A Christmas Carol

Um, spoiler alert, I guess.

Perhaps I am reading Dickens wrong. I have not (not yet) visited the Victorian era, and reading his work from the comfort of my 21^st Century poverty, I have but the faintest inkling of true Victorian poverty. Around 1/3 of the urban population lived in poverty, as told here by Angie Speaks in this excellent work house video, and there were plenty of ways the poor were subjugated and systematically punished. So when one reads Dickens, I think one must remind oneself that Dickens lived in a world where poverty, death and sickness were commonplace, and not merely things transmitted to people's homes via the safe distance of mass medium communications.

The prose at the beginning of A Christmas Carol describes Scrooge much like a pantomime villain, and despite this, I think one should acknowledge the severity of Scrooge's selfishness. Those opening words are not dissimilar to that of a fairytale, but like a fairytale, the story comes from a world filled with difficulties and cruelty. So when Scrooge in A Christmas Carol refuses to donate money to feed the poor, and talks of a surplus population, he is announcing his complicity in a system that vilifies the poor, and he is showing no compassion to the hundreds of inevitable deaths that would occur that winter.

This is why Scrooge is a bad man, and we can remind ourselves that the more saccharin moments of Dickens' work are probably essential escapism from a world wrought with suffering, suffering which would surely be present in the minds of every Victorian reader. What might seem trivial when read now might be far graver when read in context.

I think it important to understand Scrooge to be a wilfully evil man because when he is visited by ghosts, he is not merely taught a lesson, he is emotionally tortured, first through being reminded of his younger, more caring self, and second through his exposure to the hatred from others his life decisions have brought him.The torture of this character is why I found myself loving this book so much.

There is an interesting feature of the story's structure: From the visitation of the very first ghost (or the 2^nd after Marley) Scrooge immediately sees the error of his ways. Being presented with his past life, past acquaintances, Scrooge is reminded of feelings he once held for others. He was once a kinder man who, through circumstances, transitioned into the selfish character of later life. It is enough for him to see his past life, to reflect upon misfortune and poor decisions for him to change his attitude to life. When the next ghost arrives, Scrooge willingly goes with it, knowing it has a valuable lesson for him.

The instinct here, I think, for many writers (and film adaptors) would be to have Scrooge learn his lesson gradually, in three stages, rather than straight away, to remain a bad man until he receives some epiphany from the final ghost; but the effect his immediate remorse has on the story is that the 2^nd and 3^rd ghosts deliver more of an experience of torture and punishment. There are more lessons to be learned, but these lessons are given to a guilt-ridden man who already admits his wrongdoing.

It is also important that he learns his lesson early so that his remorse is believable. If he learns his lesson at the last ghost, who tells him of his lonely future, Scrooge's change of heart will come across disingenuous: someone fearing the consequences, not regretting his actions. But that is not the case here.

It is the moral torture of the 2^nd and 3^rd ghosts that brings a certain sadism to the story, a kind of kindness in cruelty, which prevents the narrative slipping into insipid moralism; and it is this torture that culminates in the most arousing moment in the story, a moment that combines a strong narrative with Dickens' excellence command of English. Scrooge is shown the future by a deathly character, but the scene he initially looks upon does not contain himself. He listens to a woman pawning some bed curtains she stole from a corpse and Scrooge supposes the message the ghost is trying to convey is that the same will happen to Scrooge if he does not change his ways. He is either ignorant to, or suppressing the notion that the dead man in question is himself.

Since it is his future he is being shown, Scrooge must surely have an inkling, and so must the reader also. You could conclude Scrooge is entirely ignorant and really does not know, but I think it is much better read as denial, Scrooge suppressing his knowing. The next scene Scrooge is taken to transcends into greatness if read as Scrooge knowing who the dead man is. For it is within this reading that the words take up their most profound charge and that otherwise would be absent. Dickens writes:

He recoiled in terror, for the scene had changed, and now he almost touched a bed: a bare, uncurtained bed: on which, beneath a ragged sheet, there lay a something covered up, which, though it was dumb, announced itself in awful language.

And

[The corpse] lay, in the dark empty house, with not a man, a woman, or a child, to say that he was kind to me in this or that, and for the memory of one kind word I will be kind to him. A cat was tearing at the door, and there was a sound of gnawing rats beneath the hearth-stone. What they wanted in the room of death, and why they were so restless and disturbed, Scrooge did not dare to think.

“Spirit!” he said, “this is a fearful place. In leaving it, I shall not leave its lesson, trust me. Let us go!”

Still the Ghost pointed with an unmoved finger to the head.

“I understand you,” Scrooge returned, “and I would do it, if I could. But I have not the power, Spirit. I have not the power.”

Another thing that should be realised is that Scrooge's suffering here is entirely human. Religion is mentioned in the book, but it is not from the threat of eternal damnation that brings him torture. It is from knowing he will receive no compassion when he dies, from knowing he isn't and won't be loved. So despite the other-worldly apparitions visiting him over three or four nights, it is the one thing within his grasp, that has always been within his grasp, that exists in the real, material world that makes him see the error of his ways. It is not god he fears, his is the fear of a life without love.

Over and out!