by Albert Pears
A Christmas Carol, written in the autumn of 1843, turns on an old man who has spent a lifetime armoring himself against everyone: Ebenezer Scrooge. People keep their distance, and he likes it that way; he cultivates his querulous disgust for the world and wears his indifference to Christmas like a badge. He plans to spend the holiday alone, in his gloomy house, when, on Christmas Eve, the ghost of Jacob Marley—his long-dead business partner—pays him a visit and announces that three spirits are on their way. Terrified, Scrooge braces himself for a sequence of night terrors.
The first apparition, the Ghost of Christmas Past, drags him back through the scenes of his childhood and youth. The second, the Ghost of Christmas Present, lets him feel the warmth of a modest celebration that has almost nothing in material terms yet overflows with affection. The third, the Ghost of Christmas Yet to Come, shows him a handful of shady figures picking over his belongings and a grave where he will end up, alone, his soul shriveled by his own cynicism.
When Scrooge wakes up, it’s a bright morning, and it is Christmas. The message of his nocturnal visions finishes the job that life had left half-done. The old man, hardened by resentment against the human race, becomes a new man: generous, attentive, almost comically eager to make amends to his fellow creatures.
* * *
A Christmas Carol is a sermon in story form, broken into five narrative stanzas that echo the five acts of a Shakespearean tragedy. The tragedy is human coexistence. The villain, or maybe the offstage deity, is the capitalist system, which Dickens keeps nudging into view: a way of organizing life and thought that reduces every value to an entry on a balance sheet, and that therefore needs some counterweight in the form of solidarity, pity, and compassion—those soft elements meant to calm the “animal spirits” that drive the whole machine.
Central to this moral geometry is the conversation with Marley’s ghost, the dead partner who has finally learned how small his old notion of “business” really was. His confession is the hinge of the tale:
“Business!” cried the Ghost, wringing its hands again. “Mankind was my business. The common welfare was my business; charity, mercy, forbearance, and benevolence, were, all, my business. The dealings of my trade were but a drop of water in the comprehensive ocean of my business!”
Dickens doesn’t abolish the word “business”; he inflates it until the petty transactions of the countinghouse look ridiculous swishing around inside it. Marley suddenly sees that the ledger he worshipped is only a corner of a much larger book.
This little ghost story belongs with a lineage of English moral fables that pretend to be simple narratives and keep turning into indictments of how we live. You think of Lord of the Flies, that black fairy tale about schoolboys regressing into tribal murder, or Robinson Crusoe, which disguises a treatise on colonial enterprise as an adventure on a desert island. The line goes back to Swift. A Christmas Carol is a moral fable, a parable about our way of life written at the moment when capitalism, having shot the rapids of the late-eighteenth-century industrial revolution, was spreading out in the hot foam of early Victorian bourgeois society.
But Dickens isn’t Swift. Swift looked at the human plant and decided it was diseased down to its roots. Dickens has been watching the same history—smoke, factories, slums, fortunes made out of other people’s shortened lives—and yet he doesn’t write from the same venomous despair. The man who gives us Scrooge isn’t offering an abstract meditation on “Man.” He is watching a particular species of man, the industrial and financial creature who rises out of the new economy.
And Dickens isn’t some “compassionate conservative” avant la lettre, one of those modern functionaries who sprinkle a little pity on the system and call it reform. George Bernard Shaw said that some of Dickens’s work was “more seditious than Das Kapital,” which sounds like Shaw enjoying his own rhetoric but hits a truth: Dickens’s tenderness has teeth. Lenin, on the other hand, complained about “bourgeois sentimentality” in Dickens, and had A Christmas Carol read aloud to him on his deathbed as if to test his own immunity. You can see why both men claim him and misread him.
Dickens is a moralist. George Orwell, who felt an almost filial loyalty to him, saw this very clearly. Orwell pointed out that Dickens’s judgment of society is almost entirely ethical. That’s why his books are so thin on constructive programs. He flays the law, parliament, schools, and almost any institution he wanders into, yet he never spells out what you’re supposed to build in their place. A novelist doesn’t have to produce blueprints, and a satirist even less. Still, Dickens doesn’t behave like a destroyer. His protests aim at a change of heart rather than a change of structure.
Orwell called him “not in the accepted sense a revolutionary writer,” then added that a purely moral critique might be just as “revolutionary” as political economy, since a revolution is, after all, a turning of things upside down. Dickens wants the turn to start in the psyche. If the social order changes afterward, so much the better; he hasn’t drawn the diagram for it.
Dickens, whom Taine christened “the master of all hearts,” takes as his specimen the heart of a man dried out by ledgers and double-entry bookkeeping. Inside Scrooge’s private system even time, especially time, exists only as a function of business. In the opening chapter, when he wakes after the first nightmare and cannot tell what hour it is, his panic isn’t metaphysical. Dickens lets us hear the thought: if the reliable march of days has been tampered with, if the clock no longer guarantees that Tuesday follows Monday, what happens to the bills coming due? Those promissory notes—assets in his favor—might suddenly become, as we would say now, junk bonds.
In Dickens’s day, the “toxic paper” of the market was often the public debt of the United States, which the English investor eyed with suspicion while planting his money in railways and industry. The parallel is too good for Dickens to resist. For Scrooge, time exists to safeguard receivables. It has no other meaning. So the first ghost’s task is simple: pry open that chronometer and show him a different set of dials. The Ghost of Christmas Past turns time into something else—sensibility, memory, grief, the wasted chances that suddenly step out of the shadows and stare back.
Christmas, which arrives along with the year’s end, invites this double bookkeeping. The feast is a religious birthday party pasted onto a secular ritual of accounts closed and accounts reopened. In Dickens’s hands, the season becomes an inventory of frustrated youthful hopes and of the rigid carapace we grow to protect ourselves from them. This is what Scrooge has become, and Dickens never lets us forget that he is standing in for us. The old miser is a collective portrait, a caricature with our features smudged in.
Even his name works as a little marginal note. “Scrooge” scrapes out of the throat with the same friction as a growl of bad temper. “Ebenezer” is more elaborate—a biblical name popular among Puritans, meaning “stone of help,” taken from a monument erected by the prophet Samuel in the Old Testament. Yet it’s an “adespoton,” a name without a saint attached to it, so his name day falls on November 1st, All Saints’ Day, when everyone is celebrated and no one in particular. The man whose first name announces help and memory has made himself into a stone. Dickens enjoys this kind of joke; he expects us to hear it.
Dickens was barely past thirty when he wrote A Christmas Carol, and you feel that youth in the headlong ease of the narrative voice and in the precision of the realistic details that keep breaking through the supernatural varnish. His writing grows out of the Victorians’ new mass culture, with London at the center of the world and newspapers and magazines multiplying like cousins at a family reunion. Serialization had already made his earlier novels into a popular obsession. This was his first book published directly in volume form, yet it moves with the same weekly rhythm, as if he’s still writing for that invisible subscription audience waiting to recognize itself in print.
There is also the effect of “mirroring,” which we now associate with reality television but which Dickens understood in his bones: the sensation of seeing on the page what you could glimpse just by turning the corner of your street. His entire oeuvre draws from his present, not from a nostalgic past. He mines the hours of his own day—those “hard times” that will later give a novel its title—and refashions them into stories that feel both exaggerated and uncomfortably exact.
In the London of the early nineteenth century, shaken by industrial growth and by the brutal collisions between classes, Dickens becomes the balladeer of a world split into poor and rich, the virtuous and the vicious—categories that do not always overlap the way the moralists would like. His sympathy is with the abused, the cheated, the humiliated, yet he has no interest in writing a militant handbook about class war. That’s not timidity; it’s instinct. He knows the tragedy of life from the inside—his own childhood had enough pain and humiliation for a whole shelf of novels—yet he refuses to reproduce that tragedy unfiltered.
Instead, he subjects it to a special treatment. He wraps the harsh facts in an atmosphere nobody else could quite duplicate, his own blend of grotesque comedy and pathos. He starts from the data of reality—he was attacked, and praised, for bringing thieves and prostitutes into literature—then thins out the social horror into something that feels like an operetta plot played on a music-hall stage. Life doesn’t end that way, and Dickens knows it no less than we do, but he isn’t in the business of docudrama.
Who decreed that the novel must mimic life as it is? The form, as the English happily say, is lawless. It has no fixed rules, which means it can sometimes summon life as it might be, printing in positive what appears as a negative in the world outside. There’s a danger in this: the danger of easy consolation, of stories that anesthetize the reader into thinking that generosity and justice are always rewarded before the curtain falls.
Dickens walks close to that sugar pit, yet he keeps a tang of bitterness on the tongue of whoever reads him. That bitter aftertaste is his maximum concession to disillusion. The shapeless chaos of social existence—poverty, cruelty, random luck—is rearranged on the page into a harmonious fiction. The reader, in exchange, tacitly agrees to keep from interrogating the ending too much. If you pick at it, the threads will show. Better to enjoy, for once, the sight of a world put right, the hinges oiled, the doors opening where they should.
Out of this comes the neat little moral of our charming apologue. The past is sealed; even the gods can’t amend it. The present slides through our fingers while we’re trying to name it. The future, entering in the black cloak of the last spirit, makes Scrooge say, “I fear you more than any Spectre I have seen,” and he speaks for all of us who would rather not inspect the bill that’s coming due.
So, after letting Dickens walk us through this nocturnal instruction manual on being human, we’re left with one modest freedom that still matters. During the short run we’re allotted here, we can choose how to stand toward the others—those “fellow-passengers to the grave, and not another race of creatures bound on other journeys,” as Dickens has Fred say at the beginning. We can at least learn to dispose ourselves kindly toward our companions in fate, the people strapped into the same journey toward death.
