For what would Christmas be without a ghost story?
A Christmas Carol was read to me by a teacher when I was about eight. It was the 1960s and my father was serving in the British Army, and we were stationed in Gibraltar. We lived in an apartment with a balcony that looked out across the Mediterranean to the Atlas Mountains of Morocco. It was far removed from the Victorian London setting of A Christmas Carol, with its freezing fog and dark cobbled streets, but I think it struck me all the more powerfully there, separated as I was from the snowy olde worlde Christmas I imagined back in England. It was about this time that I remember telling my teacher that I wanted to be a writer when I grew up.
Dickens certainly played his part in that wish. A Christmas Carol has one of the best opening lines in literature. ‘Marley was dead: to begin with.’ Who would not want to carry on reading after that? It is full of wonderful descriptions: Scrooge’s house looked as though ‘it must have run there when it was a young house, playing at hide-and-seek with the other houses, and forgotten the way out again.’
Dickens’ voice is there too – boldly, as though telling you the story personally. Scrooge is as close to the first spirit ‘as I am now to you, and I am standing in the spirit at your elbow.’ Yes, Dickens can be horribly sentimental and that tendency is much in evidence here, but he has also tempered the text with a fierce sense of injustice and a clear desire to put the frighteners on his audience. Because A Christmas Carol is a ghost story. Or at least it is a story with ghosts. But is it scary?
Well, I remember being deliciously disturbed by Marley’s Ghost, rising up from the cellar with his clanking chains. When I heard the description of that scarf being untied, my heart sank as swiftly and as surely as Marley’s jaw does when it drops to his chest, his mouth gaping open like a grave. But A Christmas Carol reaches a new level of dread when it reaches the section with the silent, cowled figure of the Ghost of Christmas Yet to Come. He is often seen as Death, because he shows Scrooge his own grim and friendless end, and I am struggling to see where that black-hooded Death figure that so haunts our imagination ever appeared before A Christmas Carol.
The same can be said of the giant Ghost of Christmas Present who seems more Bacchus than Santa Claus, and yet is clearly a stage on the route to the jolly, red-faced Father Christmas figure we know so well. But even he is not without threat, as the feral children Ignorance and Want emerge from under his robes. Children always relate to other children, and I remember finding them particularly disconcerting. I remember the spirit’s words – as true now as they were when Dickens wrote them – telling Scrooge to ‘beware them both’ but to beware Ignorance most of all.
Dickens alerted me to social injustice. When the charity men ask him for money, Scrooge asks if the workhouses are still in operation. When they say that they are but many would rather die than go there, Scrooge replies, ‘They had better do it, and decrease the surplus population.’ Scrooge is not just a grumpy old rogue, he is ‘hard and sharp as flint’. Dickens pulls no punches in making him bad before he redeems him. There is a lot of anger in that depiction. Scrooge still colours our vision of ‘greedy bankers’.
A Christmas Carol has shaped our view of what Christmas should be, but seldom is. If we ever catch ourselves feeling guilty as we survey the pile of presents under the tree or as we tuck into that seventh turkey sandwich, it is because of Charles Dickens. He brought guilt to the feast, because we are all too aware that few of us know how to ‘keep Christmas’ in the way that the reformed Scrooge did in later life.
Works of fiction are often described as ‘capturing the public’s imagination’. Very few really do. A Christmas Carol mostly definitely did. And still does.
Originally written for Norman Geras’ normblog in 2013 as Writer’s choice 377
Charles Dickens was born on 7th February 1812 in Portsmouth, where his father was a clerk for the Royal Navy. He was the second of eight children. Dickens then lived in Bloomsbury in London and in Chatham in Kent before moving to Camden Town in London in 1822. His father was sent to the Marshalsea debtors’ prison in Southwark in 1824, when Charles was 12, and Charles was sent to board with friends of the family.
Charles worked ten hours a day putting labels on pots of bootblacking in a factory near Charing Cross, before eventually being sent to Wellington House Academy in Camden. He then worked as a junior clerk in a law office, leaving to become a freelance reporter in the law courts.
After a period as a journalist, Dickens became a hugely successful novelist, with work such as Oliver Twist, Great Expectations, Nicholas Nickleby and David Copperfield, most of which carried traces of his own life and childhood. He toured Britain and America giving readings and even planned to tour Australia. But he never forgot that troubled childhood.
Dickens was very concerned with the plight of poor children from the growing underclass of industrial Britain, and was passionately interested in their welfare and education, giving speeches and helping to raise funds for institutions like Great Ormond Street Hospital. Many of his books reflect this concern, not least A Christmas Carol, with the two feral children named as Ignorance and Want, who were the inspiration for my story.
Dickens wrote several Christmas stories, but A Christmas Carol was by far the most popular. He began work on it in 1843 and it was published in the same year, the first print run selling out on Christmas Eve.
Dickens was famous for his public readings and he read A Christmas Carol well over a hundred times. He read it at his last ever performance in 1870, the year he died.
A Christmas Carol has never been out of print and has been adapted for the stage, film and television many times. There have been musical adaptations and animated versions, and its themes have been a clear influence on many other films and books, from It’s a Wonderful Life and The Grinch Who Stole Christmas to Groundhog Day.
The many film adaptations of A Christmas Carol include a 1951 version with Alistair Simm brilliant as Scrooge, a 1970 musical version (called Scrooge) with Albert Finney in the lead role, Scrooged – a 1988 comedy update with Bill Murray in the lead – and A Muppet Christmas Carol, starring Michael Caine (and the Muppets of course). Sesame Street also had a go at its own version of A Christmas Carol in 2006. Patrick Stewart took the role of Scrooge in a television adaptation in 1999.
There have also been many animated versions of A Christmas Carol for television and cinema – most recently a 2009 computer animated 3D version by Disney with Jim Carrey voicing Scrooge (and the Spirits).
My own favourite is a Richard Williams animation from 1971, with Alistair Simm voicing Scrooge (as he had done in the earlier live-action movie). I remember watching it every Christmas morning (or so it seems now, looking back) throughout the Seventies. Shamefully, despite winning an Oscar for best animated short, it is not easily available as I write this.
A Christmas Carol is a story that each new generation seems to rediscover and reinvent, and there will doubtless be many more adaptations in the coming years.
Also by Chris Priestley
The Dead Men Stood Together
The Dead of Winter
Through Dead Eyes
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The Tales of Terror Collection:
Uncle Montague’s Tales of Terror
Tales of Terror from the Black Ship
Tales of Terror from the Tunnel’s Mouth
Christmas Tales of Terror
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First published in Great Britain in November 2014 by Bloomsbury Publishing Plc
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The Last of the Spirits Page 9
