by Dickens
The plot of A Christmas Carol brought back into the public consciousness the need for Christmas to be centred on charity. Three days after the publication of Dickens’s sensational new publication, the Chelmsford Chronicle published a stirring article:
‘Well, Christmas is with us again, or close upon the door-step. His approach, like that of some great or royal personage, is prefaced by the bustle in our streets and households … Christmas in the march of time has, perhaps, lost a part of his portly form … It is not, perhaps, in the gay halls and gilded dining-rooms of wealth that the charm of Christmas is so strongly felt. There the feast of plenty comes to often to give that zest to the holiday table, which is felt in the home where … the little luxury can count a year between. But there is a class lower still than this – aye, so low that they cannot reach even the semblance of a Christmas meal, until the welcome tap of heaven-born benevolence be heard at their cottage door. The charitable alms of the rich fall at this season upon the poor like the refreshing dew upon the parched grass of summer, and a mere trifle may carry to many a lonely home of poverty that “merry Christmas”.’
‘“Do you know whether they’ve sold the prize Turkey that was hanging up there – Not the little prize Turkey: the big one.”
“What, the one as big as me.” returned the boy…. “It’s hanging there now”….
“Is it.’ said Scrooge… ‘Go and buy it, and tell them 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. … “I’ll send it to Bon 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.”…
‘It was a Turkey. He never could have stood upon his legs, that bird. He would have snapped them 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.
‘Shaving was not an easy task, for his hand continued to shake very much; and shaving requires attention, even when you don’t dance while you are at it. But if he had cut the end of his nose off, he would have put a piece of sticking-plaster over it, and been quite satisfied.
‘He dressed himself all in his best, and at last got out into the streets. The people were by this time pouring forth, as he had seen them with the Ghost of Christmas Present; and walking with his hands behind him, Scrooge regarded every one with a delighted smile. He looked so irresistibly pleasant, in a word, that three or four good-humoured fellows said, “Good morning, sir. A merry Christmas to you.” And Scrooge said often afterwards, that of all the blithe sounds he had ever heard, those were the blithest in his ears…. He went to church, and walked about the streets, and watched the people hurrying to and fro, and patted children on the head, and questioned beggars, and looked down into the kitchens of houses, and up to the windows, and found that everything could yield him pleasure. He had never dreamed that any walk – that anything – could give him so much happiness….
‘“A merry Christmas, Bob,” said Scrooge, with an earnestness that could not be mistaken, as he clapped him on the back. “A merrier Christmas, Bob, my good fellow, than I have given you for many a year. 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.”
‘Scrooge was better than his word. He did it all, and infinitely more; and to Tiny Tim, who did not die, he was a second father. He became as good a friend, as good a master, and as good a man, as the good old city knew, or any other good old city, town, or borough, in the good old world. Some people laughed to see the alteration in him, but he let them laugh, and little heeded them; for he was wise enough to know that nothing ever happened on this globe, for good, at which some people did not have their fill of laughter in the outset; and knowing that such as these would be blind anyway, he thought it quite as well that they should wrinkle up their eyes in grins, as have the malady in less attractive forms. His own heart laughed: and that was quite enough for him.
‘He had no further intercourse with Spirits, but lived upon the Total Abstinence Principle, ever afterwards; and it was always said of him, 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!’
Charles Dickens, A Christmas Carol (1843)
It was pure coincidence that A Christmas Carol was published in the same year in which Henry Cole created his Christmas card, but it demonstrates that Dickens was capturing the nostalgic mood of the time. Dickens wrote A Christmas Carol in a very specific style, deliberately calling each section a ‘stave’ not a ‘chapter’, this echoed the musical theme of the novella’s title, as well as giving it religious overtones. The main character is the miserly moneylender Ebenezer Scrooge, whose most famous expression is a contemptuous ‘Bah, humbug!’ with which he expresses his irritation at everything cheerful and, in particular, the celebrating of Christmas.
The story begins on Christmas Eve, the seventh anniversary of the death of Scrooge’s business partner and fellow miser, Jacob Marley. That night, Scrooge is visited by Marley’s ghost, who tells him he has to change his life or be condemned to the same terrible afterlife that Marley is suffering. He tells Scrooge that he will be visited by three more ghosts; the spirits of Christmas Past, Christmas Present, and Christmas Yet to Come.
By the end of the story, Scrooge has been reminded of his childhood, his lost love and the way in which money began to assume more importance to him than people; he has witnessed the miseries of poverty that he has not only done nothing to alleviate, but which he has wittingly made worse; and he has seen into his future, as a man for whom no one cares. The four ghosts achieve their goal of making Ebenezer Scrooge a kind, good, charitable man of whom, by the end of the story, ‘it was always said … that he knew how to keep Christmas well’.
The tale of this conversion of an old skinflint and miser into a man determined to help those who need it, struck at the heart of Victorian sentiment. Dickens wrote many more Christmas stories, but none ever achieved the greatness of A Christmas Carol, because it was written with such passion and fire. Dickens wrote it not solely as a story, but as a means to bring about social change, he wrote it because he was determined to make a difference to the lives of poverty-stricken children and this was the most effective way he could envisage doing so. All his subsequent Christmas books were written because his readers demanded one and because it made good business sense. None of them have the power of A Christmas Carol.
In the first stave of A Christmas Carol, Scrooge utters the unforgettable comment that poor people who are unable to work and don’t want to be forced into prison or the workhouse should die and ‘decrease the surplus population’. In writing those words Dickens was voicing what he believed many of his readers felt about the poor, the way he felt people had once viewed him as the labouring child of a prisoner. They are words that haunt Scrooge throughout the story, and he grows to be deeply ashamed for having thought of human life as worthless.
In the third stave of the book, the Ghost of Christmas Present visits Scrooge. Dickens makes it explicit that he is writing about his readers’ present time, when the ghost comments that he has ‘more than eighteen hundred brothers’ (each ‘brother’ indicating a year). When Scrooge finds the ghost, he is surrounded by the type of conspicuous consum
ption that typified a middle-or upper-class Christmas in a Victorian home:
‘It was his own room. There was no doubt about that. But it had undergone a surprising transformation. The walls and ceiling were so hung with living green, that it looked a perfect grove; from every part of which, bright gleaming berries glistened. The crisp leaves of holly, mistletoe, and ivy reflected back the light, as if so many little mirrors had been scattered there; and such a mighty blaze went roaring up the chimney, as that dull petrification of a hearth had never known in Scrooge’s time, or Marley’s, or for many and many a winter season gone. Heaped up on the floor, to form a kind of throne, were turkeys, geese, game, poultry, brawn, great joints of meat, sucking-pigs, long wreaths of sausages, mince-pies, plum-puddings, barrels of oysters, red-hot chestnuts, cherry-cheeked apples, juicy oranges, luscious pears, immense twelfth-cakes, and seething bowls of punch, that made the chamber dim with their delicious steam.’
Dickens worked very closely with John Leech on the illustrations, and the picture Leech painted of Dickens’s ‘jolly Giant’ of a ghost is closely allied both to the traditional image of the mummers’ Father Christmas and to the ancient pagan Green Man. Traditionally, and all through the nineteenth century in Britain, Father Christmas wore green and white; some illustrations depict him in blue and white, which was a throwback to the Norse god of Jul. Although he was often depicted wearing red in North America, the dominance of the modern-day image of Father Christmas dressed in red and white began in earnest in Britain after the Coca-Cola company started using his image in their advertising campaigns and changed his robes to suit their brand colours. Dickens describes the Ghost of Christmas Present as being:
‘clothed in one simple green robe, or mantle, bordered with white fur. This garment hung so loosely on the figure, that its capacious breast was bare, as if disdaining to be warded or concealed by any artifice. Its feet, observable beneath the ample folds of the garment, were also bare; and on its head it wore no other covering than a holly wreath, set here and there with shining icicles. Its dark brown curls were long and free; free as its genial face, its sparkling eye, its open hand, its cheery voice, its unconstrained demeanour, and its joyful air. Girded round its middle was an antique scabbard; but no sword was in it, and the ancient sheath was eaten up with rust.’
John Leech’s ghost is duly dressed in a flowing green robe trimmed with white fur and wears a wreath of green holly leaves around his head. He is intended to look fatherly and benign, and to provide a rich contrast to the cringeing, stooped Scrooge in his white nightshirt. The Ghost of Christmas Present is synonymous with the spirit of Christmas:
‘The Spirit stood beside sick beds, and they were cheerful; on foreign lands, and they were close at home; by struggling men, and they were patient in their greater hope; by poverty, and it was rich. In almshouse, hospital, and jail, in misery’s every refuge, where vain man in his little brief authority had not made fast the door and barred the Spirit out, he left his blessing, and taught Scrooge his precepts.’
In creating the character of Scrooge and in writing about his conversion, Dickens wanted his readers to recognise that there was a bit of Scrooge in each of them too. He wanted to prick the consciences of those readers who might call themselves good Christians and go to church every Sunday, but then gave no thought to the starving people they passed on their walk, or carriage ride, home and who paid no heed to the child labourers working in their factories or who produced the clothes they wore, or who were being abused by their employers in all manner of terrifying and often fatally dangerous jobs that made the readers’ lives easier – such as chimney sweeps’ assistants, factory machine cleaners, seamstresses, miners and brickmakers.
In this third stave, Dickens also uses Scrooge as his own mouthpiece. At one point, it is Ebenezer Scrooge who criticises a lack of compassion, when he questions the spirit as to why bakers’ shops are closed on Sundays. For those without an oven in their own home – the vast majority of the labouring class – the one chance of eating a hot meal was if the local baker let them use their oven, after the bread had been baked. Shops had to be closed on Sundays, the Christian Sabbath – but Sunday was the only day that poor people had off work. This meant that there was not a single day in the week when they could eat a hot meal. When Scrooge asks the ghost why he had decreed this, the ghost responds angrily that even though people might pretend it is being done in his name, it is not:
‘“You would deprive them of their means of dining every seventh day, often the only day on which they can be said to dine at all,” said Scrooge. “Wouldn’t you.”
“I,” cried the Spirit.
“You seek to close these places on the Seventh Day.” said Scrooge. “And it comes to the same thing.”
“I seek.” exclaimed the Spirit.
“Forgive me if I am wrong. It has been done in your name, or at least in that of your family,” said Scrooge.
“There are some upon this earth of yours,” returned the Spirit, “who lay claim to know us, and who do their deeds of passion, pride, ill-will, hatred, envy, bigotry, and selfishness in our name, who are as strange to us and all our kith and kin, as if they had never lived. Remember that, and charge their doings on themselves, not us.”’
For the author, the essence of A Christmas Carol is a section that is often left out of adaptations of the story. Dickens had had the idea for the book when thinking about the government’s report into child health, and he had wanted to make his story a way of raising awareness of the plight of labouring children. He wanted it to make his readers feel guilty enough to do something to alleviate child poverty. When the Ghost of Christmas Present is starting to age and fade away, Scrooge notices something underneath the spirit’s robe. Initially he thinks it is an animal’s claw, but then he realises it is a human hand so skinny there is almost no flesh on it:
‘From the foldings of its robe, it brought two children; wretched, abject, frightful, hideous, miserable. They knelt down at its feet, and clung upon the outside of its garment … They were a boy and a girl. Yellow, meagre, ragged, scowling, wolfish; but prostrate, too, in their humility. Where graceful youth should have filled their features out, and touched them with its freshest tints, a stale and shrivelled hand, like that of age, had pinched, and twisted them, and pulled them into shreds. Where angels might have sat enthroned, devils lurked, and glared out menacing. No change, no degradation, no perversion of humanity, in any grade, through all the mysteries of wonderful creation, has monsters half so horrible and dread.
‘Scrooge started back, appalled. Having them shown to him in this way, he tried to say they were fine children, but the words choked themselves, rather than be parties to a lie of such enormous magnitude.
“Spirit. are they yours.” Scrooge could say no more.
“They are Man’s,” said the Spirit, looking down upon them. “And they cling to me, appealing from their fathers. This boy is Ignorance. This girl is Want. Beware them both, and all of their degree, but most of all beware this boy, for on his brow I see that written which is Doom, unless the writing be erased …”’
This scene was the crux of Dickens’s message and his main reason for writing A Christmas Carol. He wanted his readers to realise that, if they continued to deny poor children the necessities of life – such as food, shelter, warm clothing, good health and an education – they would grow up to become dangerous, violent adults. The child born in a workhouse who was not as fortunate as Oliver Twist and didn’t die young like Little Nell would grow up to become another Bill Sikes, Fagin, Nancy or Daniel Quilp.
‘Bob, turning up his cuffs – as if, poor fellow, they were capable of being made more shabby – compounded some hot mixture in a jug with gin and lemons, and stirred it round and round and put it on the hob to simmer; Master Peter, and the two ubiquitous young Cratchits went to fetch the goose, with which they soon returned in high procession.
‘Such a bustle ensued that you might have thought a goose the rarest of al
l birds; a feathered phenomenon, to which a black swan was a matter of course – and in truth it was something very like it in that house. Mrs Cratchit made the gravy (ready beforehand in a little saucepan) hissing hot; Master Peter mashed the potatoes with incredible vigour; Miss Belinda sweetened up the apple-sauce; Martha dusted the hot plates; Bob took Tiny Tim beside him in a tiny corner at the table; the two young Cratchits set chairs for everybody, not forgetting themselves, and mounting guard upon their posts, crammed spoons into their mouths, lest they should shriek for goose before their turn came to be helped. At last the dishes were set on, and grace was said. It was succeeded by a breathless pause, as Mrs Cratchit, looking slowly all along the carving-knife, prepared to plunge it in the breast; but when she did, and when the long expected gush of stuffing issued forth, one murmur of delight arose all round the board, and even Tiny Tim, excited by the two young Cratchits, beat on the table with the handle of his knife, and feebly cried Hurrah.
‘There never was such a goose. Bob said he didn’t believe there ever was such a goose cooked. Its tenderness and flavour, size and cheapness, were the themes of universal admiration. Eked out by apple-sauce and mashed potatoes, it was a sufficient dinner for the whole family; indeed, as Mrs Cratchit said with great delight (surveying one small atom of a bone upon the dish), they hadn’t ate it all at last. Yet every one had had enough, and the youngest Cratchits in particular, were steeped in sage and onion to the eyebrows. But now, the plates being changed by Miss Belinda, Mrs Cratchit left the room alone – too nervous to bear witnesses – to take the pudding up and bring it in.
‘Suppose it should not be done enough. Suppose it should break in turning out. Suppose somebody should have got over the wall of the backyard, and stolen it, while they were merry with the goose – a supposition at which the two young Cratchits became livid. All sorts of horrors were supposed.