Most people read Charles Dickens’ A Christmas Carol as a sentimental story about Christmas, and people watch the familiar versions of it on TV every Christmas with a kind of rapt attention, because they think it is all about the religious importance of Christmas. But it’s not about religion at all! It’s all about being — or at least becoming – human. Some people would like you to think that this is what Christianity is all about, but Dickens had his doubts.
Take the very beginning of the story. “Marley was dead, to begin with. There is no doubt whatever about that.” And then he goes on to say: “There is no doubt that Marley was dead. This must be distinctly understood, or nothing wonderful can come of the story I am going to relate.”
This should remind you of something. Christmas, after all, is about the birth of Jesus, but the birth of Jesus would not have been important if people did not believe that Jesus had died, that he, like Marley, had been as dead as a doornail, although, with Dickens, we may not know of our “own knowledge, what there is particularly dead about a door-nail.”
This is a hint that the story is about death and resurrection, about redemption. But the redemption that Dickens has in mind is not the old Christian idea of being saved from our sins to live in another world. No, redemption for Dickens is to be reclamation to something that pertains to this life, here and now. And throughout the story we are reminded that we only have this one chance at life. Do it right, now, or the chance of redemption will have passed us by. We have but one life to live. If the story is to have its effect, it must make some change in our own understanding of how it would be best for life to go.
Most people who read the story misunderstand Scrooge, and, unfortunately, he has come down to us as the very epitome of miserliness and greed — as, no doubt, he was. The very name ‘Scrooge’ has taken on the meaning of Dickens’ first description of him:
Oh! But he was a tight-fisted hand at the grind-stone, Scrooge! a squeezing, wrenching, grasping, scraping, clutching, covetous old sinner! Hard and sharp as flint, from which no steel had ever struck out generous fire; secret, and self-contained, and solitary as an oyster. The cold within him froze his old features, nipped his pointed nose, shrivelled his cheek, stiffened his gait, made his eyes red, his thin lips blue; and spoke out shrewdly in his grating voice.
Alistair Sim as Scrooge
We tend to forget — Dickens’ description is so thoroughly evocative — that he is describing what had been, not what Scrooge was to become: “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.” And goodness is not so captivating as a grasping old sinner like Scrooge — as Tolstoy discovered when writing about marriages, or Milton about Satan – a man who could be neither warmed nor frozen by external sources of heat or cold: “No warmth could warm, no wintry weather chill him. No wind that blew was bitterer than he, no falling snow was more intent upon its purpose.”
But Dickens’ purpose is not to denigrate poor old Scrooge, but to describe the desperate state from which he was redeemed. What the ghosts of Christmas Past, Present and To Come manage to do, is to transform Scrooge in a way — Dickens suggests — that the death and resurrection of Jesus had not managed to do for so many of his devotees, represented by the earnest busybodies who appeal to Scrooge, seeking “to buy the Poor some meat and drink, and means of warmth,” because this time of year “is a time, of all others, when Want is keenly felt and Abundance rejoices.” That’s why Dickens is so intent on getting us to acknowledge that Marley was dead, to begin with, because the man who turned these pious busybodies down was the man to whom the word ‘liberality’ itself sounded ominous.
The wonder of it is that no one, or at least very few, seems to have noticed that A Christmas Carol is a critique, not only of Christians, but of Christianity. Scrooge was transformed by the ghosts of his own past, present and future. Christians are not transformed by an even greater miracle than this, by the death and resurrection of God’s own son. Of course, Dickens does not point this out, which is doubtless devious of him. But the meaning is there. Everything that takes place in the story takes place in Scrooge’s imagination. He is transformed from within, reflecting on his life as it had been, and his life as it would be. Marley’s account books and cash boxes weigh him down just as the sinfulness of Christians weigh them down. But Scrooge bears them too. He has been working on them for seven full years since Marley died. It is a ponderous chain, as Marley points out. And so Scrooge is able to learn his lesson from Marley and the ghosts, because they are a part of him, but Christians seem only able to manage one day out of the year in which to be generous and to care for their fellow human beings, “when Want is keenly felt.” What? Only then?
And it’s not as though there are no pointers throughout the story. Dickens frequently returns to obviously Christian themes, if not explictly identified as such. For instance, Scrooge accuses the Spirit of Christmas Present of closing places of refuge for the poor every seventh day, something done, Scrooge says, in your name, showing clearly that the ghosts really, in some sense, represent Jesus, in whose name Christmas is celebrated. (Perhaps we could make the case that the three spirits represent the Christian Trinity, the Father, Son and Holy Spirit.) And the Ghost of Christmas Present replies:
There are some upon this earth of yours … who lay claim to know us, and who do their deeds of passion, pride, ill-will, hatred, envy, bigotry, and selfishness in our name, who are as strange to us as all our kith and kin, as if they had never lived. Remember then, and charge their doings on themselves, not us.
Since I have just been writing about it, I remember here the pope and Bishop Thomas Olmstead, strangers to this Spirit of goodness, as to all his kith and kin, and how poorly, in the way Christians most often characterise Jesus, they reflect the goodness and the gentleness of the Jesus they claim to represent. (Well, at least on some interpretations of Jesus — which is a problem, don’t you think?)
In the end, of course, Scrooge does get the message of the spirits, just as, Dickens implies, Christians have yet to understand, that celebrating Christmas with all its jollity and apparent goodwill is empty, if it does not include human goodness, that deep human understanding that knows people at the heart of their joys and sorrows. Dickens’ famous Christmas story is a protest against the emptiness of Christmas, a festival that celebrates humanity every 25th of December, and then enters a deep sleep of forgetfulness for another year.
Huh. I always thought that “A Christmas Carol” was so popular because most people thought that it was indeed about humanity, not because people thought it was religious. You’d think that if anyone really thought it was religious the relevant Christian religions would, ya know, talk about it more.
A couple of issues with your analysis though:
1) The main link from Marley — and at least part of the importance of establishing his death — is indeed to demonstrate that while he was alive he didn’t do good works, and now that he’s dead he can’t, and he wears the chains he forged in life by not being good. Scrooge is motivated to face his fears of the ghosts by his fear of what will happen to him in the afterlife if he doesn’t listen and reform. I don’t think that’s meant to be any deep promotion of Christianity, but it seems to just be using the underlying ideas of the times to foster the main theme of the work.
2) I haven’t read the book directly, but have seen a lot of the popular movie versions, including the Alistair Sim version, and it doesn’t strike me as being particularly religious or not religious. Cratchett and Tiny Tim attend services, but that’s not generally presented as any particular indication of their goodness. The same thing applies to their views of Christmas. They and all the others do keep Christmas, but it seems to me that it is presented as “They’re good, so they keep Christmas” as opposed to “They keep Christmas, so they’re good”. Thus, it doesn’t seem like a protest against the emptiness of Christmas at all — since the overall impression is that Scrooge is empty, and so Christmas is empty to him — or a protest against Christianity at all. The book may be clearer on this, though.
3) It’s dangerous to associate any real argument that we’re meant to take seriously if it comes from Scrooge before his conversion. Scrooge is presented as a smart man, and he’ll make arguments that at least superficially sound good but that don’t actually work, like the “are there no prisons, are there no workhouses?” line. The one you cite seems to be one of those: Scrooge makes the line that those who represent that sort of goodness do things that aren’t right in an attempt (I think; I don’t remember that scene) to make himself look better relatively. The Ghost pointedly reminds him that you can judge goodness by actions, and that for some — even those who claim themselves good — are in no way such. Note that all the rest are not so challenged; the collectors, Scrooge’s nephew, Cratchett and the others are all presented as in some sense being good and doing good.
So there might be an underlying point about hypocrisy, but that doesn’t seem to be the main theme, or else it would be focused on more.
Well, if you had said, “I always thought that “A Christmas Carol” was so popular because most people thought that it was indeed about humanity, not [just] because people thought it was religious,” I would agree. But, from my experience in the church over many years, it is clear that people think of A Christmas Carol as being especially about Christmas, and it’s not. It’s a direct criticism of what Dickens saw as the limited compassion that was expressed in traditional Christmas celebrations — and still is.
Of course, others around Scrooge are shown as being genuinely good. But recall, too, that Scrooge’s self-centredness is shown as deriving from a lonely childhood, and the loss of his beloved sister. The whole thing is a complex human story, and that’s the point, as I understand it. Marley’s ghost is the goodness in Scrooge struggling to break free. The dreams of the ghosts are an outworking of this struggle. But the point about prisons and workhouses doesn’t make Scrooge look good. What it does is to make Christians look bad, because the prisons and workhouses are busy all year long, not just at Christmas time, and so it is not only at Christmas time that Want is felt.
And I don’t think that Scrooge’s fears are about the afterlife. Don’t forget, what he dreams about are consequences right here. His charlady will steal his bed curtains, the undertaker will purloin his watch, no one will show up at his funeral — unless he’s fed — and so on. Nothing about the afterlife at all.
Of course, there’s an undercurrent of traditional Christianity throughout the story. How could there not be? But it’s there as a background to the real story, which is the humanising of Scrooge, not his becoming Christian, but his becoming truly human, with a concern for people the year through, and not only on Christmas day. And, as to the spirits, well, remember what comes at the end:
“He had no further intercourse with Spirits, but lived upon the Total Abstinence Principle, ever afterwards …”
Which at least is suggestive about his further religious commitments.
Let me put in a plug for reading the story. (You can’t, by the way, read something indirectly!) It’s worthwhile, and Dickens’ English is amongst the most poetic in the language.
Tom Lehrer said in his song “National Brotherhood Week”
“It’s only for a week, so have no fear
Be grateful that it doesn’t last all year!”
Let me put in a plug for reading the story. (You can’t, by the way, read something indirectly!)
Really. It’s a terrible mistake to think that movies based on novels are “versions” of the novels themselves. They are new things. The novels are themselves, and one hasn’t kind of sort of read them by seeing movies based on them.
And Dickens was a verbal genius.
I hope, Eric, that you will expand on this one day. The distinction between redemption as Dickens conveys it and redemption as sold in the religious marketplace deserves serious consideration.
The most interesting sentence in the story comes at the end of Scrooge’s soliloquy over the corpse, where he imagines it as, instead of himself (which he knows it is), that of a kind soul. Strike, Shadow, strike! And see his good deeds springing from the wound, to sow the world with life immortal. This is Christian eschatology turned on its head around the meaning of immortal. Not life everlasting, but life enriched by a man, now dead, whose hand was open, generous and true.
Eric,
It’s actually odd that I haven’t; considering how much I read, you’d think I would have read it by now. I might have to look for it and pick it up.
I can’t say too much about whether he’s aimed at showing the shallowness of Christmas or not without reading the book in detail. But I’d guess that he made it a Christmas story more to make Scrooge’s miserly ways obvious; while in every day matters being a bit miserly is more forgiveable, how can one be that miserly at Christmas?
My point about that sort of point is that it’s the sort of point that’s shallowly a good one but when looked at in detail — and in the conditions in them — it’s not as good. That’s partly why they had them in the first place; it sounded like a good idea, but wasn’t anywhere near as good as it sounded when they implemented it. Scrooge is meant, I think, to be considered to be a smart miser; he has reasons, though ones that don’t stand up.
I don’t think that Dickens is using anything to directly criticize Christianity. I think he’s criticizing — at least in part — his society and its attitudes. I’m not sure how easy it would have been to separate the religion from the other aspects at that point in time.
The beginning of the story ties Scrooge’s conversion to his fear of having an afterlife where he’s even worse off than Marley, and can’t do anything to fix it. The end doesn’t really mention that again, but focuses on his not being respected by anyone despite being a man of business. How religious is it, then? It’s hard to say, since we don’t want to read too much into these sorts of choices. That being said, Scrooge retreated from people into his business, but the visions of the ghosts demonstrated that the people were what was important and the business gained him nothing, and to me that sounds like what Dickens was really after.
To start with, Ken, I agree, that is a central part of the story. Death has only won, according to this, when the one who dies did not really live, and really living is to be generous, open and free. And, of course, the immortal life that is sown is sown in the world, which is, exactly, to turn Christianity on its head.
Although we are told that Scrooge hears the words (of what you call his soliloquy), even though they were not pronounced, this is, in a sense, the moment of his reclamation, as he thinks that he too might be amongst those loved, revered and honoured dead, with a hand open, generous and true, and a heart brave, warm and tender — and, most importantly, the pulse a man’s. This shows how deeply this-worldly is Dickens concept of redemption in this familiar and much loved story.
And that’s why I have to disagree with you, verbosestoic. You say, “while in every day matters being a bit miserly is more forgiveable, how can one be that miserly at Christmas?” This is precisely the opposite of Dickens’ point. What Dickens does with his story is to show how hopeless is the idea of a special day on which to be generous. If it doesn’t make a difference to one’s life, what’s the point of being generous on Christmas day? His whole protest against Christmas is based on this. Christmas, for Dickens, is a humbug, that is, just empty joy, empty generosity, empty celebration, precisely because it is focused on just one day, and makes no real change to people’s lives. In fact, based on my own experience, people don’t want to hear about the troubles of the world and people’s suffering on Christmas day. They want to be wafted into a never never world where it is always summer holidays.
The question is not the shocked: How could you be miserly on Christmas day? The question is: How could you be miserly? And that’s the lesson that Scrooge learns. When the men came looking for a little something to buy some meat and drink for the poor, because at this time of the year want is so keenly felt and abundance rejoices, he called Christmas a humbug. He was not wrong. Scrooge was an honest skinflint. He kept at it every day. Others are not so honest. They make an exception for Christmas. How is this not a humbug?
As to Dickens’ concept of redemption. It certainly isn’t Christian. In Christianity a person is redeemed by faith. It may make no difference at all to the world — think death bed conversions — and yet a person is considered to be redeemed, because redemption has to do, not with something done, but with something believed. For Dickens redemption is a process of personal transformation that makes a difference to the world, as we can see . Marley’s ghost calls it Scrooge’s reclamation, and in the end that is the Scrooge that we see, as good a man as the good old city ever knew.
A hidden message in a cherished book? Dismissible on its face.
Seriously, Eric, Atwill’s reading of the gospels is no more implausible than what you propose here. You might be surprised and pleased. When it became real for me, it was quite an experience.
Remember, it’s on esnips, search Caesar’s Messiah. It’s free.
There’s no substitute for actually reading the story. Atwill is no Dickens, but even his critics such as Price agree he’s a “brilliant” man.
Among my favorite lines from the story, coming near the beginning when Scrooge goes home from work:
“Quite satisfied, he closed his door, and locked himself in; double-locked himself in, which was not his custom. Thus secured against surprise, he took off his cravat; put on his dressing-gown and slippers, and his nightcap; and sat down before the fire to take his gruel.”
Scrooge believes he’s “secured against surprise,” just as he’s about to receive the shock of his life. We aim for such security (and much of religion purports to provide it), but it’s illusory at best.
I have just been introduced to this blog, and find it fascinating. If I may be so bold, I would share two thoughts about A Christmas Carol. First, to me, a central image in the story is the Ghost of Christmas Present pointing out the two waifs clinging to his legs – one is want, and the other, more significant, is ignorance. Both, particularly the latter, are to be feared. Second, it is all too easy to miss that Scrooge is a witty man – “Are there no prisons? Are there no workhouses?” is said not in earnest, but is thrown in the faces of those asking for a contribution. And one of Scrooge’s first remarks to Marley is something to the effect that there is more of gravy than of the grave about him. He’s quick-witted, but lacks compassion. His discovery of this capacity within himself transcends any particular religion, it would seem, and Dickens is offering this story as a critique of his society’s self-satisfaction. We could use a dose of that today.
I think it transcends religion altogether, transcends Christmas too, which seems to me to be Dickens’ point. Thank you for reminding us of Scrooge’s wit, which indeed is delightful, and central, I think, to the point of the story. For the wit, I believe, is largely the source of Scrooge’s compassion. It is witless, heavily earnest people who cannot see into another’s heart, which is why ignorance is so dangerous. The joy of Christmas is often superficial and trivial precisely because it is so difficult to look into the depth of things, and to appreciate the scope of human misery. This is why Dickens told the story as he does, in which it is Scrooge who sees “the true meaning of Christmas” which the earnest philathropists miss entirely. Which is why I disagree with Paul Gnuman. The meaning of the story is not hidden; it bears it on its face.
Great Post
thought you might like my machinima version of A Christmas Carol
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=S9SBebs3A5I