I know that Dickens wrote A Christmas Carol to cheer the hearts of mankind and to infuse us all with the spirit of the season. (Well, he also wrote it to try to jump start his flagging career—more on that later.) But my earliest memories of this festive classic involve being scared out of my mind by the Ghost of Christmas Yet to Come. Thank you, Hollywood. I’d make it through the Marley part with only mild whimpering, then get lulled into a false sense of complacency by the benign Ghosts of Christmas Past and Present, only to be accosted by that terrifying bony hand emerging from its black shroud to point at Scrooge’s grave.
In more recent years, I have revisited A Christmas Carol on a yearly basis, often in the company of some other Dickens Christmas tales (perhaps another entry). Every time I read it, I am more struck by what a fine work it is (and yes, that last ghost still gets me). Perhaps because it has been so frequently filmed, and even loosely interpreted by Disney and the Muppets, I am apt to think of it as “Dickens lite,” and almost to consider the Dickens of the Christmas stories as a different entity altogether from the writer of Bleak House and Little Dorritt. But as I spend more time with the story, my admiration increases and I see it more as a work of literature and less as a “spirtual petit-four” (to quote a favorite line from Lily Tomlin in I [Heart] Huckabees). Yes, there is a certain saccharine quality that is almost inevitable in festive literature, but if anything it is more subtle than that of Little Dorritt or, certainly, The Old Curiosity Shop. The pacing of the story and its remarkable conciseness could be a model for short story writers everywhere. Finally, the writer’s skill in mixing humor, pathos, jollity, and terror in such perfect proportions is truly amazing. The mere fact that Fezziwig and that terrible final ghost can exist within pages of each other with no sense of contradiction is remarkable.
My appreciation for this story was heightened this year by the purchase of a little book called The Man Who Invented Christmas: How Charles Dickens’s A Christmas Carol Rescued His Career and Revived Our Holiday Spirits by Les Standiford. It jumped out at me as I browsed in The Bookery. I’m a sucker for attractive books, and this one has a festively elegant red, green, and gold cover, deckle edges, and big red initials at the chapter heads.
It’s a very enjoyable read and tells a great deal about Dickens and his career circa 1843. It also presents (as implied by the title) a story of how A Christmas Carol revived both Dickens’s career and Christmas itself, a holiday which had been weakened by the combined forces of Puritanism and secularism. In his depictions of Christmas festivity, Dickens was not depicting things as they normally were in the 1840s, but was hearkening back to a older traditions that he feared would die out. It’s interesting to note what these traditions are. Dickens does not mention Christmas trees or gifts. He does mention dancing (not currently an activity associated with Christmas), and eating (which remains extraordinarily popular). Standiford offers the opinion that Dickens can be credited with the shift in Christmas poultry from goose to turkey.
So, I heartily recommend a salutary re-reading of this Christmas classic and a perusal of the The Man Who Invented Christmas to provide context. God bless us, every one!