In the Western world, there can be few Christmas stories, outside the Biblical ones of course, that have had such an enduring influence on our celebrations at this time of the year as Charles Dickens' A Christmas Carol (1843). It has even been said that Dickens invented our modern idea of Christmas through his yearly offering of Christmas Tales. I have my grandmother's copy of these timeless stories that she inscribed with her name when a young lady, and I began reading A Christmas Carol on that most suitable of days, and the day on which the story begins, Christmas Eve.
I don't think any writer outside Shakespeare has created such imaginatively powerful characters as Dickens has. They are larger than life, fairy-tale-like in their familiar magical otherness, have entered our imaginative consciousness and become part of the furniture of our minds; the Pantheon of the English imagination. Ebenezer Scrooge features strongly among them, the archetypal miser whose meanness and cold heart slowly melt away as four supernatural presences manifest to show him the truth: his deceased associate Marley, and the Ghosts of Christmas Past, of Christmas Present and the last visitor, the Ghost of Christmas Yet to Come.
What an extraordinary opening line!: 'Marley was dead: to begin with. There is no doubt whatever about that.' We know what we have on our hands, another installment from our greatest storywriter, 'the inimitable Dickens'. We know we will be entertained with his infectious humour, we know we will be treated to a supernatural tale, and all within the first six words.
As I wander wide-eyed through the magic world of Scrooge's Counting House, the London Streets at Christmas, the visions summoned up by the Ghosts of Scrooge's childhood and youth and the modest household of his clerk Bob Cratchet, I am amazed by the breadth of this imaginative vision, the richness and density of the prose, a prose which even after a hundred and eighty years is as fresh and delightful as it was when it was first penned. It gives us humbling food for thought to consider that these stories were read by 'all and sundry', the rich, the not so rich, the barely literate, the poor, the uneducated; and understood, and loved. It is true that people did not have today's distractions, the screens of telephones, computers, televisions, and endless media chatter, but most people struggled to get by, like today, and very many lived in the deepest poverty. But the world of mass production of standardised products was limited, people lived more sedentary lives, communities still flourished on the bedrock of age-old customs and traditions, language, although cheapened by a largely mercantile society, retained some of its density. And Dickens' world is dynamic, everything, even the most ordinary of objects, have a liveliness and life of their own. Here is an early description of the mid-winter London outdoors:
The ancient tower of a church, whose gruff old bell was always peeping slily down at Scrooge out of a Gothic window in the wall, became invisible, and struck the hours and quarters in the clouds, with tremulous vibrations afterwards as if its teeth were chattering in its frozen head up there. The cold became intense.
And here, the lively bustling streets of ice, and the glow and warmth of human habitation and activity; again we note that objects are not 'inanimate'in this world, they have expressions, personality, even feelings:
In the main street, at the corner of the court, some labourers were repairing the gas-pipes, and had lighted a great fire in a brazier, round which a party of ragged men and boys were gathered: warming their hands and winking their eyes before the blaze in rapture. The water-plug being left in solitude, its overflowings sullenly congealed, and turned to misanthropic ice. The brightness of the shops where holly sprigs and berries crackled in the lamp heat of the windows, made pale faces ruddy as they passed. Poulterers’ and grocers’ trades became a splendid joke: a glorious pageant, with which it was next to impossible to believe that such dull principles as bargain and sale had anything to do. The Lord Mayor, in the stronghold of the mighty Mansion House, gave orders to his fifty cooks and butlers to keep Christmas as a Lord Mayor’s household should; and even the little tailor, whom he had fined five shillings on the previous Monday for being drunk and bloodthirsty in the streets, stirred up to-morrow’s pudding in his garret, while his lean wife and the baby sallied out to buy the beef.
And what about the description of the first supernatural apparition, Marley, his associate, seven years dead, whose face first appears in the place of Scrooge's ... doorknocker:
And then let any man explain to me, if he can, how it happened that Scrooge, having his key in the lock of the door, saw in the knocker, without its undergoing any intermediate process of change—not a knocker, but Marley’s face. Marley’s face. It was not in impenetrable shadow as the other objects in the yard were, but had a dismal light about it, like a bad lobster in a dark cellar. It was not angry or ferocious, but looked at Scrooge as Marley used to look: with ghostly spectacles turned up on its ghostly forehead. The hair was curiously stirred, as if by breath or hot air; and, though the eyes were wide open, they were perfectly motionless.
In our televised or film versions of Dickens, we can forget what a most perculiar, strikingly original, and downright out-of-this-world imagination he has. What a strange image!: "a dismal light about it, like a bad
lobster in a dark cellar". Surely, something utterly surreal, nightmarish.
What mind would then think the next imaginative thought, when Scrooge closes the door behind him?
'and he did look cautiously behind it first, as if he half expected to be terrified with the sight of Marley’s pigtail sticking out into the hall.'
And the comically strange sight of the transparent ghost of Marley, standing in Scrooge's room:
His body was transparent; so that Scrooge, observing him, and looking through his waistcoat, could see the two buttons on his coat behind.
This detail of the buttons is amusing; and very human too in its perceptiveness; we know in the oddest, even most extreme circumstances, how our attention can alight on the most apparently trivial detail. The 'two buttons' observation is also a reminder that although this might be in part a ghost story, it is not a 'horror' or 'gothic' story, it is not entirely serious; the ghosts are not a threat, but a reminder of a higher order of things, a reminder of what remains to be done in our precious time on earth.
Finally, in this first part, and on a graver note, the ghost of Marley carries in him the weight of a spiritual sickness, brought about by never having lived his life on earth outside the narrow perimetres of the counting house, never having lived generously with a thought for others' wealthfare - and his visit from beyond the grave is an act of grace, to warn Scrooge not to live like this and to avoid the tortured wanderings of a disincarnate soul after death. Marley and Scrooge have both 'forged' the chains of their own present misery and self-confinement.
“It is required of every man,” the Ghost returned, “that the spirit within him should walk abroad among his fellowmen, and travel far and wide; and if that spirit goes not forth in life, it is condemned to do so after death. It is doomed to wander through the world—oh, woe is me!—and witness what it cannot share, but might have shared on earth, and turned to happiness!”
Again the spectre raised a cry, and shook its chain and wrung its shadowy hands.
“You are fettered,” said Scrooge, trembling. “Tell me why?”
“I wear the chain I forged in life,” replied the Ghost. “I made it link by link, and yard by yard; I girded it on of my own free will, and of my own free will I wore it. Is its pattern strange to you?”
Scrooge trembled more and more.
“Or would you know,” pursued the Ghost, “the weight and length of the strong coil you bear yourself? It was full as heavy and as long as this, seven Christmas Eves ago. You have laboured on it, since. It is a ponderous chain!”
