Dickens' "A Christmas Carol"--A Lesson in Giving

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Dickens' "A Christmas Carol"--A Lesson in Giving
by James Hall

December 20, 2001

"Leaning Left"

James Hall "You are fettered, Jacob," said Scrooge, trembling. "Tell me why."

"I wear the chain I forged in life," replied the Ghost.... "Is its pattern strange to you?"

Charles Dickens (1812-1870) What is Christmas without Charles Dickens? This time of year I always enjoy reading his "Christmas Carol," that short but magical book, or watching one of the numerous movie or television adaptations, the latest of which is the production featuring Patrick Stewart as Ebenezer Scrooge. Stewart does a fine job, too, but then Dickens' characters are so vividly drawn that it would be difficult to fail to understand them.

It's hard for me to think of Christmas without recalling Scrooge, the Cratchits, and the Three Spirits of Christmas--spirits that I myself see more of, the older I get. And if Christmas is about Christ, who gave so much to the world, I would submit that "A Christmas Carol," a story about a tightfisted lonely old man who learns to give and receive love, is more than suitable for the season.

No writer did a better job of describing his milieu that Charles Dickens. His London in midwinter, dingy countinghouses half-hidden in the coal-driven fog; its underdressed clerks shivering in tiny cells illuminated by dim candlelight, its poor women and babies sleeping on doorsteps, its businessmen pinch-faced in their blind pursuit of wealth, its beggars and blind men shrinking out of the way as Scrooge passes, is a world not so different from our own.

Who drew more vivid characters than Dickens? Ebenezer Scrooge epitomizes miserliness--his "Bah, humbug!" is on the lips of every shopper who must stand in a long line for the cashier on the Last Shopping Day Before Christmas. Bob Cratchit is everyone's downtrodden employee who works hard to but cheerfully for a paltry sum, and Scrooge's nephew Fred the classic Cheerful Fellow who accepts his relatives as they are. Tiny Tim is unforgettable as the picture of wounded innocence.

The only thing that Dickens seemed to have difficulty doing is drawing characters who are truly evil. Scrooge's partner Marley and his cohorts seem truly repentant, though cursed to see the suffering of the world and be impotent to do anything about it--and in that light, Scrooge's mean and petty contemporaries at the Exchange seem more pitiful than evil, unaware of the abyss they are stepping close to. Even the undertaker and the servant women who strip Scrooge's bed and corpse in his future vision seem more like victims of a greedy system than villains themselves.

Life was hard in Dickens' England. The Poor Laws relegated debtors and the jobless to prisons or workhouses where families were separated and engaged in the unrewarding labor of breaking rocks or picking strings from old rope to make insulation. They were fed a diet of thin gruel designed to sustain them, barely. Children were 'apprenticed' to industries where they became a source of cheap labor.

The political philosophy of the time, based on utilitarianism, argued that people didn't enjoy basic rights, and so the object of the Poor Laws was to make the workhouses so awful that any kind of private menial labor would be an improvement. But many Englishmen chose begging or a life of crime instead.

The economic theory favored the views of Thomas Malthus, a pessimist who lent truth to the description of economics as "the dismal science." He argued that the human population would inevitably grow faster than agriculture's ability to feed it, and so the poor must be restrained from breeding. He considered war and famine legitimate forces that helped keep down population size. Just two years after Dickens published "A Christmas Carol," the Irish population was reduced 25% by the potato famine that killed nearly a million people and the emigration caused by the terrible circumstances that remained afterwards.

As hard as life was then, the hearts of the well off were often harder. Self-help and hard work were seen as a universal cure for trouble, while failure was clearly sinful. When Scrooge refuses to assist the charitable businessmen, asking instead, "Are there no prisons? And...workhouses?" or when he comments to the businessman's reply that the poor would rather die than go to a workhouse, saying, "If they would rather die...they had better do it, and decrease the surplus population," he is but reflecting the worst attitudes of a community that accepted only financial success as a good, and was blind to sympathy, fellow feeling, or attachment to humanity.

Dickens' criticism of his class and sympathy for the underclass was undoubtedly a reflection of his own circumstance. His civil servant father had managed the family's finances poorly, and the family had then faced debt and was even imprisoned for it briefly. Charles himself was pulled out of school and apprenticed to a blacking factory at the age of twelve, where he was put to work putting labels on the blacking bottles for nine hours a day, six days a week. Only a reversal of his father's fortunes rescued him from the factory and sent him back to school and eventually an apprenticeship as a reporter. His background--which later became the basis for the semi-autobiographical book David Copperfield, influenced him to write his socially conscious, realistic stories of life in Victorian England.

A Christmas Carol, however, isn't simply a protest against the ills of Victorian society. It is also a remedy. Scrooge saves himself because he examines his past, present, and likely future and doesn't like what he sees--the missed opportunities for love, friendship, and happiness, the refusal to acknowledge the suffering of the destitute, the eternal clawing and scraping for money that makes him the pitiful creature he is. Scrooge takes responsibility for himself by taking care of others--and by seeing to the needs of those less advantaged than he, finds the connection to others that he's been missing.

A Christmas Carol reminds us that we are not alone unless we choose to be. Like Ebenezer Scrooge, we learn that when we help others, we help ourselves. And so, as Tiny Tim observed, Merry Christmas, and "God bless us, every one." ***

Image of Charles Dickens courtesy of personal files