Charles Dickens’ A Christmas Carol is without doubt the best-known piece of fiction ever written about the season. If you doubt me, consider the simple fact that the surname of the main character, Ebenezer Scrooge, has entered the language as a noun, and most dictionaries define the word as meaning “miserly”. Even people who have never read the novel, or have somehow never managed to encounter one of the more than 130 filmed versions of the tale, know what you mean when you refer to someone as a scrooge.
It’s a very short novel — just under 31,000 words — but Dickens makes every one of them count. Consider his masterly line when Scrooge, making his way up to his lodgings on Christmas Eve, lights a solitary candle: “Darkness was cheap, and Scrooge liked it.” There we have an entire person — his life, his beliefs, his outlook, his soul — in seven simple words.
Of course, even those only passingly familiar with the work know that the Scrooge we see at the end of the novel has undergone a profound change, and there are few passages in literature as redemptive, as joyful, as purely right and good as those describing Scrooge on Christmas morning, when he realizes that he has been given a second chance. There are so many film versions that those trying to judge which ones are “best” often use this scene as the deal-breaker, as it were. Does the actor playing Scrooge sell us on his transformation? Do we, like him, feel merry as a schoolboy? Many great actors have assayed the part, but it is this scene that separates the very best — Alistair Sim, George C. Scott, Michael Caine — from all the rest.
Another mark of the greatness of the tale is its timelessness. Strip away the mid-Victorian language and trappings and we have a tale as old as time, which can be endlessly adapted, updated, twisted, pulled apart and put back together without losing its ability to speak as loudly and clearly to us as it did to the original audience 180 years ago. The Ghost of Christmas Present introduces Scrooge to “ragged, scowling, wolfish” children. Scrooge asks whose children they are, and the response is that they are Man’s: “This boy is Ignorance. This girl is Want. Beware them both, and all of their degree, but most of all beware this boy, for on his brow I see that written which is Doom, unless the writing be erased.”
And how have we done at erasing that writing, almost two centuries later? Not very well. In fact, considering that we in the West live in a time of wealth and bounty and material goods unsurpassed in all of human history, we’ve done a pretty crap job, to be honest. To take just one obvious example, the richest man the world has ever known recently spent US$44 billion purchasing a social media site that can be a cesspit of ignorance. I can’t be certain, but I suspect that $44 billion would have been able to erase a good deal of the Ignorance and Want that Dickens was banging on about, and which we see too much of around us every day.
Interestingly, the end of A Christmas Carol makes no mention of money; we don’t learn that Scrooge became a better man by giving away his riches. Instead, we are told that he became “as good a friend, as good a master, and as good a man, as the good old city knew, or any other good old city, town, or borough, in the good old world. Some people laughed to see the alteration in him, but he let them laugh, and little heeded them … His own heart laughed: and that was quite enough for him.”
Scrooge just became a better man, with the implication that this — this one simple thing — was enough to make the world around him, and the people in it, better and happier than they had been. We don’t all have $44 billion to chuck around, but we can all emulate Ebenezer Scrooge, and make the world a better and happier place.
editorial@accjournal.ca
Like us on Facebook and follow us on Twitter