A Christmas Carol
I had never read Charles Dickens’ immortal classic A Christmas Carol until I did so—a sentence which is a pointless tautological nightmare and a terrible way to start a blog but! also much less so if you pretend that nothing between the em-dashes exists, and rather that the sentence had been allowed to proceed apace to the end, as it will now—this month. As with many Great Works of the Canon that I did not get around to reading until decidedly too late, I enjoyed it with an utterly unjustifiable smug sense of having discovered its greatness myself. “Why, this is really quite something, this book,” I found myself thinking. “I’m not sure people get just how good and crucial this book really is,” I exclaimed to myself, about one of the most widely identifiable and beloved examples of English-language storytelling produced in the last three centuries. “What this book really needs,” I realized, “is to be blogged about, but by me.”
Dickens takes charge of the proceedings with insinuative efficiency, his narrator all but tossing an arm around the reader’s shoulder and gathering you in close from the very first moments. The intended effect isn’t so much instant transport to mid-19th century London (which follows shortly), but the comfortable presence of an old friend—confident and self-deprecating, and with a story to tell. The opening also feels entirely modern, a fourth-wall-smashing and highly discursive couple of pages that nevertheless accelerate right into the story, with quick digressions about language and Hamlet that comment as much on the nature of storytelling as on the unfolding plot itself.
Of course, it feels modern, in part, because of the influence Dickens has had over the last two hundred years of popular writing and culture. But it’s not just his authorial voice, or the cinematic depictions of setting and character, or the now-familiar trappings of Christmas that he popularized—A Christmas Carol is basically a time travel story, with Scrooge whisked backwards and forwards through time and space long before “time travel” was a recognizable convention of fiction, sci-fi or otherwise.
The time traveling turns Scrooge—a perfectly and immediately wholly-realized figure, to boot—into a kind of character-as-fourth-wall, an in-universe audience of the story-of-his-life that is also the book. His journey is less about growth or transformation than it is about remembering something he already knew to be true, but had forgotten or suppressed. Dickens assigns to Scrooge the humanitarian rebirth he’d like the audience to experience, an awakening of the soul that he hopes will have wide cultural and political ramifications. By packaging these potentially dangerously maudlin ambitions in a short Christmas-centric ghost story wrapped around an instantly iconic misanthrope, Dickens gets away with a level of enthusiastic earnestness that would otherwise come off cloyingly—and no doubt does anyway, to those disinclined to the spirit(s) of the season. I don’t think we’re supposed to recognize in Scrooge any particular individual, but Scrooge-as-society in industrial, urban London. Scrooge’s personal rebirth is perennial and lasting, but we revisit the story every year—and re-adapt it anew seemingly as often—because the world continues to be a difficult place in which to find oneself, the machinery of capitalism as exploitative and punishing as ever, despite undeniable material improvements.
Before A Christmas Carol was what it became, Dickens thought he was going to write a pamphlet about the brutality of child labor in England—specifically in response to a report from the government that included a series of interviews conducted by a journalist he knew. He ultimately decided to write his ghost-and-time-travel story instead, no doubt because the audience—commercial and otherwise—for pleasing, humorous fiction was considerably broader than what exists for enraged, scolding essays. (This was before Twitter, after all.) But expanding the audience in this way comes with a cost—that any specific political point he may be trying to make is subject to both interpretation and outright dismissal. It’s just a story, after all, and it will be appropriated however the audience (and eventually Disney) sees fit. That he seemed to believe that his story could have a “Sledge hammer”-level impact on society-wide problems of poverty and social injustice is a tribute to his optimism or his arrogance, and probably both. A pamphlet might have changed a few minds in 1843, but A Christmas Carol has been softening hardened hearts and thawing frozen souls for a dozen generations, and it still matters.
Because it’s important to be reminded, from time to time, that kindness and generosity are central to a meaningful life—that we humans are in it together, often pitted against malevolent or just entropic forces that can only be overcome communally. It is a simple message that we all already know, one so pure and obvious that Ebenezer Scrooge himself realizes it almost immediately—not in the closing pages of the story, but right at the beginning. In an increasingly atomized and isolating world that insists, against all the evidence, that we’re actually more connected to one another than ever before, it may be a simple message that we all already know, but it is also a beautiful one, and we need to be shown again, every once in a while. I do, anyway.
You’ll perhaps notice that I have discussed basically none of the actual story of A Christmas Carol, or what I like about it, or what makes it any good, and that the scroll bar is getting curiously near to the bottom of the page for me to start doing so now. This is not because, as you may so hopefully expect, that I recognize that you, of course, already know the story of A Christmas Carol—rather, it is because this is but the first in a series of posts about Dickens’ immortal classic, and its many, many adaptations. So if you like this sort of thing, good news! There’s more on the way, wherein I will explore the particulars of the story, and which adaptations get it right, and which miss the point entirely. If you do not like this sort of thing, how the hell did you possibly make it all the way down here? And also, Bah! Humbug to you!
Next time: The fairly faithful 1935 adaptation, Scrooge. Available to stream on Amazon, or YouTube, or pretty much anywhere else.
