to make, we are still more wary of it. The impatience with the material of everyday life, the desire for a total change, the urge towards the remaking of man in devotion to the greater cause of the nation — having seen these utopian dreams too firmly realized in Stalinist Russia and Nazi Germany, in the Cultural Revolution and the Khmer Rouge, we fear their maker. We know exactly what it would be like to dismiss the tawdry compromises of mass democracy and begin again with pure virtue and absolute unity. Year Zero is not the first of new years but the worst of all years.
Yet if we have doubts about his Romantic absolutism, Carlyle’s vision still seems essential to Dickens’s Christmas parable. Marley’s great cry, “Mankind was my business!” echoes Carlyle’s prophetic impulse and inspires Dickens. But in Dickens’s fable we sense something more delicately ambivalent. Scrooge is both remade entirely and merely woken from his dream; he rejoins his old life as a better man but knows too what the machinery of the story cannot quite announce: there is another world beyond the material one. To be woken from a dream and to be born again are not quite the same thing, or anywhere near. The man, or child, woken from a dream is changed but can rejoin his life whole; Alice comes back to the meadow or to the warm fire of the living room. The man truly born again becomes . . . another man. Does Scrooge become a better Scrooge or another Scrooge? Is he a better materialist or no longer a materialist at all? Certainly all the evidence points to his being a better Scrooge: he keeps Scrooge & Marley’s going but does it with more heart and soul, and he now knows how to keep Christmas. But he is also, or might be, another Scrooge entirely: a man transformed and no longer caring for his old life, a Christian who has thrown it all away — a convert, in that sense. Scrooge wakes up, but as a reconciled capitalist or a secret revolutionary? Dickens never quite says and we never quite know.
Dickens thinks that what Christmas offers us, properly understood, is a kind of tiny revolutionary moment in the year when everything can be remade, not just our hopes but our hearts too. A Christmas Carol is a reassuring book. Yet it’s that insistence on epiphany — that only Spirit can save us, that what society needs is not improvement but a total remaking of its regimen — that gives the book its inner tension. It’s what made it so potent in its time and, indeed, in ours. Dickens oscillated throughout his adult life between a belief in reform, restoration, and piecemeal change and an impulse — Romantic and not very well worked out — for sweeping semi-religious radicalism. (The not-very-well-worked-out bit was why Mill mistrusted him; consistency may be the hobgoblin of little minds but it is the archangel of political philosophers.)
But however complex (or just confused) Dickens’s ideas of reform were, he never thought that the alternative to Christmas ambivalence was clear authority. As Dickens’s later Christmas stories appeared, Carlyle seems to have been appalled that Dickens never “advanced “ beyond his original “sentimental” view, saying that Dickens “thought men ought to be buttered up, and the world made soft and accommodating for them, and all sorts of fellows have turkey for their Christmas dinner. Commanding and controlling and punishing them he would give up without any misgivings in order to coax and soothe and delude them into doing right.“ Carlyle was right. Dickens did think it was better morals, and better politics, to coax and soothe than to command and control. Carlyle couldn’t understand how you could believe in the overthrow of the capitalist order without having some idea of an absolutist heroic authority to put in its place. Christmas matters so much to Dickens exactly because it is a celebration of reversal that is also a celebration of renewal. He revels in the contradiction rather than attempting to reconcile it and this was in a deep sense outside Carlyle’s understanding, as it lies outside those of modern critics who think of Dickens’s Christmas as merely sentimental. Dickens thought that if all sorts of fellows had turkeys for their Christmas dinner, then there would be no need to control and punish them. Men buttered up were men made better. It’s at the heart of his view of the world.
In this way, the Dickensian Christmas, far from being a minor sentimental construct or a mere affirmation of smug bourgeois values, is a complicated and tellingly ambiguous festival, instinctively seizing on the ambivalence between reversal and renewal deeply imprinted in the holiday’s past. In part it’s a dream reversal festival in which Tiny Tim and the afflicted many are brought out of the corner and made central to Scrooge’s consciousness, and in part it’s a renewal festival in which the order of the family is reaffirmed. (Remember, the Cratchits are a very happy family; although they suffer externally they don’t suffer internally — they don’t feel themselves to be oppressed or miserable.) In this way this most familiar of all modern fables of recuperation is morally double and sends a double message: reform — and be reborn! Let Christmas be a time of taking stock; let Christmas be a time of spending pleasure. Be buttered and be bettered. Both at once, and God bless us all, or everyone. Visions at midnight are a morning reformer’s best ally and Dickens knew it. His are not the failed dream politics of a Victorian fable-maker. They are the successful real politics of the liberal imagination in power — when it allows itself the liberty, and the power, to imagine.
We can see the special qualities of Dickens’s imagination, and its power, if we compare his Christmas stories to that of his single greatest contemporary, Anthony Trollope — yes, he did write them. In Trollope’s Christmas stories, the Dickensian apparatus is spoofed and treated sardonically: a woman in a Paris hotel on Christmas Eve is suddenly filled with the Dickensian Christmas spirit and goes, in the middle of the night, to make a healing mustard plaster for her husband’s sore throat, only to enter, farcically, into the wrong room and plaster the sleeping throat of a shocked bachelor. Nighttime’s altruistic impulses, the sensible Trollope implies, shouldn’t be trusted, even at Christmas. In those stories by Dickens’s disciple, Benjamin Farjeon, the ones with the obviously Jewish family at the heart of an entirely secularized holiday, the empathy for the poor is even greater than it is in Dickens, but the imaginative fantasy is replaced by mere melodrama: poor people die in the bitter December. (Though Farjeon’s tragedies of the frozen poor may at least remind us that the politics of Christmas still have winter at their heart. It’s cold outside.)
So the winter holiday as it emerges in British fable-making beginning in the 1840s isn’t just “secularized” — a sacred holiday made into a commercia
l occasion. It has an idea of the sacred of its own, and the thing made sacred is the idea of political transformation through family solidarity. You find in the next decades a very similar kind of transformation taking place in the politics of Christmas in the United States. There, though, it takes place through popular imagery, and particularly through the work of an artist who is the other great maker of the popular Christmas: the New York cartoonist Thomas Nast.
Nast was the single greatest image-maker who ever lived in the U.S. More of the American canon of imagery is owed to Nast than to any other creator. He invented the Republican elephant and the Democratic donkey. He popularized the image of the capitalist as a hugely corpulent man and the image of the corrupt politician as a capitalist in a shining vest. And he was the man who single-handedly created the image of Santa Claus.
