I finally sat down yesterday and made myself read Dickens’s A Christmas Carol. As a scholar of Victorian literature, I should have read this story long ago, back when I was in graduate school, if not well before, but I don’t think I ever did. And really, why should I have? It’s not considered Dickens’s best work by Victorian scholars; in addition, it’s entered our culture so thoroughly, in so many forms, that it hardly seems necessary to read the original because we all know the story and characters so well. Like the story of Adam and Eve, we’ve imbibed so many versions of the original tale that we might not even recognize the original if we were, for some reason, to take it up and read it for ourselves. (Back when I taught English literature to community college students, I would make them read the part of Genesis that dealt with Adam and Eve’s exile from Eden before we tackled Milton’s Paradise Lost. The original was a tiny passage–just a few lines long–compared to Milton’s magnum opus, which is undoubtedly more familiar, at least in the way it presents the main story, to us than the original.) For most of my life, I have been content to ignore Dickens’s original story, perhaps thinking that watching the Mr. Magoo version was good enough.
So what prompted me to correct this defect in my reading at this late date? Simply this: I encountered an advertisement for an online course that promised to reveal A Christmas Carol as a story of Christian redemption, and I immediately bristled at what I thought was a misguided interpretation of the whole thing. Of course, you can find anything you want in anything you read: I was once an academic, so I can attest to this. But just because you can do something doesn’t mean you should do it. Presenting an entire course for the purpose of forcing this reading on Dickens’s tale seemed wrong to me, because I believed something like the opposite is more likely to be true. And so, to check my theory, I decided to read the original myself and that’s what brought me, a person who long ago tired of Christmas hoopla, to engage in that most Christmas-y of Christmas activities: reading A Christmas Carol.
It’s well worth the read, but I realize I’m probably not going to convince anyone to spend a couple of hours reading a story written 180 years ago. And also, some people–the fact astounds me–some people simply don’t like Dickens. But that’s no reason to go around saying his best-known work is something that it really isn’t. I’ll freely admit that Dickens wrote a story celebrating what he considered the spirit of Christmas: an antidote to the greed and lack of empathy, a story designed to combat the misery produced by industrial capitalism that gripped much of Victorian London. (Indeed, a mere two years later, Friedrich Engels would produce his seminal study, The Condition of the Working Class in England, focusing on Liverpool and Manchester instead of London.) This much is clear: Dickens intended to, and succeeded in, writing a powerful story that drew on the emotional appeal of Christmas.
So why do I refuse to consider the novella a Christian story? My argument is a simple one, and in fact I’d argue that the very popularity of the story (go ahead and try to determine how many recorded versions exist–I gave up, but not before I became distracted by one that must have taken place during COVID lockdown, in which surviving members of Dark Shadows read it through on a Zoom call) does much to prove that I am right.
So here’s my argument: Dickens witnessed the greed and heartlessness in the world around him. He recognized the need for a correction of sorts, and he determined that spreading the spirit of Christmas–an idea that he himself largely willed into existence–was one such creative measure to provide this correction. True, there’s a link from Christmas back to Christianity and Christ, but by the Victorian period, that link was growing ever more tenuous in an age riddled with religious doubt. Thanks to Dickens (with a bit of help from Prince Albert, who brought German Christmas traditions to England), by the end of the century, people who were not devout Christians, or not Christian at all, would be able to to take part in Christmas festivities without feeling profoundly uncomfortable.
Dickens’s genius was that he recognized that the original Christmas story, the one celebrated in many Christmas carols (pa-rum-pa-pum-pum), was rapidly losing its cachet; it was no longer performing the function it needed to in order to make society more livable. Thus, genius that he was, he set out to create a new Christmas story, one for his time. He succeeded beyond even his wildest imagination. Readers caught hold of his story, which then entered into the culture and disseminated what he had called Christmas spirit–to wit, generosity, good cheer, lovingkindness–throughout a society corrupted by industrial capitalism, in order to administer a corrective, if only for a few days at a specific time of year. In other words, A Christmas Carol was created because the original Christmas story had begun to lose its hold on an England that was no longer uniform in its Christian belief (and perhaps never had been) and had therefore lost its power to influence society.
Was Dickens aware of how ambitious his project was? Almost certainly not. He was simply trying to create a compelling story that would capture his audience’s attention and sell lots of books. But that doesn’t mean he wasn’t on to something really big. Like J.R.R. Tolkien, he was setting out to create a mythology for the people of his time, since he recognized, at least at some level, that the one they had inherited had lost much of its power. But there’s an important difference between Tolkien’s project and Dickens’s: Tolkien was deliberately trying to create a new mythology for Britain and was aware of what it was he was aiming for. Dickens, I’d argue, was not. His new mythology was thus tacked onto the existing one, as a kind of appendix that would someday come to supplant, or at least threaten to eclipse, its predecessor.
So, in the end, A Christmas Carol may well have a Christian message, but if so, it’s a pretty wide definition of “Christian,” so wide as to be ultimately meaningless. Rather, its message is a critique of industrial capitalist society, subtle enough to co-exist with that society without causing too much friction. In writing it, Dickens created a new parable, actually replacing and not merely reinforcing the original Christmas story.
My takeaway from this? Stories are important. They influence the societies we live in. Our capacity to get caught up in them, to believe in them and their messages, have profound effects on societies, on culture, and ultimately, on the arc of human civilization. Sometimes, as with A Christmas Carol, a story comes along with such resonance that we are able to see, in real time as it were, how very important they can be, and how some stories that were once powerful in their own time can be supplanted by others when they begin to lose their influence. In the end, it behoves us all to understand how stories work, and how they not only describe, but actually create, the world we live in.
The Tabard Inn 