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56 How Dickens and Scrooge Saved Christmas

How Charles Dickens and

Scrooge saved Christmas

The Industrial Revolution and
Victorian practically erased the
holiday in England. A Christmas

Carol revived and reinvented it
around the gift of giving.

Clive Irving

This is not a person you would wish to meet in
the street at any time, let alone at a time of
festive good feelings:

“Oh! But he was a tight-fisted hand at the
grindstone. 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,
from life, in his own words: “He wept and fling.
and self-contained, and solitary as an oyster. The
laughed and wept again, walked about the black It’s the economic theory of temporary
cold within him froze his old features, nipped
streets of London fifteen or twenty miles a night alleviation in action. (Holidays are another.)
his pointed nose, shriveled his cheek, stiffened
when all other folks had gone to bed.” People will always scratch and save if a sudden
his gait; made his eyes red, his thin lips blue; and
A Christmas Carol is a compact parable. burst of unrestrained pleasure can be purchased.
spoke out shrewdly in his grating voice….”
It’s very far from being Dickens’s most Bob Cratchit, the clerk who is the father of Tiny
This is how we meet Ebenezer Scrooge,
devastating portrait of his world and times. Tim and who meekly serves Scrooge, is paid
five paragraphs into Charles Dickens’s timeless
Unlike his big novels, which were published in fifteen shillings a week. It would take a whole
morality tale, A Christmas Carol.
installments so that they could reach the many week’s wages to buy the basic Christmas feast
Scrooge is still with us, not just in print
people who could not afford to buy a fat book, Cratchit dreams of, seven shillings for the goose,
but embodied in the cold hearts and selfish
this was a one-off volume, and slim. five for the pudding, three for the onions, sage,
calculations of misanthropes everywhere. In the
Nevertheless its effects were profound and oranges.
secular carnival led by Santa Claus, Scrooge is
and it remains by far Dickens’s most popular That pleasure is designed as exquisitely
firmly ensconced as the second most recurrent
work. That is partly because it can be said that as Dickens intended it, and Dickens fills the
character, rebuffing all entreaties to melt by
this is the book that saved Christmas. Dickens streets with many other temptations:
barking “Bah, humbug!” as “he carried his own
gathers up the traces of a Christmas that has “The poulterers’ shops were still half
low temperature always about with him; he iced
virtually disappeared in the folk memory and open, and the fruiterers’ were radiant in their
his office in the dog-days; and didn’t thaw it one
brings it back to vivid and congenial life – in the glory. There were great, round, pot-bellied
degree at Christmas.”
same way that Dickens wants us to hope that life baskets of chestnuts, shaped like the waistcoats
When A Christmas Carol was published
can be brought back into the ailing body of the of jolly old gentlemen, lolling at the doors, and
just in time for the Christmas of 1843, the
story’s emotional center, Tiny Tim. tumbling out into the street in their apoplectic
holiday had been in a long decline in England.
The book is broken into what Dickens opulence. There were ruddy, brown-faced,
The habit of celebrating Christmas had
calls staves, not chapters. He’s using a musical broad-girthed Spanish onions, shining in the
flourished there in medieval times as a wanton
term to support his title, which acknowledges fatness of their growth like Spanish Friars; and
combination of marking Christ’s birth, the
that in England carols, a form of hymn specific winking from their shelves in wanton slyness at
Roman orgy of Saturnalia, and the German
to Christmas, originated in Austria and the girls as they went by, and glanced demurely
winter festival, Yule.
Germany, are catching on – thanks, in part, to at the hung-up mistletoe….”
Although the Anglican Church still held
their popularity with Queen Victoria, whose The shop windows of a Dickensian
considerable power over the customs of
husband and tastes are German. Christmas, each small pane rimmed with ice and
Victorian England the observation of Christmas
More important, A Christmas Carol can snow, drew Tiny Tim to wonder at the baubles
was, by then, more doctrinal than hedonistic.
truly be said to have become the foundation beyond his experience.
The folk memory of medieval community life
myth for the business model for a version of Never mind that some of the
had been wiped out by the industrial revolution.
Christmas that is now a retail juggernaut in the atmospherics are shaky, like the white
Large swathes of the countryside were
consumer societies of the world, generating a Christmas, for example. In Victorian London,
depopulated. Rural churches were deserted, and
sizeable chunk of annual profits. Dickens snow in December was a rarity. Soot was far
the connection between the land and the bounty
himself would surely not appreciate that this is more likely to be falling. But, of course, as
of harvests was gone.
probably one of the greatest examples of symbolism, covering the soot in a layer of white
In the large cities the urbanized working
unintended consequences in the history of was as refreshing as enrobing Santa Claus,
class were slaves to a plutocracy. Dickens grew
literature. otherwise a grossly obese huckster, in red velvet
up in a London where child labor was ruthlessly
The story’s subliminal narrative is all with fluffy white cuffs, and giving him a jolly
exploited. In 1839 nearly half the funerals in
about the creation and management of appetites. laugh, suggesting the ribald bonhomie of
London were for children under the age of 10.
And what is the great lure toward which all Shakespeare’s carouser Falstaff.
What would later become familiar as Dickensian
efforts are ultimately directed? A table creaking But it is to Scrooge we must return. He is
London was one vast, grinding machine that
under the weight of a Christmas banquet, a the dark matter to the constellation of twinkling
simultaneously generated enormous wealth and
classic celebration of binge eating and drinking. stars on the Christmas tree. And his pitiless
widespread public squalor, replete with public
But it’s more than that as the ritual has a social beliefs would be no stranger to the political
hangings, thieving lawyers, and a merciless
significance. Dickens’s observation is acute to discourse of today.
judiciary.
the moment: in a society that spends most of its
Imagine, then, in the fall of 1843, the
days in bleak deprivation there is always a latent (Continued on Page 57)
author going about his work, gathering material
and irrepressible desire to have a communal