A Christmas Carol by Charles Dickens

I don't usually do themed posts for holidays; I work five or six weeks ahead, and don't usually keep track closely enough to hit specific dates. But I've also had a copy of the Oxford Illustrated Dickens Christmas Books on my shelf for more years than I want to admit, and keep thinking, every year, that I should read one or more of them in the appropriate season.

Well, let me be honest: I generally think that at the end of the appropriate season, in the conditional past tense, that it would have been great if I had thought of it earlier.

This year, I happened to look at that shelf a day or two before Thanksgiving, had that annual thought, and read A Christmas Carol on Thanksgiving. I might read the other four Dickens "Christmas Books" over the next four years the same way. But probably not; that's a level of organization in my reading life I just don't have. But I've now read the one everyone knows, at least.

We all know this story. Very few of us have read the book: I know this is the first time I got to it. The details are more particular, and more early 19th century, than the gestalt version of it we have in our heads, smoothed out by decades of first stage and then film and then video versions.

Ebenezer Scrooge is a merchant of some kind, in 1843 London. Maybe a banker, in a small way: we know he makes loans. But probably mostly moving goods about - which goods doesn't matter. He's well-off and miserly, working and living in cold, dark rooms because "darkness is cheap." He has one employee, the clerk Bob Cratchit. He holds onto all of his money with both hands, and, inasmuch as he takes any pleasure in his life in anything, he enjoys making and holding onto money. He's a fairly old man; probably in his sixties - his partner Marley, probably of a similar age, died seven years before.

On Christmas Eve, he rejects an offer for dinner the next day from his nephew Fred and the overtures of two local merchants collecting for the poor. Scrooge cares nothing for the poor, of course: that's the core expression of how mean and miserly he is. To Dickens, that's even more central than shunning his family: Scrooge does not have the giving spirit a Christian must have, especially in that season.

Scrooge goes home, and that night is confronted by Marley's ghost, dragging the chains he forged in life: "cash-boxes, keys, padlocks, ledgers, deeds, and heavy purses wrought in steel." Marley says Scrooge still has a chance to avoid Marley's fate - to endlessly roam the world, seeing problems he could have solved in life, but now with no power to affect anything real.

There will be three more ghosts, which Marley explicitly says will come over the next three nights. (I wonder if there's been a scholarly fight about why Dickens has Marley say that: it's not what actually happens later, as we all know.)

Christmas Past is the spirit most often transformed in modern retellings; here, he's something like a candle turned into human form, carrying his own snuffer. And all three spirits show Scrooge more scenes than a movie interpretation puts onto film: Dickens can cover several scene changes on one page, but a movie crew needs sets and actors and props, all of which cost money. So the book has a wider scope; it more clearly shows the three spirits guiding Scrooge through a long ordeal, making him witness many things, not just a small handful directly relevant to him.

But, yes, there's first Past, and then the jolly gigantic Present - who here is implicitly born for this year, one of a series of similar spirits stretching back, as he says "over eighteen hundred years," and who visibly ages over the course of the Christmas he guides Scrooge through. (Which also seems to extend to Twelfth Night, in an element I don't think adaptations have picked up on at all.)

And last the barely-described, silent, creepy Yet to Come, who shows Scrooge several scenes of an unnamed dead man - who the reader knows instantly is Scrooge, of course.

The prose Christmas Carol shows Scrooge softening with each spirit, with clear regrets during both the Past and Present scenes. Adaptations sometimes follow that model, but more often save Scrooge's reformation for one big burst at the end, when he wakes up on what he doesn't yet know is Christmas morning and bursts to the window to yell out to that famously passing boy.

Here, Scrooge is clearly changed by his experience, a happier, outgoing, transformed man, focused on the happiness of others in that way Dickens always insisted was the true aim of humanity. And he's definitely more pleasant to be around for other people in his story, though the miserly early Scrooge is more fun as a character in a story.

The legend is both that Christmas Carol revived Christmas for Victorian Britons, where it had become a minor holiday, and that the third Christmas book, The Cricket on the Hearth, was the most popular during Dickens' life and for a few decades afterward. Perhaps both of those things are true; we'd have to ask a scholar of the period for a definitive answer. Christmas Carol has definitely become a durable, central story for the English-language world, and it's still a fine Dickens story, with many of his strengths shown well in a much shorter form than most of his best work.