From London to Peterborough, Truro to Dundee, A Christmas Carol is everywhere this year, raising the question of why Charles Dickens’ novella should remain so haunting 180 years after it was written. Dickens was just 31 years old when he conjured up the old misanthropist Ebenezer Scrooge and his parade of ghosts as a quick money-spinner between more expansive serialisations.
The book was published on 19 December 1843 – and by Christmas Eve all 6,000 copies had sold out. By February, eight adaptations had been staged, only one sanctioned by the author. Not all his contemporaries were impressed. “There is no heart. No feeling – it is nothing but glittering frostwork,” said Mark Twain when Dickens toured his own staged reading to America two decades later (a tradition that the great latter-day Dickensian Simon Callow has continued on stage and now on screen).
But for every detractor, the novella accumulated legions of fans. GK Chesterton went so far as to credit Dickens with saving Christmas as a popular institution from “the educated classes” who, he wrote, “are everlastingly sweeping things away as vulgar errors, and then trying to recall them as cultured eccentricities”. From declarations such as this came the myth that Dickens invented Christmas. He didn’t. But he did invent a great new version of the nativity. Instead of a baby in a stable, an old man in his counting house; instead of three kings bearing gold, frankincense and myrrh, three ghosts, bearing the gifts of insight into the past, the present and the future. Instead of a birth, a rebirth.
For all the pathos of the Cratchit family, this isn’t really a fable of righting social wrongs. It’s about the redemption of an irredeemably miserable old man through supernatural visitations that scare him back into his wits, and restore him to happiness by showing him the pleasure of generosity. The Muppets harnessed the comedy of this into a glorious puppet carnival, while many others have surfed its gothic energy, including recent versions by Jack Thorne and Mark Gatiss. There is comfort and joy in them all.
The darker resonance of Dickens’s stories comes not only from their didactic messages, but from the atmospherics that saturate them. Earlier this year, the Charles Dickens Museum themed an exhibition around fog, drawing parallels between the choking Victorian streets of Our Mutual Friend and Bleak House and air pollution today. A Christmas Carol’s evocation of urban penury in snowbound streets has given the English-speaking world an imagery with which to imagine social inequality. It was there in the background when the Centre for Social Justice warned this month that Britain was slipping back into Victorian extremes of wealth and poverty.
Great myths are those with the power to adapt to new situations, but it does not do to interpret them too literally, as a social media commentator learned a couple of years back, when he compared Bob Cratchit’s earnings with the US minimum wage. While Scrooge today could be likened to a baby boomer billionaire, sitting miserably on decades of accumulated wealth, nobody should get the idea that a Christmas morning giveaway might offer any sort of fix. Fiction can usefully raise a tear for the Tiny Tims of this world. But it always took more than a one-off gesture to enable them to live happily and healthily ever after, just as it always will.
