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This Guardian article on Dickens and Christmas nudged me into re-reading A Christmas Carol. The introduction to this Penguin edition even starts with the same anecdote, about the costermonger's daughter who asked “Mr Dickens dead? Then will Father Christmas die too?”
I rarely re-read books, not least because there are too many classics I wish I'd read, and which I haven't yet read once, to launch myself into a project of re-reading. But also because I know that re-reading is more time-consuming both to do and to write about, because it's not just about the book and the current reading experience, but a reconsideration of what I'd previously got out of the story. (This post is, for the moment, just about A Christmas Carol and not the other Christmas Writings. People's appetite for Christmas material is probably already waning on 4th January, and I don't expect to finish this whole collection by Twelfth Night.)
The early pages of A Christmas Carol remained so familiar that I thought it might be basically impossible to review the book. It was simply itself and that's how it was. Goodness knows how many times I'd read them when I was growing up - I'd been given two different editions as presents before the age of ten, and would have opened and browsed them frequently. The only surprises were that some of Scrooge's anti-Christmas rants were genuinely funny, and that he was suffering from a cold throughout proceedings. However, I found it less familiar once I hit Stave Two, and more possible to think about it as I would another book, although every now and again, there were occasional sentences that had resounding familiarity from childhood, because they'd just got into my head, like "who and what are you?" or because they were probably captions to illustrations in other editions.
It was hard to tell whether this is an effect of my own early habituation to the text, or if I was spotting genuine influence at work, but there is a tone here which seems like the essence of British children's writing, especially, though not only, children's fantasy writing, and fantasy stories which aim to have cross-age appeal. Did Dickens essentially invent it? Or did he simply popularise it so that almost everyone since has been influenced via his work? Probably its greatest contemporary exponent is Neil Gaiman - including with that storyteller voice and occasional authorial breaking of the fourth wall that has become connected with the trust many readers have in his public persona (a clause which I feel could be saying equally about Dickens or Gaiman). I don't read much in the way of contemporary children's or YA, but it's also the tone A.L. Kennedy was going for in her Little Prince spin-off, The Little Snake, which I read a few months ago.
Often the sentences seemed astonishingly modern - noticeably more of them would work in contemporary writing than would sentences from, for example, Henry Fielding, written a century earlier. Perhaps this is due to the overwhelming popularity of the Carol which has led a huge readership and reuse, often unwitting, of many of the phrasings. I did not find myself struck by modernity of wording in the same way when I read the less popular Hard Times a couple of years earlier. But just when I was marvelling at all this, of course there would come along some paragraph really quite antiquated and tangled to 21st century ears, showing that this is indeed still a work of 1843.
What never would have occurred to me as a kid is that Scrooge is essentially forced through a rapid course of psychotherapy in order to effect personality change - only he didn't seek it out himself. (Did Freud read much Dickens?) Its transformative outcome in either three days or one, depending how you measure time in the book, is one that promoters of accelerated programmes like the Hoffmann Process can probably only dream of. He is made to examine how the past made him who he is, including a number of painful moments which reawaken a dormant capacity for a variety of emotions; he is shown the adverse effects he has on others, and his separation from what are considered healthy social norms; and then to reinforce it all, just in case his repentance - to use a term from religion that would have been recognisable to early Victorians - is not yet deep and sincere, he is forced to look in the eye the probable future consequences of his current way of life. His response to the final Spirit is basically the idea of psychological integration: "I will live in the Past, the Present, and the Future."
The main, intended, message of A Christmas Carol is one of charity, and, ultimately, in tandem with Dickens' other works, the need to improve economic equality. However, I think that alongside this it also ends up showing lavish material consumption (via spending rather than hoarding of money) as a sign of being good-hearted. (Picking out unhelpful influences I absorbed from books and films when I was younger is, for me, an inevitable part of revisiting them. In some cases these influences occurred because I didn't properly understand the wider context or social norms beyond the work, but in the case of A Christmas Carol I think it's something the text in its many forms has actually put into the wider Anglo-American culture. 'Moderation in all things', or lagom to use the Swedish term increasingly fashionable in English, is not what it's about.) Whilst Scrooge is possibly malnourished himself, living on gruel to save money, Scrooge's nephew's house evidently has more than anyone could ever need. Bob Cratchit definitely needed a substantial pay rise and decent heating at work. (Which I think of all the more keenly knowing some of my own ancestors were unhealthy Victorian clerks, and another a milliner like one of the daughters.) But his Christmas dinner sounds very nice as it was - and would he have even been able to cook that giant turkey? Would the local ovens have had space for a thing like that, which would have normally been bought by a wealthy household? Would it have cost them more to cook and delayed neighbours' dinners by taking up communal oven space? I guess in an age of extreme wealth inequality there is lavishness and there is poverty, and Dickens' own life story had a hand in how he showed this. Issues of the later 20th and 21st century - of prevalent commercial and media pressures to overconsume leading to stress and overspending, and of ecological depletion - were certainly not on the radar of the Hungry Forties, when mouthwatering accounts of mountains of food could provide thrills and comfort to poorer readers who were scraping by, much as the Cratchits were. Slater's introduction refers to real letters readers sent to Dickens also saying how much they loved the scene of the family's dinner. Which, it’s interesting to see, includes a Christmas pudding cooked in the laundry copper - would that affect the taste? (I assume the name 'Cratchit' is supposed to have a scraping-by sort of sound and perhaps to echo Tiny Tim's crutch, but its echoes of 'crotchety' and 'crabbit' mean it also sounds ill-natured in a way that emphatically does not suit Bob and his family.)
The abundance of works like this one, showing great positive change in difficult people, can also lead to frustration over the years, as one gradually discovers that, in the reality of adult life, people do not necessarily change and 'grow' as much as would be helpful - but that is hardly peculiar to A Christmas Carol.
However, in terms of evaluating A Christmas Carol by modern mores, I suppose one can't much fault Dickens on healthy eating! Often in the 19th century, meat and carbohydrates were valued over vegetables, which could be seen as a food for the poor. (No sprouts to spoil the Cratchits' dinner!) Yet a paragraph this ecstatic about veg and fruit (Dickens even sexualises it somewhat) could only fit these days into food or travel writing; anywhere else it would sound like a parodic escape from a public health campaign - normally it is cakes and chocolate that are extolled this way:
There were ruddy, brown-faced, broad-girthed Spanish Onions, shining in the fatness of their growth like Spanish Friars; and winking from their shelves in wanton slyness at the girls as they went by, and glanced demurely at the hung-up mistletoe. There were pears and apples, clustered high in blooming pyramids; there were bunches of grapes, made in the shopkeepers’ benevolence to dangle from conspicuous hooks, that people’s mouths might water gratis as they passed; there were piles of filberts, mossy and brown, recalling, in their fragrance, ancient walks among the woods, and pleasant shufflings ankle deep through withered leaves; there were Norfolk Biffins, squab and swarthy, setting off the yellow of the oranges and lemons, and, in the great compactness of their juicy persons, urgently entreating and beseeching to be carried home in paper bags and eaten after dinner.
The notes in this edition seem very good. There is very little in the way of material so obvious it's patronising, and only a couple of things missed out which could have done with notes: " a twice-turned gown" and " like a bad lobster in a dark cellar" (in 2018 the combination of lobsters and basements made one think of Jordan Peterson fans; goodness knows what greater significance it had in 1843).
Something I keep mulling over more generally about Dickens is how he was, in his day, so effective in his social reform agenda, and so well-loved by readers, whereas fiction doing the same now - not least because he's done it before - easily comes across as either mawkish, or written by and for a particular small audience (which has in the past couple of years come to be called 'liberal elites'). As far as I can work out, reasons for this on a larger scale would have included the reform-mindedness of some 19th century parliaments, the prevalence of some strands of Christianity, and the abundance of cheap energy fuelled industrialisation which required better education and thereby societal participation of workers. Whereas nowadays many people are aggrieved about declining standards of living, making them feel, en masse, less inclined to share, and the economic underpinnings have a different trajectory. (Not that Dickens didn't have opponents, of course. The introduction mentions that the Westminster Review condemned him, in June 1844, for his ignorance of political economy and the ‘laws’ of supply and demand: ‘Who went without turkey and punch in order that Bob Cratchit might get them – for, unless there were turkeys and punch in surplus, some one must go without – is a disagreeable reflection kept wholly out of sight [by Dickens].’ But this was a predictable reaction from Utilitarian extremists. ('Utilitarian extremists' seems somehow an absurd phrase now, if utilitarianism is an abstract idea from introductory philosophy courses, but evidently they were a thing!) Yet although the sight of the poor was surely more familiar to the wealthy of the 18th and 19th century than to their 21st century contemporaries in many western cities, people were shocked by reports on working and living conditions - Earlier in the year [1843] he, like Elizabeth Barrett and many others, had been appalled by the brutal revelations of the Second Report (Trades and Manufactures) of the Children’s Employment Commission set up by Parliament.. Were many shocked this way, or were plenty of others inured? There was evidently some shift of ideas and sentiment which I've not really read about, and of which Dickens was no doubt part - it was not just underlying economic factors, even if they are the growth medium - which made those with power gradually start caring more and doing more. The biggest change was the post-WWII welfare state, but there was a broad trajectory of improvement over the century or so before that. Something I'd like to read more about.
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What Christmas is as We Grow Older is a short piece Dickens wrote in 1851 at the age of 39. The introduction explains the background: for some years Dickens had been struggling with memories of family members and friends who had died, and he had started to find Christmas increasingly sad because of this. This article is a kind of resolution in which he concludes that it is fine and right to think of them as well as of those present, and to remember youthful ambitions unfulfilled as well as enjoying what is happening now. (Although probably the latter had been easier for him, as a successful man.) It mirrors the integration he'd written about Scrooge experiencing, but after he'd had more struggles of his own that marred his wish to find Christmas special. It shows how much death it was normal for someone of that age to have experienced at that age in the Victorian era (very different from now, though I thought of one good friend who, quite recently, at the same age, lost a much-loved parent), and that regardless of its being a universal experience then, and despite Dickens' religious belief, it was still a struggle. I'm sure this is the sort of writing that makes some people scoff at Dickens' sentimentality (the bit about child angels especially); and I couldn't help but speculate that it might have annoyed people who knew the less pleasant sides of Dickens' character - yet overall I found the piece incredibly moving; it instilled a sense of reverence, and before the end I cried in a way few books have ever provoked (not just welling up a bit, the actually-need-a-handkerchief sort) and couldn't read anything else straight afterwards.
(Read Dec 2018 - Jan 2019; reviewed January 2019. The review on Goodreads.)
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