How A Christmas Carol Became a Classic
It’s been 178 years since Charles Dickens, stung by commercial indifference to his most recent novel, Martin Chuzzlewit, spent six weeks walking deserted streets after midnight for inspiration, returning to his fashionable townhouse to madly scribble out a novella that would forever change the way we celebrate the yuletide. Ebenezer Scrooge remains one of the great villains of literature, “a squeezing, wrenching, grasping, scraping, clutching, covetous old sinner,” winding his way through the snowy back alleys of mid-19th Century London with a sneering “Bah, humbug!” at the ready for any urchin unfortunate enough to cross his path.
But with the help of four spirits over five “staves,” Scrooge transforms from heartless skinflint to vessel of charity and mercy, discovering the magic of a season that, in the salving words of his sunny nephew, Fred, represents “a good time: a kind, forgiving, charitable, pleasant time: the only time I know of, in the long calendar of the year, when men and women seem by one consent to open their shut-up hearts freely.”
England had been in something of a Christmas hangover before Dickens’ shimmering little chronicle changed everything. Oliver Cromwell and the Roundheads, Scrooges all, had banned any celebration of the holiday in the 1600s; the subsequent advent of the Industrial Revolution kept factories humming with nary a thought for yuletide. Dickens raised a glass to the season in a chapter in The Pickwick Papers in 1836, but it wasn’t until A Christmas Carol, published in a slim leather-brown volume with gilt pages and color illustrations in 1843, that the jollification of the season took root. While some rejected its unabashed holly-and-ivy sentimentality—“Its interest is almost entirely forced, and its power quite artificial. Goose and stuffing are its ethereal influences,” sniffed the Scottish novelist Margaret Oliphant—the book would come to serve as a cultural touchstone of Christmas.
Indeed, over the next two centuries Dickens’s little novel has become a Noel staple, and nowhere more than in America. Its revered traditions—the bountiful turkey, the glittering tree, the punch, the parlor games, the singing—we still cling to today. More important, the book continues to serve as a deft and timeless moral apologue on the power of forgiveness. The emotional wallop of Dickens’ tale comes not from its recitation of polkas and puddings, but rather its relentless march toward its antihero’s salvation and as a beacon of the things that matter. A Christmas Carol is a tool for rediscovering one’s own humanity and purpose, a parable that tells us it’s never too late to open your heart, to atone, to be good. No one embodies this radiant faith more than Bob Cratchit’s beloved son Tiny Tim, the character with the least to be thankful for but who emerges as the book’s shining symbol of noble hope.
Absent the narrative of Bethlehem, A Christmas Carol is, arguably, the most popular Christmas story ever told, adapted into countless stage productions, offshoots, cartoons, and films (as well as Louis Bayard’s fantastic 2004 sequel, Mr. Timothy). The list of actors who have played the cranky miser is long and eclectic. Your archetypal Scrooges are represented by Alistair Sim (considered by most Carol acolytes as the gold standard), George C. Scott, Albert Finney, Patrick Stewart, and John Carradine, among others. The, shall we say, more creative interpretations of the character have come from everyone from Bill Murray, Vanessa Williams, and Carrie Fisher to Mr. Magoo, Fred Flintstone, and … Tori Spelling. (Don’t ask.) Next year a new, big-screen musical version, titled Spirited, will feature Ryan Reynolds as, one assumes, a far hunkier Scrooge, with a supporting cast that includes Will Ferrell and Octavia Spencer.
Why does the tale endure so steadfastly? Perhaps because Dickens was, above all, a brilliant moralist, determined to cast a light on the virtues of the forgotten poor who, in his view, exemplified the best in us. At its heart A Christmas Carol is a polemic, artfully wrapped in mistletoe and served with a steaming bowl of punch. Fred’s heartfelt soliloquy, Marley’s chain-rattling lament, the Ghost of Christmas Present’s mic-drops throwing Scrooge’s most cruel quips back at him (“Are there no prisons? Are there no workhouses?”)—they’re all veracious epistles that toll as loudly as the steeple church bell. “There are some upon this earth of yours,” the Ghost of Christmas Present tells him as they walk the city, “who lay claim to know us, and who do their deeds of passion, pride, ill-will, hatred, envy, bigotry, and selfishness in our name: who are as strange to us and all our kith and kin, as if they had never lived. Remember that, and charge their doings on themselves, not us.” Ask yourself: Have those words ever been more relevant, more necessary, than they are today?
God bless us, everyone.
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