Les Standiford

by The Man Who Invented Christmas: Charles Dickens's

  While the words are attributed to a character in a novel, there is little doubt that the sentiments are those of the author. Dickens had in fact expressed similar feelings about the season in previous works, including one sketch describing a happy Christmas family gathering during which a number of simmering feuds and resentments are laid to rest. Titled “Christmas Festivities,” it was originally published in Bell’s Life in London in December 1835, and later it was included in Sketches by Boz as “A Christmas Dinner.”

  “That man must be a misanthrope indeed, in whose breast something like a jovial feeling is not roused—in whose mind some pleasant associations are not awakened—by the recurrence of Christmas,” the piece begins. And if the mention of such a misanthrope conjures up images of a Scrooge-to-be, later in the sketch there also comes a reference to an innocent child who dies:

  “Look on the merry faces of your children (if you have any) as they sit round the fire. One little seat may be empty; one slight form that gladdened the father’s heart, and roused the mother’s pride to look upon, may not be there.

  “Dwell not upon the past; think not that one short year ago, the fair child now resolving into dust, sat before you, with the bloom of health upon its cheek, and the gaiety of infancy in its joyous eye. Reflect upon your present blessings…not upon your past misfortunes…. Fill your glass again, with a merry face and contented heart…your Christmas shall be merry, and your new year a happy one!”

  For the Christmas issue of The Pickwick Papers in 1836, Dickens had also written “The Story of the Goblins Who Stole a Sexton,” a short fiction about a gravedigger who is redeemed by the intervention of a pack of goblins. Grub is described as “an ill-conditioned, cross-grained, surly fellow—a morose and lonely man, who consorted with nobody but himself, and an old wicker bottle which fitted into his large deep waistcoat pocket.” He is the sort of fellow who raps a carol-singing urchin’s head with his knuckles, and who delights to find a coffin arrived at his graveyard on the holiday: “A coffin at Christmas! A Christmas Box. Ho! Ho! Ho!”

  Yet after Grub is mystically spirited away by the goblins and treated to a series of glimpses of the lives of the unfortunate, including one family’s grief as the “fairest and youngest child lay dying,” he comes to understand the error of his ways. “He saw that men who worked hard, and earned their scanty bread with lives of labour, were cheerful and happy…. Above all, he saw that men like himself, who snarled at the mirth and cheerfulness of others, were the foulest weeds on the fair surface of the earth [and] he came to the conclusion that it was a very decent and respectable sort of world after all.”

  This little fable, while a pale shadow of what a more mature Dickens would create some seven years later, is proof that the basic elements of A Christmas Carol had been incubating for some time. There are also some hints of the delightfully mordant humor that would leaven Scrooge’s miserliness. It is difficult not to appreciate a grump who can chortle over a coffin as a “Christmas box.”

  In such touches, we see hints of what would flower in A Christmas Carol, with its misanthrope so riled by goodwill that he declares a curse on holiday revelers: “If I could work my will,” says Ebenezer Scrooge to his nephew, “every idiot who goes about with ‘Merry Christmas’ on his lips, should be boiled with his own pudding, and buried with a stake of holly through his heart. He should!” Or, that immortal reply to poor Fred’s wish that he have a Merry Christmas: “Bah! Humbug!”

  And while it may seem superfluous to summarize such a well-known tale (one commentator has said of it that “if every copy were destroyed to-day, it could be rewritten tomorrow, so many know the story by heart”), still, a brief recounting of what grew bit by bit in Dickens’s mind as he strode about the dark London streets seems in order.

  After being accosted in his offices at the accounting firm of Scrooge and Marley by his far-too-merry nephew Fred, our aging bachelor protagonist, Ebenezer Scrooge, makes his way home through the fogbound and bustling Christmas Eve, pausing only when he is approached by a do-gooder seeking donations for the poor:

  “Many thousands are in want of common necessaries,” this portly gentleman informs Scrooge, “hundreds of thousands are in want of common comforts, sir.”

  “Are there no prisons?” Scrooge asks the man. “And the Union workhouses? Are they still in operation?”

  Having dismissed this emissary with a series of such questions, Scrooge continues to his doorstep without further incident, though he is somewhat disconcerted to find that his doorknocker seems briefly to take the shape of the face of his years-dead partner Jacob Marley—a vision with “a dismal light about it, like a bad lobster in a dark cellar.”

  The moment passes, however, and Scrooge goes on inside, where, as he takes his evening gruel, the ghost of Marley appears before him in whole form. Marley explains to a disbelieving Scrooge that for his own sins of avarice he has been condemned to wander in a kind of purgatory all the seven years since his death, and he further announces that three ghosts will follow on his heels to Scrooge’s chambers.

  “Without their visits,” Marley tells Scrooge, “you cannot hope to shun the path I tread.” The first, he says, will arrive by one o’clock in the morning, and though Scrooge asks—in the spirit of efficiency, of course—if it mightn’t be easier if all three came at once, Marley disappears.

  While Scrooge wonders if that visit of Marley’s is nothing more than a bad dream occasioned by an undigested bit of beef or a fragment of an underdone potato, he is indeed roused at the appointed hour. A spirit who seems by turns youthful and greatly aged carries Scrooge on a tour of his past, where he is reminded of a friendless childhood, and one evening in particular, abandoned in a dismal schoolhouse with only the characters in books for company.

  Following a brief appearance of his beloved and long since departed younger sister, the dream-tour shifts to the warehouse offices of Scrooge’s first employer Fezziwig, where business is quickly pushed aside for a Christmas Eve party of epic proportions. Hardly has Scrooge recovered from this display of Fezziwig’s huge spirit, than the Ghost carries him along to a memory of his one and only sweetheart as she breaks off their engagement: she knows that a rival has displaced her in his eyes, and when young Scrooge demands to know whom, she tells him simply, “Gain.”

  The tour of Christmas Past ends with a quick glimpse of what might have been—his former fiancée now married, with a brood of children tearing about a festive house on Christmas Eve, and a good-humored husband arrived home to let her know that he has chanced to see her former friend Scrooge this day, alone and pitiful in his countinghouse as his partner Marley lies dying.

  The memories are almost more than Scrooge can bear, and he falls upon the Ghost in a fury—“Leave me. Take me back. Haunt me no longer”—and finds himself abruptly returned to his bed.

  The ordeal so exhausts Scrooge that he apparently sleeps through Christmas day, awakening again the next morning at the stroke of one, and this time ready for anything. Given what has already taken place, “nothing between a baby and a rhinoceros would have astonished him very much.”

  Thus, when a voice calls from his living room, Scrooge climbs down from his bed without hesitation. When he opens the door to his living room, he finds those spartan chambers transformed into a veritable Yule forest bedecked for the holidays, a fire raging in his normally meager hearth, and a jolly Christmas Viking-Ghost seated atop a thronelike assemblage of roasted game and turkeys, geese and sucklings, puddings, pies, and cakes.

  The bewreathed Ghost of Christmas Present, clad in fur-trimmed robes of green, takes Scrooge on a tour of the holiday-thronged streets of London that ends with a visit to the home of Bob Cratchit, Scrooge’s clerk, where a poor but grateful family—including the crippled Tiny Tim and his several siblings—enjoy a feast of goose and applesauce and mashed potatoes and gravy, and, finally, a pudding “like a speckled cannonball…bedight with Christmas holly stuck into the top.”

  Scrooge is stru
ck by the affection that passes between Cratchit and his afflicted son and even asks of the Ghost if Tiny Tim will live, but the miser is equally touched by Cratchit’s gentle reproach of his wife when she refers to Scrooge as “an odious, hard, unfeeling, stingy man,” this despite the fact that we have seen the clerk unable to pry as much as an extra lump of coal from his boss to stoke the office fire.

  These characters who fascinate Scrooge so are not a handsome family, we are told, and their clothes are worn and scanty. “But they were happy, grateful, pleased with one another, and contented with the time.” And even as the vision fades away, Scrooge holds “his eye upon them, and especially on Tiny Tim, until the last.”

  There is one more stop with Christmas Present, this at an evening dinner party to which Scrooge’s nephew had invited his uncle during their encounter of the day before, and where this time it is the nephew who defends Scrooge and his fabled hardheartedness against the slurs and catcalls of the others of the group. Yes, it is a shame that his uncle cannot appreciate the spirit of the holidays, his nephew Fred admits, but adds quickly, “I am sorry for him…. Who suffers by his ill whims? Himself, always.”

  The tour of Christmas Present might have ended on that vaguely generous note, if Scrooge had not then noticed what seemed to be a claw poking from beneath the Ghost’s robes. Seeing his surprise, the Ghost pulls back the robes to reveal the wretched sight of a boy and girl huddled there: “Yellow, meager, ragged, scowling, wolfish…. Where angels might have sat enthroned, devils lurked, and glared out menacing.”

  In response to Scrooge’s stunned wonderment as to where these two have come from, the Spirit tells him, “They are Man’s…. This boy is Ignorance. This girl is Want. Beware them both, and all of their degree.”

  Scrooge stares back at these children of the Saffron Hill school incarnate. “Have they no refuge or resource?” he murmurs.

  “Are there no prisons?” comes the Spirit’s mocking answer. “Are there no workhouses?” And before Scrooge can answer, the clock strikes midnight, and Christmas Present is gone.

  The final Spirit, that of Christmas Yet To Come, is much more threatening than his predecessors, a sepulchral creature that glides toward Scrooge “like a mist,” its face hooded and using only a spectral hand to communicate. This ominous creature guides Scrooge through the London streets, first to a knot of men who discuss in callous tones the death of an unnamed associate and their disinclination to so much as attend the funeral, unless, of course, “a lunch is provided.”

  From there, the hooded Spirit conveys Scrooge to a dismal boneyard, where a charwoman brings a heap of bedclothes taken from her former employer’s house to pawn: “Ha, ha!” the woman laughs as the boneyard master pays her for her troubles. “This is the end of it, you see! He frightened every one away from him when he was alive, to profit us when he was dead! Ha, ha, ha!”

  Though it dawns on Scrooge that “the case of this unhappy man might be my own,” even a visit to a deserted bedchamber where a corpse lies wrapped in sheeting cannot entirely lift the fog of his obliviousness. When he begs the Spirit for a glimpse of anyone in all London who might mourn this dead man’s passing, Scrooge is permitted to watch one couple lament that their creditor has died before the husband could beg him to relieve their debt.

  The culmination of the final Spirit’s visit comes with a visit to the Cratchit home, where Bob Cratchit has just returned from a visit to Tiny Tim’s grave. As he tries to keep himself together, the clerk admonishes his family to remember Tim’s mild example. “We shall never quarrel among ourselves, and forget poor Tiny Tim in doing it,” Cratchit says, and his remaining children assure him that they will not.

  By now the entire family is in tears, with Cratchit doing his best to hold up. “I am very happy,” says young Bob junior, “I am very happy!” And the whole group comes to embrace their wretched father.

  With that, the Ghost of Christmas Yet To Come snatches Scrooge away, conveying him quickly past his closed-up office and to a churchyard, and thence to a tombstone in it, where the mystery, if it has not yet sunk in, is finally revealed. Our miser stands reading the chiseled name of EBENEZER SCROOGE upon the stone in shock, then—enlightened at last—turns to beg his guide for one more chance to mend his ways.

  “Oh, tell me I may sponge away the writing on this stone,” cries Scrooge. He lunges for the spectral hand of the phantom, holding tightly to it in supplication…and wakens then to find himself clutching the wooden post of his own bed, daylight flooding the room, and the bedclothes he had seen pawned in a boneyard back in their rightful place.

  A breathless Scrooge runs to his window to thrust his head out and call to a shop boy in the streets below. It is but Christmas Day, the boy assures him, and Scrooge marvels that the Spirits have done their work in the space of a single night after all. Overjoyed to find himself still alive, he sends the shop boy off to the poulterer’s for a turkey—“Not the little prize Turkey: the big one,” and sends the thing—“twice the size of Tiny Tim”—off to the Cratchits’.

  As quickly as he can manage it, he is shaved and dressed and out into the streets, where he meets the do-gooder whom he rebuffed the day before. When he whispers an unspecified amount into the gentleman’s ear, it leaves his beneficiary gaping in astonishment.

  From that encounter he is off to his nephew Fred’s, for dinner, and after that delightful time, returns home for a good night’s rest. The next morning he is quickly off to his office morning to await the arrival of Bob Cratchit, who enters in a nervous sweat, a “full eighteen minutes and a half behind his time.”

  “I am not going to stand this sort of thing any longer,” Scrooge tells the frightened Cratchit—then claps his clerk jovially on the back. “I’ll raise your salary, and endeavour to assist your struggling family, and we will discuss your affairs this very afternoon, over a Christmas bowl of smoking bishop, Bob! Make up the fires, and buy another coal-scuttle before you dot another i, Bob Cratchit!”

  Ever afterwards, we are told, it was always said of Scrooge that he knew how to keep Christmas well, “if any man alive possessed the knowledge. May that be truly said of us, and all of us! And so, as Tiny Tim observed, God bless Us, Every One!”

  In summary, A Christmas Carol is a bald-faced parable that underscores Dickens’s enduring themes: the deleterious effects of ignorance and want, the necessity for charity, the benefits of goodwill, family unity, and the need for celebration of the life force, including the pleasures of good food and drink, and good company. And, admittedly, Dickens is in some ways repeating concepts that he had put in print before.

  But that aside, the accomplishment of this slender story, which more than one critic has termed Dickens’s “most perfect” work, is to be found in the details of its rendering. In A Christmas Carol, a contemptible gravedigger is replaced by the much more estimable figure of a wealthy businessman. Ebenezer Scrooge is no castoff drunk, but the very emblem of economic achievement. And in place of specious advice to parents who might well want to grieve a lost child at Christmastime, he offers but a chilling vision of the Cratchit family’s life without Tiny Tim, then hurries to bring that crippled child back to life again.

  Furthermore, the ghosts who assail him are not vaguely drawn creatures from familiar myths. The tripartite Spirits of Christmas, preceded by the shade of Scrooge’s dead partner, are as originally conceived as they are powerful in their detailed, quasi-human form. Marley appears looking very nearly as he had in life, save for the fact that “His body was transparent; so that Scrooge, observing him, and looking through his waistcoat, could see the two buttons on his coat behind….[Scrooge] felt the chilling influence of its death-cold eyes; and marked the very texture of the folded kerchief bound about its head and chin, which wrapper he had not observed before.”

  Lest all this frightfulness open the artist to the charge of melodrama, however, Dickens slips in a typically caustic aside: “Scrooge had often heard it said that Marley had no bowels, but he had n
ever believed it until now.”

  It is the sort of wit that creeps in throughout, allowing the cynical reader to proceed contentedly through the story alongside the sentimentalist. (It is not surprising, then, that one of the more enjoyable modern interpretations of the tale is performed by the comedian Jonathan Winters, master of the cutting jibe.)

  And while only the hardest hearts fail to be moved along with Scrooge by the plight of the Cratchit family and the stiff-upper-lippedness of Tiny Tim, there are also moments in the text when Dickens’s powers distinguish him as much as a stylist as he is a master dramatist.

  Of the vast, echoing staircase in Scrooge’s dimly lit town home, the narrator says, “You may talk vaguely about driving a coach-and-six up a good old flight of stairs, or through a bad young Act of Parliament; but I mean to say you might have got a hearse up that staircase, and taken it broadwise, with the splinter-bar towards the wall and the door toward the ballustrades: and done it easy. There was plenty of width for that, and room to spare; which is perhaps the reason why Scrooge thought he saw a locomotive hearse going on before him in the gloom.”

  The cadences, the detail, the wry humor, and the ease with which the narrator shifts from what is real to what is not—these are elements that are sometimes unrevealed to modern audiences who know A Christmas Carol only from dramatic adaptations, where the author’s descriptive voice is replaced by a camera or by a set designer’s vision. But this quality of writing contributes as much to the book’s ability to work its magic upon readers as do any number of fine and noble sentiments. In such details lie the reasons why Ebenezer Scrooge and his preposterous self-centeredness would live on through history, and why Gabriel Grub, cut from the same thematic bolt of cloth, would not.