Scrooge still haunts us
By Owen Williams
The visible aspects of the English-speaking Christmas owe much to Charles Dickens (1812-1870), particularly of course to his great novel A Christmas Carol, which haunts Christmas as we know it with all the vividness and persistence of the ghosts in the book.
It is a great Christmas fable with a true Christian and Christmas message: repentance and redemption, brought about by a form of epiphany of charity.
Also, it is an extremely good story, with what Hollywood used to term an amazing cast. Who does not know the unforgettable Ebenezer Scrooge? He changes from his muttered imprecations of “Bah, humbug!” to something like a rather gnarled good fairy on the top of the Christmas tree.
It is an almost Jekyll-and-Hyde-like transformation (invented, incidentally, by another great Victorian novelist, Robert Louis Stevenson).
Old Scrooge seems almost likeable when he is in his Mr Hyde form. His total candour and lack of hypocrisy, for example, are refreshing. So is his courage. Instead of traditional fear and dread, he brushes away bothersome interruptions by ghosts such as that of old Marley.
He is a mettlesome old bird who likes his money, does not give a fig for his fellow man, and is quite content with his own company. One could imagine him saying that he likes being by himself because he likes the company of an intelligent man.
That this old curmudgeon could become the very epitome of Christmas cheer and benevolence, the Yuletide spirit itself, and remain so for generations is a tribute to the genius of Charles Dickens. Like all good fables, the story becomes more real than reality itself, and the three Christmas ghosts are to us much more real than the Prime Minister of Dickens’s time, Benjamin Disraeli.
None of us has ever met a Scrooge, much as none of us has met the Big Bad Wolf, but most of us will recall someone like him. A respectable old lady I knew always referred to one of my friends as “Old Scrooge”.
Dickens wrote A Christmas Carol on commission in six weeks. At the time he was writing Martin Chuzzlewit. The Carol became the Christmas story of all time in the English-speaking world. None is better known, and probably there is none better.
A feature of Dickens was ever his incredible energy. In his mid-20s, for example, he wrote at the same time The Pickwick Papers and Oliver Twist, both vast novels, for serialisation. He said he often did not know what was going to happen next. The memorable galaxy of characters he created took on their own life.
Dickens’s novels were mostly serialised as he wrote them. He was once reported to be worried when in a news agency he heard a customer rejecting an issue of a magazine as she had read it. She wanted the next number, to know what was going to happen in the Dickens novel. The great novelist suddenly realised that the time to write it was almost upon him, and he did not know himself.
Nevertheless, year after year, until the end of his life, he kept up this schedule. He was never known to miss a deadline.
He drew of course on his own experience. Through his feckless father (the origin of Mr Micawber) as a small boy he found himself working in a blacking factory. His father was no stranger to debtors’ prisons. Accordingly, the child Charles had very little formal education.
Nevertheless, he became the most famous English novelist of his time, and probably the best there ever was. In other countries some were better, such as the Russians Tolstoy (1828-1910) and Dostoevsky (1821-81), and the Frenchman Gustave Flaubert (1821-80).
In the vast profusion of his imagination Dickens can easily be compared to the two Frenchmen Honoré de Balzac and Victor Hugo, who as writers have the edge on the Englishman, I think. There is no novelist in England, though, who has created a world so individually his own, with characters so recognisable.
One might not like Mrs Gamp attending to one as a nurse, but having met her in Dickens, no one will ever forget her.
His imagination stretched across the English Channel too. Madame Defarges in A Tale of Two Cities, another story of redemption through sacrifice, remains a very recognisable French-woman who still glares from many a concierge’s lodge.
Dickens frequently said he believed in the New Testament and the message of Christ. Though he seemed to have done little formal observance, he stuck to that. Underneath the crass commercialism of the season, there is still a genuine joy to be found in Christmastide. Dickens knew that full well.
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