From the time I first became aware of it many years ago, nothing has spoken to me of the true meaning and message of Christmas better than Charles Dickens’ novella, “A Christmas Carol,” originally written and published in 1843. I loved it from the moment I first saw one of the innumerable film productions of the story, animated or acted. No matter how long ago it may have been made, or who played Scrooge, black and white or in color, they all are compelling; though I must say, given the choice, if allowed to watch just one version of the story on Christmas eve, for me it would be the George C. Scott version. I think his depiction of Scrooge is simply the best! You, of course, are free to disagree and may have your own favorite. What we would hold in common, however, is our affection for the story, which is timeless, and which has well-earned that perhaps overused moniker “classic,” if anything has.
Adding to the legacy of Dickens’ “A Christmas Carol” on film, is the recent production (2017) of a movie called, “The Man Who Invented Christmas,” starring Christopher Plummer as Scrooge, and Dan Stevens as Charles Dickens. I’ve now seen this movie many times, having watched it at least twice during each holiday season since I first saw it in 2018. It is now one of our Christmas favorites, right up there with “White Christmas,” “It’s a Wonderful Life,” and, of course, the George C. Scott version of “A Christmas Carol.” “The Man Who Invented Christmas,” tells a somewhat fictionalized account of Charles Dickens and his writing of his famous novella, and is absolutely hilarious in its depictions. For instance, in one scene we see Dan Stevens as Dickens, struggling to come up with a name for the character that would become Scrooge in his book. You can see that he has the concept of what he wants, possibly a combination of the words “stooge” and “screw”, both of which are applicable to the character he has in mind. When, at last, the name “Scrooge” pops out of his mouth, Dickens (Stevens) briefly expresses a moment of triumph before realizing that the character of “Scrooge” (in the form of Christopher Plummer) has now manifested in living color right there in his writing studio. The two then go on to have a conversation with each other, with Plumber playing the cynical Scrooge “to the T.” Of course, Scrooge is only visible and audible to Dickens, as are the other characters in the story when it is their turn to manifest, all of which lends a certain eccentricity, as well as humor, to Dickens, which Stevens displays well in the way he portrays the author. In case you haven’t seen the movie, I’ll share no more spoilers with you now, but I will say that as a result of my exposure to it and the story itself, I’ve become much more interested in finding out what I can about the legendary author of, not just “A Christmas Carol,” but literary classics such as “David Copperfield,” “A Tale of Two Cities,” and “Great Expectations” among others.
Charles Dickens was born in 1812, which would have made him a relatively young 31-years old when he wrote “A Christmas Carol” in 1843. Born into a family of modest, lower middle class circumstances, there were several times when he experienced outright poverty during his youth; including an instance when, at the age of 12, both of his parents were taken to debtor’s prison and the young Dickens had to fend for himself by working in a factory. Such instances instilled in him a deep sympathy for the poor and homeless, especially the children, which are common themes of his books, including “A Christmas Carol.” You should also understand that the first half of the 19th century was the time of the Industrial Revolution, with the technologies of production and farming developing rapidly. The combination of the loss of jobs in agriculture due to the advent of more efficient machinery, along with the increase in factory jobs, resulted in more and more people moving to the city; in England’s and Dickens’ case, the city being London. This, in turn, resulted in these people living in very poor conditions, often in squalor or even homeless, as they struggled to survive on substandard wages, if they had a job at all. These were the prevalent conditions facing Dickens as he grew up, and in the London he lived in at the time he penned “A Christmas Carol.”
Of particular concern to Dickens during that era, was the plight of the children. There were no child labor laws at the time, and, as Dickens himself had experienced, young kids were often forced to work in factory jobs or mines doing dangerous work across long hours for little pay. Indeed, right before he wrote “A Christmas Carol” a report had been published in London by something called the Children’s Labor Commission” which exposed the conditions under which these kids were being exploited. Dickens read the report and resolved to write a piece decrying the child labor situation, but soon realized that a story of fiction would have far more impact for social change. In referring to his plan for the fiction story he would write, to a friend Dickens stated: “You will certainly feel that a sledge hammer has come down with twenty times the force—twenty thousand times the force—(than) I could exert by following out my first idea.” It was a short while after this that he authored “A Christmas Carol.”
In addition to the Industrial Revolution and child labor, there was also a theory prevailing at the time that colored the world in which Dickens and the characters he created lived. This theory was developed by an economist working for the British East India company[1] named Thomas Malthus.[2] In 1798 Malthus penned what would become known as his “Essay on the Principle of Population,” in which he posits that disease, war and famine are inevitable as the natural checks on population, which expands geometrically while the means of food and other production expand only arithmetically.[3] Of course, it is not hard to see how this theory comes into conflict with the traditional Christian and religious concepts of brotherhood, charity and the Golden Rule. In a pure, materialistic view, by Malthus’ logic war, famine and disease could be considered as “good.” In “A Christmas Carol” you can hear Scrooge allude to this when responding to some “do-good” businessmen who approach him for donations for the poor at Christmas time. On receiving their request, Scrooge asks them if the poor houses and tread mills are still functioning, and when told that many of the poor would rather die than go to those institutions, he responds with the comment: “If they would rather die, they better do it, and decrease the surplus population.”
Malthus himself could not have said it better.
The effects of Malthus’ theory reverberate to this day, and influenced greatly the “natural selection” theories of Charles Darwin[4] and his concept of “survival of the fittest.” Darwin read Malthus’ essay in 1838 and used his concept of “limited resources” as a central element to how and why new species evolve from earlier forms, as explained in his famous “Origin of Species,” published in 1859. Together, since their advent, the two theories have been used to justify the genocide and ethnic cleansing of millions, not to mention slavery, class superiority and other massive civil rights violations. There is no mention by either Malthus or Darwin of man’s impulse toward religion, God or even man’s natural tendency to want to associate with and help others; concepts that form our natural sense of ethics and what is “right”, what is “wrong”, and what is moral. Perhaps, whether realizing it fully or not (I think he did), this is what Charles Dickens was protesting when he penned “A Christmas Carol” and his other works: man’s inhumanity to his fellow man, his abandonment of traditional spiritual values as aided by insane “scientific” justifications, and the failure of simple, common, human decency.
Of such is the milieu from which Charles Dickens crafted his classic ghost story of sin and redemption: “A Christmas Carol.” Personally, I love the story, and it is my all-time favorite tale of Christmas. To me it does the best job I’ve ever seen or read of defining the true spirit and meaning of Christmas, as described in a passage early in the book, when Scrooge’s nephew, Fred, is trying to convince the old man to change his ways:
“I am sure I have always thought of Christmas time, when it has come round—apart from the veneration, due to its sacred name and origin, if anything belonging to it can be apart from that—as 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, and to think of people below them as if they really were fellow passengers to the grave, and not another race of creatures bound on other journeys. And therefore, uncle, though it has never put a scrap of gold or silver in my pocket, I believe that it has done me good, and will do me good; and I say, God bless it!”
If you love Christmas too, and appreciate its true meaning and spirit, then I think you’ll agree with me when I say—in the above statement, I think Fred nailed it!
Wishing you all the Merriest Christmas ever!!
[1] The East India Company (EIC) was an English/British, company founded in 1600 and dissolved in 1874. It was formed to trade in the Indian Ocean region, initially with the East Indies (the Indian subcontinent and Southeast Asia), and later with East Asia. The company seized control of large parts of the Indian subcontinent and colonized parts of Southeast Asia and Hong Kong. At its peak, the company was the largest corporation in the world by various measures. The EIC had its own armed forces in the form of the company’s three armies totaling about 260,000 soldiers, twice the size of the British army at the time. The operations of the company had a profound effect on the global balance of trade.
[2] Thomas Robert Malthus: (13/14 February 1766 – 29 December 1834) was an English economist, cleric, and scholar influential in the fields of political economy and demography. In his 1798 book An Essay on the Principle of Population, Malthus observed that an increase in a nation’s food production improved the well-being of the population, but the improvement was temporary because it led to population growth, which in turn restored the original per capita production level. In other words, humans had a propensity to use abundance for population growth rather than for maintaining a high standard of living, a view that has become known as the “Malthusian trap” or the “Malthusian spectre”. Populations have a tendency to grow until the lower class suffered hardship, want and greater susceptibility to war, famine, and disease, a pessimistic view that is sometimes referred to as a Malthusian catastrophe.
[3] geometric and arithmetic progressions…A progression in Mathematics is a series of numbers that exhibits a particular pattern. An arithmetic progression is a series where the difference between any two adjacent terms is one and the same. Similarly, a geometric progression is one where any two consecutive terms are related by the common ratio.
[4] Charles Robert Darwin (12 February 1809 – 19 April 1882) was an English naturalist, geologist and biologist, widely known for his contributions to evolutionary biology. His proposition that all species of life have descended from a common ancestor is now generally accepted and considered a fundamental concept in science. In a joint publication with Alfred Wallace, he introduced his scientific theory that this branching pattern of evolution resulted from a process he called natural selection, in which the struggle for future has a similar effect to the artificial selection involved in selective breeding. He published his landmark opus “Origin of Species” in 1959 Darwin has been described as one of the most influential figures in human history.
