Charles Dicken’s A Christmas Carol (1843) marks the invention of the modern celebration of Christmas. Our celebrations derive more from Dickens than from the New Testament narratives.
Traditionally English peasants celebrated the twelve days of Christmas with feasting, drinking, and games. The poor demanded food and money from the rich. It was a rowdy celebration of Christ‘s birth.
During the reign of Queen Victoria, the Industrial Revolution fundamentally transformed English society. Large parts of the population were forced off farms and villages and into cities. The English economy exploded. Laissez-faire capitalism was on a rampage. Great fortunes were made and poverty spread. Children worked long hours in dangerous mines, sweatshops, and workhouses. Karl Marx’s Das Kapital (1867) brilliantly analyzed this situation. Dickens was deeply disturbed by this new social revolution. He himself at age twelve had experienced child labor in a shoe-blacking factory. These themes are present in all his novels. Think of David Copperfield or Oliver Twist.
The Victorian period saw a revival of interest in Christmas celebrations. Queen Victoria and her husband, Prince Albert, introduced and popularized the Christmas tree. There was renewed interest in Christmas carols. Dickens’ A Christmas Carol accelerated and fueled this revival. While the greeting “Merry Christmas” predates Dickens, his novella made it the standard greeting at Christmas. “Bah Humbug” became a part of the English language as a phrase of dismissal. “Scrooge” became synonymous with a miser. The meager roasted goose, the standard Christmas dinner faire before A Christmas Carol, was replaced by the fatter Christmas turkey because of its role in the novella. Family gatherings, feasting, and gift giving became central.
But A Christmas Carol goes deeper. Underlying the novella is a conflict between laissez-faire capitalism and Christmas itself or better the meaning of Christmas. But from whence does Dickens derive the meaning of Christmas? How Dickens explores the conflict between capitalism and Christianity and expands the meaning of Christmas is fascinating.
In Scrooge’s first encounter with the ghost of his former partner Jacob Marley, the ghost lays out the conflict. When Scrooge tells the ghost, “But you were always a good man of business, Jacob,” the ghost replies: “’Business!’ cried the Ghost, wringing its hands again. ‘Mankind was my business. The common welfare was my business; charity, mercy, forbearance, and benevolence, were, all, my business. The dealings of my trade were but a drop of water in the comprehensive ocean of my business!’”
Marley and Scrooge were capitalists par excellence. But the ghost rejects capitalism or business in favor of mankind, the common welfare elaborated as charity, mercy, forbearance, and benevolence. This is the social gospel. There is no appeal to the scriptures, to God, or to Jesus Christ. Capitalism and the common welfare are posed as opposites, a stark either-or.
Dickens also transforms Christmas into Easter. In traditional Christianity, Easter celebrates new life, rebirth, the possibility of which leads to repentance. Dickens transfers these themes to Christmas. The ghosts bring about a miraculous transformation in Scrooge. As he says, “The Spirits have done it all in one night. They can do anything they like. Of course they can. Of course they can.”
The first thing he says as he awakens from his final ghostly visitation is, “I will live in the Past, the Present, and the Future!” The eschatological now. His mind has been opened, he is a new man transformed. He even describes himself as a baby: “‘I don’t know what day of the month it is!’ said Scrooge. ‘I don’t know how long I’ve been among the Spirits. I don’t know anything. I’m quite a baby. Never mind. I don’t care. I’d rather be a baby. Hallo! Whoop! Hallo here!’”
His bedroom window had been his egress into the spirit world. Now on the first day of his new life, “Running to the window, he opened it, and put out his head. No fog, no mist; clear, bright, jovial, stirring, cold; cold, piping for the blood to dance to; Golden sunlight; Heavenly sky; sweet fresh air; merry bells. Oh, glorious! Glorious!” The tomb is opened, Christmas morning is now Easter morning, everything renewed.
Dickens poses a central problem in Christian life. Is repentance truly possible? Can we really become a new person? Dickens argues in the affirmative. But it requires critical reflection, represented in his novella by the spirits. He concludes his story by noting that “Scrooge was better than his word. He did it all, and infinitely more.” He summarizes Scrooge’s life as “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 have seen Dickens’ A Christmas Carol as sentimental and its view of life as too optimistic and unreal, that is, repentance is an illusion. But Dickens had anticipated that critique. “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.”
Dickens’ A Christmas Carol is a good example of what John Caputo terms theopoetics. Dickens has repositioned and rephrased the Christian message but without reference to the scriptures, God, or Jesus Christ. There is no supernatural faith here. In story he has used the social gospel to produce a blistering critique of laissez-faire capitalism.
Stories as powerful as A Christmas Carol have afterlives, often unanticipated. In the narrative, Tiny Tim is the emblem for the sufferings inflicted by laissez-faire capitalism. Dickens even gives Tiny Tim the last word in the novella: “And so, as Tiny Tim observed, God bless Us, Every One!” But this has had the unanticipated effect of focusing Christmas on innocence, especially that of children. Innocent children need not repent, and so interpretations of A Christmas Carol do tend toward the sentimental, and because of the novella’s influence on our understanding of Christmas, we view Christmas as the recovery of a lost innocence symbolized by giving children gifts. There is no room in this view of Christmas for the slaughter at Bethlehem and Rachel weeping for her dead children.
One might say that capitalism has had its revenge. Family gatherings, feasting, reconciliation, and gift giving, all this capitalism has turned into a mighty engine of economic power. But Dickens’ novella retains the power to call us to the possibility of new life, renewal, and to remind us that all of humankind is our business.
A Christmas Carol is beautifully written and engaging, even today. Dickens was one of the great stylists of the English language. The original 1843 edition with the illustrations by John Leech is available on Kindle for free. It’s the edition to read. Read the book. The film adaptations are a pale reflection, although often interesting.
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