Charles Dickens’ “Christmas Carol” proposes a continually improving community

Charles Dickens’ “A Christmas Carol” is a story that was loved instantly at its 1843 publication, and has evoked admiration ever since. The story illustrates the virtue of what the Rev Delores Wein urged in the Winter issue of The Anglican Digest: our responsibility in every season to “be Christ.” Dickens, however, achieves this behavioral ideal without articulating anything approaching doctrinally pure “Christianity.” The story should be approached more carefully in order to capture its spirit, its “message,” and less doctrinally. Though we have come to celebrate this gem as a—perhaps the–Christmas story, I’d urge us progressives to put aside the story’s Christian provenance while still admiring its central, its deeply humane affirmation. And we should above all appreciate the profoundly secular arena in which it plays out.

One tribute to the story’s continuing cultural resonance is how frequently we voice (if only in jest) the dismissive phrase “bah humbug,” or call someone (perhaps less jovially) a “Scrooge.”  That practice testifies to the tale’s true “popularity” in the word’s Latin sense: “people” quote it. It has become part of “our” culture. But over and above those phrases that our culture has made its own, there are other moments I find especially poignant. For me they capture and evoke traditionally Christian insights but without appeal to any specifically Christian doctrine or rehearsing any events from the Gospels’ Christmas narrative. What draw me are seemingly trivial moments where Dickens evokes Scrooge’s human universe with minute particularity.

For Progressive readers, who bring a more critical and analytical eye to notions like shepherd-alerting angels, the musty cattle-shed, the Virgin Birth, Dickens offers a series of what I would call tiny, pedestrian “resurrections”—separate moments where the new, the reformed, the “saved” Scrooge regains (or acquires for the first time) a humane life. He becomes a vital participant in a vital, dynamic and inclusive human community. The moments I have in mind are powerful in the way they reveal to the tight-fisted man of commerce the vital importance of community. Dickens shows powerfully that a new sense of human brotherhood can come to pass down here, on this earth, in our lives, and he does so without seeking any heavenly or eternal confirmation.

This superlatively imaginative author does it by showing us that the secular, the quotidian, the “lowly” affairs of life can prove revelatory.  His fable dramatizes a vital Christian insight, which we might legitimately term “incarnational”–God at work in the tiniest corners of our lives. As Sean Patrick has said (in an essay for the Catholic Education Research Center): “This carol prepares its readers not only for Christmas Day, but also for Life in all its dirtiness and dignity.”

Dickens of course, deeply concerned with his audience, his market, does genuflect (though only briefly and very early in the story) to the central Event of Christmas. He has Scrooge’s nephew speak of “the veneration due to its sacred name and origin, if anything belonging to it can be apart from that.” But having performed that obeisance, Dickens lets his vital tale blossom. It’s the way Scrooge responds to the simplest, most pedestrian, most seemingly trivial details of the world to which he brings his reformed spirit that are for me the loveliest thirty seconds of the entire tale. Here are those crucial comments. They occur, significantly, upon the first moments of Scrooge’s coming awake. (I’ll try to interrupt as little as possible.)

“What’s to-day?” cried Scrooge, calling downward to a boy in Sunday clothes, who perhaps had loitered in to look about him.

“Eh?” returned the boy, with all his might of wonder.

“What’s to-day, my fine fellow?” said Scrooge. (Remember that epithet. It’s hugely significant.)

“To-day?” replied the boy.  “Why, Christmas Day.”

“It’s Christmas Day!” said Scrooge to himself.  “I haven’t missed it.  The Spirits have done it all in one night. They can do anything they like.  Of course they can.  Of course they can.  Hallo, my fine fellow!”  (The epithet is repeated.)

“Hallo!” returned the boy.

“Do you know the Poulterer’s, in the next street but one, at the corner?” Scrooge inquired.

“I should hope I did,” replied the lad.

“An intelligent boy!” said Scrooge.  “A remarkable boy!

So factual, everyday, unremarkable a skill as knowing the nearest butcher sparks, for the newly-awoken Scrooge, both delight and wonder.  He applauds the random kid with two glowing adjectives: “intelligent” and “remarkable.” The trivial but vital discovery lets Scrooge move to a new stage in his unplanned but evolving steps of generosity.

“Do you know whether they’ve sold the prize Turkey that was hanging up there — Not the little prize Turkey: the big one?”

“What, the one as big as me?” returned the boy.

“What a delightful boy!” said Scrooge.  “It’s a pleasure to talk to him.  Yes, my buck.”

When the boy describes the turkey which Scrooge wants him to buy, the positive reply makes this renewed man so joyful that he considers the conversational exchange a source of profound satisfaction. The dialogue that to us seems merely factual is, for the former miser, miraculous.

“It’s hanging there now,” replied the boy.

“Is it?” said Scrooge.  “Go and buy it.”

“Walk-er!” exclaimed the boy.

“No, no,” said Scrooge, “I am in earnest.  Go and buy it, and tell them to bring it here, that I may give them the direction where to take it.  Come back with the man, and I’ll give you a shilling.”

The kid’s slang riposte “Walk-er”—a contemporary term expressing suspicion and doubt (roughly equivalent to our sarcastic “yeah, right”)–doesn’t discourage the newly-awakened man. He remains steadfastly eager to share. Early in the story Ebenezer’s his life solely “business.” That’s the perspective that shaped his customary appraisal of Christmas as “an excuse for picking a man’s pocket every 25th of December.” But here (it’s an especially deft touch) Dickens shows that Scrooge has lost none of his business acumen, his operating principle that time is money.  Come back with him in less than five minutes and I’ll give you half-a-crown.”  His acquisitive impulses still are at play, but they now work in the service of genuine generosity.

Scrooge gets additional pleasure here that the turkey’s existence provides the chance to unleash his new generosity, on behalf of the Cratchit family. A chance to “do good” in this world—an opportunity for genuinely selfless generosity. It’s almost as if his old vanity now serves his self-denial—his refusal to be identified as the provider, his desire to remain anonymous. It’s the same commitment to anonymity shown by his decision merely to whisper his intended contribution to the man he had so abused the day before. The newly humble man keeps his generosity private.

It’s very tiny slice of the tale, a mere twenty seconds, but it is for me the most powerful confirmation of how miraculous the world appears to one who has at long last discovered a communal role. He has captured (and will “keep” perpetually) the Christmas spirit as defined explicitly by the author: “It’s that season 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.” At the tale’s beginning it was Scrooge’s “business” not to “interfere with other people’s” business. Now, though, Scrooge has become genuinely communal—an attitude quintessentially articulated in that twice-stated affectionate epithet for the lad. Scrooge discovers the availability of, and his own legitimate role within, a “fine fellow”-ship.

In short, in his first walkabout as a reformed gent, Ebenezer finds that “everything could give him pleasure.”  Dickens brings his characteristic superfluity to a wide range of activities Scrooge undertakes as he explores the world that now lies all before him. The long series of verbs underscore the degree of his vitality, as does his effective employment of an elementary coordinating conjunction: “he “went… and watched … and patted and questioned and looked down and up …”. That abundance of conjunctions shows the newly energized Ebenezer coming into full flower in the course of that (truly pedestrian) exploration. “He had never dreamed that any walk — that anything — could give him so much happiness.”

Dickens characteristically captures our world through its vivid, detailed but “low” activities and humble participants. Here the account of Scrooge’s redemption is brought alive in an explicitly secular and worldly arena. Scrooge becomes an exemplar of “keeping Christmas” and demonstrates the lesson through his intimate but elementally simple involvement in pedestrian, worldly things.

His hands were busy with his garments all this time; turning them inside out, putting them on upside down, tearing them, mislaying them, making them parties to every kind of extravagance.

The (seemingly infinite) number of ways he clothes and re-clothes himself are vivid testimony to the new man’s instinct for change and variety—to reform, both inside out and upsides down.)