Bill Kerwin's Reviews > A Christmas Carol

It has been a decade since I last read this classic, so I decided to look at it again, taking note of what I have forgotten or imperfectly remembered and also garnering any new insights my older (and I hope wiser) self could now find within it.

But first, I decided to do a little research, and discovered the great irony underlying the book’s creation: how this tale that warns against miserliness was born because of Dickens' acute need for money, and how its publication resulted in a dispute about the distribution of profits.

Dickens was already famous in 1843, but the sales of the recent installments of Martin Chuzzlewit were less than half of what he had received for the individual numbers of his previous novels. His publishers Chapman and Hall were so alarmed that they invoked a clause in Dickens' contract which demanded that they be reimbursed for the printing cost of the Chuzzlewit installments. Dickens was alarmed too, but also hurt, offended...and worried. A large mortgage payment would soon be due, and his wife had just given birth to their fifth child. Still, he was convinced that his idea for a yuletide novella would yield an ample return and make up for the Chuzzlewit deficit.

He financed the sumptuous edition of A Christmas Carol himself—colored plates, colored title page, gilt embossed front cover, gilt-edged pages, etc.—and insisted that the price not exceed the sum of 5 shillings (still expensive: one third of Cratchit’s weekly salary). Dickens waited eagerly for the money to roll in, but, although the sales were indeed phenomenal, Dickens gained little money from them. Although the cost of producing the elegant volume must have cut deeply into the profits, Dickens was convinced Chapman and Hall were cheating him and he refused to do business with them for the next fifteen years.

But enough of money matters, for now! What follows are a few random observations on this, the latest of my many readings.

1) How thoroughly Marley’s Ghost is surrounded by iron objects: doorknocker (large Victorian doorknockers were typically iron), iron door nails, iron coffin nails, iron chain and iron metal strong box. Helps us see what hard, unrelenting old sinners Marley and his partner really are.

2) In addition to being hard of heart, Scrooge is a man with a deliberate philosophy of self-exoneration. It consists of two principles: 1) taxpayers fund the poor houses and prisons, thereby discharging in full their obligation to all of their fellow human beings, and 2) death by starvation, although it may seem regrettable, is actually a positive good as proven by science (because Malthus!), and relieves the rest of us of the burden of a surplus population. This philosophy is the shield that protects Scrooge from feeling the pains of sympathy and compassion.

3) The first emotion produced in Scrooge by the Ghost of Christmas Past is sadness at this own boyhood loneliness, but the second emotion is his joy in the books that consoled him and helped him empathize with others: The Arabian Nights, the old romances (Valentine and Orson), and realistic fiction (Robinson Crusoe). In Ebenezer’s coming transformation, the sadness and its memory are of course necessary, but no more necessary than this joy.

4) At Fezziwig’s Christmas party, the guest list is inclusive: the family and the clerks of course, but also the housemaid, the baker, the cook, the milkman, and a boy and a girl from down the street whom the Fezziwigs fear are mistreated by their masters and mistresses. Scrooge’s defense of his employer Fezziwig's little party which may only have cost “a few pounds” is even more eloquent than I remembered:

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 them up: what then? The happiness he gives, is quite as great as if it cost a fortune."

If I were dictator, I would compel our 21st century employers to listen to the above words at least four times a year. (Exception: employers who, in order to increase the volume of key strokes, forbid all family photographs and personal items in their data entry cubicles. No, those guys should have to listen to the above passage on a loop, eight hours a day, for the rest of their lives.)

5) In my favorite movie version, the Alastair Sim Scrooge (1951), Ebenezer sees his former fiance as an old woman (still beautiful of course) nursing the sick and dying in the shadowy corners of the poorhouse. It is moving, certainly, but how much more effective—and crueler—is the Dicken’s original! There, Scrooge sees his former love happy in the recent past, a contented wife and mother surrounded by a whirlwind of children.

6) In the past I have viewed the temporal structure of the tale (ghost past, ghost present, ghost future) as an effective but obvious device. But the more I think about it, the more profound it seems, psychologically and spiritually. This, after all, is the pattern of every true conversion, the manner in which we grow in sympathy toward our fellow human beings: we reflect upon the emotionally charged sense impressions of the past, observe their consequences for good or ill manifested in the present, and then—on the basis of these observations—we make a decision to act in a new way, a way which draws us closer to love. Certainly St. Augustine would have understood, for it was how he envisioned the Trinity, as a model of love in action: memory, understanding, and will.

Oh, speaking of how painful memories can inspire a person to action, I forgot to tell you the rest of the story about A Christmas Carol and money. Another factor that reduced Dickens' yuletide revenue stream was a cut-rate bit of plagiarism issued two weeks after Carol by Parley’s Illustrated Library called A Christmas Ghost Story. Parley's claimed they owed Dickens nothing because what they had published was not a piracy, but an "analytical condensation" of the tale, and, in addition, they had improved upon the original. (For example, in their version, Tiny Tim sings a song about a little child freezing in the snow.) Dickens sued and won, but Parley’s went bankrupt, and instead of gaining any money from his legal ordeal, Dickens was forced to pay 700 pounds in court costs.

Now, here comes the good news: This painful experience so disillusioned Dickens with English civil law that he used it as his inspiration ten years later for what is arguably his finest, most mature creation, the masterpiece Bleak House. So I guess Dickens gained something from the experience after all.

On that high note, I will leave you. And God bless us, everyone!