Before the Christmas Season is over . . . .

Teachers of all subjects are familiar with the sometimes weekly student incantation, “Why do we have to do this?” This is certainly disheartening because the question implies that there actually is no point to a project or assignment, thereby further implying that the teacher is some kind of illogical and cruel master of doom who derives pleasure just from making the serfs do a jig. And yet, if simply the pure love of learning something new is not reason enough, students do have the right to be gently guided to the relevant connections they seek. This becomes a special bugaboo for Literature teachers, particularly when teaching 18th century English Literature to a 21st Century American audience. When I recently challenged my students, at least the ones who bothered with actually reading Charles Dickens’ A Tale of Two Cities, to write a defense for retaining the iconic work on the booklist for AP English Language and Composition, an astute and saucy young scholar decided I should have a winter break assignment about Dickens as well. I was tasked with reading Dickens’ slim novella A Christmas Carol and defending the story’s relevance today:

Almost a century and three-quarters have passed since Charles Dickens, at a feverish pace of six weeks from blank page to final product, wrote his novella A Christmas Carol. From that point on, the way most of the Western world celebrates this Christian Winter Holiday has been more guided by this new Victorian “gospel” than by the biblical birth of the eponymous, Jesus Christ. As long as Christmas continues its paradoxical hybridization as both unabashed consumerism and unadulterated generosity, there will long be a place in our society for Ebenezer Scrooge and the three spirits who give him an attitude adjustment.

First of all, the story has some of the most memorable characterization known to English Literature. A testament to the vitality of Dickens’ characters is the fact that even only after one year of publication there were some eight different stage productions of A Christmas Carol already running both in England and America. New media forms each century have not daunted the story’s influence as there have also been over 27 different film interpretations of the story starting as early as 1904. From the ethereal but harrowing Jacob Marley and his clanging chains of ““cashboxes, keys, padlocks, ledgers, deeds, and heavy purses wrought in steel” (62) to the Dionysian “jolly Giant” (151) Ghost of Christmas Present sitting on his throne of ““turkeys, geese, game, poultry, brawn, great joints of meat, sucking-pigs, long wreaths of sausages, mince-pies, plum-puddings, barrels of oysters” (153), Dickens has wrought a masterful cast of characters who are multifaceted, resonant and wholly tangible. Few people can see a small child with a crutch in hand without thinking of Tiny Tim, or see a protruding bony finger from a dark cloak without imagining it pointing to an overgrown tombstone. The images Dickens created, the characters he painted with his words have become part of the Western cultural DNA, perhaps even to the point that those who read the book for the first time, have an eerie sense that they’ve seen or heard this story some time and place before.

Along with the universal character and image reverberations,  another great resonant quality

of A Christmas Carol is its appeal to a higher social order. Dickens was quite deliberate in his crafting of stingy Scrooge, a “squeezing, wrenching, grasping, scraping, clutching, covetous old sinner” (25) as a way to have England’s tightfisted bourgoisie merchant class to recognize their lack of human kindness. By juxtaposing Scrooge to his battered and freezing clerk, Bob Cratchit, whose “fire was so very much smaller [than Scrooge’s] that it looked like one coal” (29), one of the messages that resonates loud and clear is injustice inherent in the employer/employee relationship. However, as the Ghost of Christmas Past guides Scrooge to look at one of his own past bosses, the jovial Mr. Fezziwig, who threw enormous Christmas Eve parties for his employees, Dickens provides an example of an employer with a heart. When the spirit refutes that Fezziwig’s generosity is a “small matter”, Dickens uses Scrooge as his mouthpiece to advise the ruling class on how to treat their employees:

He has the power to render us happy or unhappy; to make our service light or burdensome; a pleasure or a toil. Say that his power lies in words and looks; in things so slight and insignificant that it is impossible to add and count 'em up: what then? The happiness he gives, is quite as great as if it cost a fortune (127).

While this treatise on human relations may seem heavy-handed, the significance of all of Scrooge’s “epiphanies” during his journeys to past, present and future are direct messages of morality using Christmas as the backdrop for a time to readjust one’s generosity meter and see the joy in giving to those less fortunate. Valuing generosity over greed, God help us, will continue to be a universal and timeless message that needs a boost once a year. And for that reason A Christmas Carol will remain relevant.

One of the most significant reasons that A Christmas Carol will continue to have a strong literary following well into the twenty-first century boils down to the most basic human fear: Death. Dickens sets up a situation in which Scrooge must face his imminent, lonely, and miserable death. He is forced to look at his own dead body, his bed stripped bear by common pawnshop thieves, leaving the corpse twice cold and the room desolate and lonely.  While, yes, Scrooge is affected by the premonition of Tiny Tim’s death, it is not until he sees his own gravestone that he has his ultimate catharsis calling into the misty night “ ‘Spirit! . . . hear me! I am not the man I was. I will not be the man I must have been but for this intercourse. Why show me this, if I am past all hope’ “ (268). He, of course, is not past all hope. He has the opportunity to rectify all ills and avoid Jacob Marley’s fate. He can shock the Cratchit family with a turkey the size of Tiny Tim, and can play Blind

Man’s Buff with his young life-affirming self in the persona of his nephew. Scrooge is allowed to “sponge away the writing” (270) on his gravestone, to live not only “another” day but a “better” day.

Avoiding an unrepentant death, having a kind of resurrection moment, then, becomes the most resonant and relevant of the themes that will guide A Christmas Carol into probably not only the twenty-first, but perhaps the thirty-first century.  Man will continue to be flawed, greedy and selfish. Man quite likely does not deserve the kind of second chances he often is afforded. But man is also capable of great change, and this kind of hope and optimism for humankind has survived the sneers of cynics and the excoriations of critics for millennia. Just as the story from which the Christmas holiday was originally prompted, we will continue to gravitate to stories in which we clearly see the redemption of our “Bah! Humbug!” demons into our “God Bless Us, Everyone” better spirits. And we will, unfortunately, always need the reminders “to open [our] shut-up hearts freely, and to think of people below [us] as if they really were fellow-passengers to the grave, and not another race of creatures bound on other journeys” (34). At the risk of sounding hyperbolic, the human race needs A Christmas Carol and that alone will make it continue to be wholly relevant.

Charles Dickens. “A Christmas Carol / The original manuscript.” iBooks. https://itunes.apple.com/WebObjects/MZStore.woa/wa/viewBook?id=7BD5B22619D7DFB7B013D7319741DBDC