{"id":132020,"date":"2018-12-18T09:00:21","date_gmt":"2018-12-18T14:00:21","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.theparisreview.org\/blog\/?p=132020"},"modified":"2018-12-18T10:46:06","modified_gmt":"2018-12-18T15:46:06","slug":"the-endurance-of-a-christmas-carol","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.theparisreview.org\/blog\/2018\/12\/18\/the-endurance-of-a-christmas-carol\/","title":{"rendered":"The Endurance of A Christmas Carol<\/i>"},"content":{"rendered":"
\"\"<\/a>

Illustration by John Leech. Public domain.<\/p><\/div>\n

On January 2, 1840, Dickens wrote to his printers, Bradbury and Evans, to thank them for their annual Christmas gift of a turkey. He chose his words with care:<\/p>\n

My Dear Sirs,<\/p>\n

I determined not to thank you for the Turkey until it was quite gone, in order that you might have a becoming idea of its astonishing capabilities.<\/p>\n

The last remnant of that blessed bird made its appearance at breakfast yesterday\u2014I repeat it, yesterday\u2014the other portions having furnished forth seven grills, one boil, and a cold lunch or two.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

It is a generous letter, fully in keeping with the generosity of the people he is addressing. Still, like many people who write to express their thanks for unexpected or unwanted Christmas gifts, it seems that Dickens could not resist poking gentle fun at the purchasers\u2019 taste, not least by hinting that sending him a turkey the size of a small child was perhaps being generous to a fault. Is there a note of reproach in \u201cMy Dear Sirs\u201d? There is certainly more than one sense in which a turkey that hangs around for a week might be thought of as \u201cthat blessed bird,\u201d as is clear from Dickens\u2019s decision to pump up \u201cturkey\u201d into \u201cTurkey,\u201d the double insistence on its final reappearance \u201cyesterday\u2014I repeat it, yesterday,\u201d and the drawn-out sentence that describes the many attempts made by the Dickens household to finish it off (\u201cseven grills, one boil, and a cold lunch or two\u201d), like a chorus of \u201cThe Twelve Days of Christmas\u201d in which partridges in pear trees and swans a-swimming have been usurped by this one \u201cblessed bird.\u201d Even the reference to the turkey\u2019s \u201castonishing capabilities\u201d seems suspended between wonder and worry, as if a turkey that produced so many leftovers came close to being a real-life version of those enchanted objects and creatures\u2014pots overflowing with porridge, or geese laying limitless supplies of golden eggs\u2014that throng the pages of fairy tales.<\/p>\n

Four years later, Dickens had written something that possessed still more \u201castonishing capabilities.\u201d A Christmas Carol in Prose: Being a Ghost Story of Christmas<\/em> was first published just before Christmas in 1843, and since then it has never been out of print. Originally written as a tract for the times, this cautionary tale about the ongoing tussle between greed and goodness has been thought of as timely whenever it has been read. Enjoyed by its first readers as a modern expression of the spirit of Christmas\u2014as modern as Christmas cards, which were sent for the first time in the same year as the Carol<\/em>\u2019s publication\u2014it has since become popular for quite different reasons: the sense of tradition it is thought to embody, a reminder of the simple pleasures that seem to have been lost sight of in the seasonal scrum of shoppers, an annual invitation to the pleasures of nostalgia. Reproduced so often, and in so many different forms, it has become as much a part of Christmas as mince pies or turkey, with the key difference that, as Martin Heidegger argued was true of all classic works, it has never been \u201cused up.\u201d There have been dozens of films, starring everyone from Laurence Olivier and Ralph Richardson to Mr. Magoo and Mickey Mouse, operas and ballets, an all-black musical (Comin\u2019 Uptown<\/em>, which opened on Broadway in 1979), Benjamin Britten\u2019s 1947 Men of Goodwill: Variations on \u2018A Christmas Carol,\u2019<\/em> even a BBC mime version in 1973 starring Marcel Marceau. So regular are the annual returns of the Carol<\/em> to our stages and screens, in fact, that it has become something like a secular ritual, an alternative Christmas story to its more obviously religious rival, in which the three wise men are replaced by three instructive spirits, and the pilgrimage to a child in a manger is replaced by a visit to the house of Tiny Tim. Even people who have never read the Carol<\/em> know the story of Scrooge, the miserable old skinflint who repents after being visited by the Ghost of Christmas Past, the Ghost of Christmas Present, and the Ghost of Christmas Yet to Come. So widely and deeply has this story entered the popular imagination that phrases such as Bah! Humbug!<\/em> have floated free of their original context and acquired the force of common proverbs, while Scrooge himself has entered the language as a piece of cultural shorthand \u201cused allusively to designate a miserly, tight-fisted person or killjoy\u201d (OED<\/em>, \u201cScrooge\u201d). <\/p>\n

This can make it hard to read, even for the first time, without the uncanny feeling that it is both familiar and strange, ancient and modern. As with any story that has developed the power of a myth, as Virginia Woolf once observed, we tend to know the Carol<\/em> even before we know how to read, and our knowledge comes from many different sources, with the result that any attempt to assess what Dickens actually wrote can be an experience as hazy and disorientating as Scrooge\u2019s first impressions of the Ghost of Christmas Past: \u201cWhat was light one instant, at another time was dark, so the figure itself fluctuated in its distinctness.\u201d And yet to read his original story closely is to realize that, even though at first it may seem to lack the zip and glitz of later adaptations\u2014there are no Cockney dance routines in the snow, no bustling crowd scenes full of cheeky urchins, no Muppets belting out big musical numbers\u2014Dickens\u2019s plot cannot properly be separated from the strange and haunting power of his narrative style. In both the local details and the overall shape of his writing, Dickens sets out to show his readers that what happens in the Carol<\/em> is intimately bound up with how it is described as happening.<\/p>\n

To take just one example, the story of Scrooge\u2019s mean-spirited solitude being replaced by openhearted sociability is echoed in a style marked by narrative generosity. Repeatedly, the narrator lingers over examples of human activities that show companionability spreading from one person to another\u2014Bob Cratchit joining some strangers for a slide on the ice, or Scrooge\u2019s nephew playing games with his friends and relatives\u2014in a way that is as involuntary and catching as a cough. Even the natural world, far from being indifferent to these activities, seems to be working on a similar principle of benevolent overflow, with fog that busies itself \u201cpouring in at every chink and keyhole,\u201d or \u201cgreat, round, pot-bellied baskets of chestnuts\u201d that tumble out onto the street \u201cin their apoplectic opulence\u201d\u2014a cheering alternative to the water plug, as solitary and frozen as Scrooge, with its \u201coverflowings sullenly congealed, and turned to misanthropic ice.\u201d Whether moving or static, animate or inanimate, everyone and everything appears to be spilling over, breaking out, extending beyond itself. Dickens\u2019s narrator, too, repeatedly sets out to convince us that the world we share is, or should be, one of liberality, plenitude, intimate connectedness. Whether he is describing Scrooge\u2019s character (\u201ca squeezing, wrenching, grasping, scraping, clutching, covetous, old sinner!\u201d), or the weather (\u201ccold, bleak, biting\u201d), or the objects that make up Marley\u2019s chain (\u201ccash-boxes, keys, padlocks, ledgers, deeds, and heavy purses wrought in steel\u201d), rarely is one detail given when three or four or more will do, as Dickens crams every sentence with alternatives and supplements, like a set of thesaurus entries spread out across the page. Indeed, there are times when the Carol<\/em> reads more like an extended shopping list than a book, as when Dickens describes the throne of the Ghost of Christmas Present, made up of \u201cturkeys, geese, game, poultry, brawn, great joints of meat, sucking-pigs, long wreaths of sausages, mince-pies, plum-puddings, barrels of oysters, red-hot chestnuts, cherry-cheeked apples, juicy oranges, luscious pears, immense twelfth-cakes, and seething bowls of punch.\u201d That\u2019s quite a mouthful, even for a reader, and one of the problems Dickens confronted when inserting such lists into the Carol<\/em>, with all the wide-eyed enthusiasm of a small child leaving a note for Santa, is that they might not be properly absorbed into the story as a whole; however lip-smacking each item might be individually, put together like this they run the risk of producing a nasty case of narrative indigestion. Faced with the prize turkey Scrooge sends to the Cratchits, a suspicious reader might then wonder whether Dickens was winking at his readers about the nature of the story he had produced for them. \u201cHe could never have stood upon his legs, that bird,\u201d we are told by the narrator, voicing Scrooge\u2019s gleeful thoughts. \u201cHe would have snapped \u2019em short off in a minute, like sticks of sealing-wax.\u201d An oddly self-conscious thing to say at this stage of a story, perhaps, when the writer is close to wrapping up his manuscript and sending it off to the printers, especially given how spindly Dickens\u2019s plot is when compared to the top-heavy nature of his style, chiseled with italics and spattered with exclamation-marks (\u201cIt was<\/em> a Turkey!\u201d). But it takes a confident writer to joke about what he is up to, and a swaggeringly confident one to tease his readers with the thought that he might not be up to it. And sure enough, the delighted lists that stretch across the Carol<\/em>\u2019s pages serve as a valuable reminder that, even when Dickens\u2019s prose risks sounding strained or anxious, he is fully in control.<\/p>\n

Writing in an accretive style was nothing new for Dickens; from the start of his career, he had been alternately celebrated and condemned as a writer unusually fond of what George Orwell described as \u201cthe unnecessary detail<\/em>.\u201d However, never before had he set out so deliberately to bring together his style and his narrative subject. As the Carol<\/em> develops, even details that at first appear superfluous, narrative grace notes, are revealed to be part of a pattern, \u201ca genial shadowing forth,\u201d designed to alert the eyes and ears of Dickens\u2019s readers to the dangers of assuming that anything or anyone is as \u201cself-contained\u201d as Scrooge supposes himself to be. The light that spills out of the shop windows, for example, which \u201cmade pale faces ruddy as they passed,\u201d sets the tone for light to become a central image of the different ways in which human beings, too, might reach out beyond the boundaries of the self: the \u201cpositive light\u201d that issues from Fezziwig\u2019s calves when he dances, which is echoed in his power \u201cto make our service light or burdensome\u201d; the lighthouse, which offers a model of cheerful solidarity in the face of chilly adversity; the \u201clight hearts\u201d of Scrooge\u2019s creditors when they think he is dead; the precious burden of Tiny Tim, willingly taken on by his father, for whom \u201che was very light to carry\u201d; finally, Scrooge signaling his redemption by whooping that he is \u201cas light as a feather.\u201d Gently but insistently, Dickens educates his readers into the need to make connections in a world that might otherwise shiver into isolated fragments. It is the same idea and the same technique he would later develop in novels such as Bleak House<\/em>, where his listing of objects and urgent cross-referencing of ideas would again reflect his pleasure in the sprawling multitudinousness of the world and his anxious desire to keep that sprawl in check. At this stage in his career, however, writing the first narrative that he had planned as \u201ca little whole<\/em>,\u201d Dickens seems more confident in his ability to keep his imagination from overspilling the boundaries of his plot, and less worried about his ability to find a style to match the dense weave of affection and obligation that should bind together the rich with the poor, the living with the dead. And the writer with his readers? Who better to remind us that other people are \u201cfellow-passengers to the grave, and not another race of creatures bound on other journeys,\u201d as Scrooge\u2019s nephew puts it, than a writer whose story has asked generations of readers to make the same journey, as each pair of eyes travels across the page to meet that clinching final sentence, at once conclusive and all-embracing, \u201cGod bless Us, Every One\u201d?<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

Robert Douglas-Fairhurst is the author of <\/em>Becoming Dickens (Harvard UP, 2011), winner of the 2011 Duff Cooper Prize, and has edited editions of Dickens\u2019s <\/em>Great Expectations, Henry Mayhew\u2019s <\/em>London Labour and the London Poor, and Charles Kingsley\u2019s <\/em>The Water-Babies for Oxford World\u2019s Classics. He writes regularly for publications including the <\/em>Daily Telegraph, the <\/em>Guardian, the<\/em> Times Literary Supplement, and the <\/em>New Statesman.<\/em><\/p>\n

From <\/em>A Christmas Carol and Other Stories<\/a>,<\/em> by Charles Dickens, edited by Robert Douglas-Fairhurst. Copyright \u00a9 2018 by Robert Douglas-Fairhurst and published by Oxford University Press. All rights reserved.<\/em><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

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