Monday
At our church’s Sunday Forum yesterday, I talked about Charles Dickens’s vision of Christmas. While I pushed again the recent movie that contended that the novelist was “The Man Who Invented Christmas,” I did acknowledge that he helped to re-invent it. Of particular interest to me is how his view of Christmas evolved.
First, I noted that Christmas was alive and well 1000 years before Dickens came to it. The 9th century’s King Alfred, for instance, said that the Twelve Days of Christmas should be a time of celebration and no work.
To be sure Christmas, which probably has deep roots in both the Roman saturnalia and also in winter solstice celebrations, was banned by the British Puritans when they came to power in the 1640s. These religious purists, suspicious of the raucous feasting, ordered fasting to replace gorging. In a reverse blue law, shops were ordered to remain open on the day.
Charles II reestablished Christmas when he was restored to the monarchy, but the Puritan fear of wasteful extravagance never entirely went away. This became especially true when power shifted from the landed class to the mercantile class, with their Protestant work ethic. We see some of their language in Scrooge’s invective:
What’s Christmas time to you but a time for paying bills without money; a time for finding yourself a year older, but not an hour richer; a time for balancing your books and having every item in ’em through a round dozen of months presented dead against you? If I could work my will,” said Scrooge indignantly, “every idiot who goes about with ‘Merry Christmas’ on his lips, should be boiled with his own pudding, and buried with a stake of holly through his heart. He should!”
Later he tells Bob Cratchit that Christmas is an excuse for “picking a man’s pocket every twenty-fifth of December!”
In my talk I contended that a new emphasis on Christmas arose not only in reaction to the middle class focus on profit but also to industrialization, urbanization, and atomization. Suddenly there was nostalgia for the old gentry and their communal Christmas festivals. Dickens didn’t invent the new fervor but he did provide enduring and memorable narratives to go along with it. Let’s say that he supercharged Christmas.
In doing so, he harkened back (I’m pretty sure) to Joseph Addison’s description of Christmas, written 140 years earlier. The fabled editor of the Spectator reports a supposed conversation with Sir Roger de Coverley, a country squire who,
after the laudable custom of his ancestors, always keeps open house at Christmas. I learned from him that he had killed eight fat hogs for this season, that he had dealt about his chines very liberally amongst his neighbours, and that in particular he had sent a string of hog’s-puddings with a pack of cards to every poor family in the parish. “I have often thought,” says Sir Roger, “it happens very well that Christmas should fall out in the middle of the winter. It is the most dead, uncomfortable time of the year, when the poor people would suffer very much from their poverty and cold if they had not good cheer, warm fires, and Christmas gambols to support them. I love to rejoice their poor hearts at this season, and to see the whole village merry in my great hall. I allow a double quantity of malt to my small beer, and set it a running for twelve days to everyone that calls for it. I have always a piece of cold beef and a mince-pie upon the table, and am wonderfully pleased to see my tenants pass away a whole evening in playing their innocent tricks, and smutting [kissing?] one another. Our friend Will Wimble is as merry as any of them, and shows a thousand roguish tricks upon these occasions.”
Depictions of such Christian cheer show up in Dickens’s first works, Sketches by Boz and The Pickwick Papers, both published in 1836. What will change by 1843’s Christmas Carol is Dickens’s view of memory.
In his Sketches by Boz essay, Dickens wants to banish bad memories from the holiday:
Look on the merry faces of your children (if you have any) as they sit round the fire. One little seat may be empty; one slight form that gladdened the father’s heart, and roused the mother’s pride to look upon, may not be there. Dwell not upon the past; think not that one short year ago, the fair child now resolving into dust, sat before you, with the bloom of health upon its cheek, and the gaiety of infancy in its joyous eye. Reflect upon your present blessings—of which every man has many—not on your past misfortunes, of which all men have some. Fill your glass again, with a merry face and contented heart. Our life on it, but your Christmas shall be merry, and your new year a happy one!
Note how, in trying to rid the holiday of such memories, Dickens brings special attention to them. And as we will see in Christmas Carol, the potential death of Tiny Tim—revealed by the Ghost of Christmas Future—is important is converting Scrooge. Dickens, in other words, evolves to a position that, rather than trying to banish past darkness, one should face up to it. If the miracle of Christ is that love triumphs over death, then death has to be acknowledged.
Indeed, the Ghost of Christmas Past can be seen as psychological scarring. We are haunted by past trauma, which threatens to blight our lives. Christmas is miraculous because it becomes a time, not to ignore our previous suffering, but to see it as co-existing with love and joy. Through our experiences with and knowledge of suffering, we are able to develop a deep sense of compassion.
In fact, in a later Christmas story Dickens shows what would happen if we were to blot out traumatic memories. In The Haunted Man, the protagonist has a spirit erase his mind, after which he evolves into—well—a haunted man:
Who could have seen his hollow cheek; his sunken brilliant eye; his black-attired figure, indefinably grim, although well-knit and well-proportioned; his grizzled hair hanging, like tangled sea-weed, about his face,—as if he had been, through his whole life, a lonely mark for the chafing and beating of the great deep of humanity,—but might have said he looked like a haunted man?
Who could have observed his manner, taciturn, thoughtful, gloomy, shadowed by habitual reserve, retiring always and jocund never, with a distraught air of reverting to a bygone place and time, or of listening to some old echoes in his mind, but might have said it was the manner of a haunted man?
Only after a benign spirit reverses the wish and restores the man with memory does he develop a compassionate soul.
In my presentation, I noted how the great Christmas stories always feature darkness. I told the story of how, when my father, returning from World War II, attended Frank Capra’s It’s a Wonderful Life with my grandfather, my grandfather insisted on walking out of the film midway through because he found it too depressing. And indeed, the film is very dark—especially when George Bailey blows up at his family—which makes its Christmas ending all the more powerful. The same is true of film versions of A Christmas Carol, which I remember frightening me out of my wits when I saw them as a child.
In short, A Christmas Carol caught the public imagination and elevated Christmas because it wasn’t afraid to show images of death in its pages. Scrooge grapples with his mortality and, through that struggle, rediscovers his heart.