Back to: Dickens A Christmas Carol and the Bible
Dickens, of course, did not invent Christmas, but he successfully reintegrated earlier traditions and memories of traditions and, in effect, repurposed the Christmas season.
There are several accounts of an incident in which a woman was overheard exclaiming on the day
that Dickens died, June 9, 1870, “Dickens dead? Then will Father Christmas die too?”
Three unrelated historical circumstances overlapped to bring about this cultural phenomenon.
1 In 1843, the year A Christmas Carol was written and published, Dickens was at a low point of his personal history. His popularity as a writer and his income—both recently quite substantial—had fallen with the disappointing sales of Martin Chuzzlewit. Dickens was ready to leave fiction and rely instead on travel writing, which, following his trip to the United States, had brought him some success. Had other factors not been present, A Christmas Carol and most of the author’s other best-loved stories might never have been written.
2. Social and economic conditions of this period of English history also played a part. The Industrial Revolution had changed both the English landscape and the relationships among laborers and landowners. The decade before A Christmas Carol appeared was full of political and social tension, culminating in often violent strikes by miners and spinners, the hanging of nine agricultural workers, and the destruction of farm fields and equipment. exacerbated by the specter of the French Revolution a century earlier, which raised fears in the English upper classes about strikes and rebellions fomented by the lower classes. As a writer known for his sympathies for people of all classes and, in particular, for children in downtrodden and abusive circumstances, Dickens felt himself under personal and public pressure to promote efforts to educate homeless and neglected children and to support the legislative proposals of the Factory Movement—a contemporary political effort to ameliorate or eliminate child labor and other practices that added misery to the already disadvantaged working classes
There is persuasive evidence to support some scholarly speculation (see, for example, Vogel, pp. 57–68) that instead of direct political involvement, Dickens put his compassion (and perhaps guilt) concerning unjust and inhumane treatment of the lower social classes into writing his story about a miser and a desperately poor family. A Christmas Carol brought into focus an age-old paradox about inequities among the social classes and the social imperatives contained in the biblical story of Christmas
Dickens scholar Joseph W. Childers writes: We can see¯. in A Christmas Carol . how Christmas
struggles against competing views of social responsibility that are likewise attempting to resolve the contradictions of the Victorian everyday in the 1840s. [It takes up] the issue of the poor, the other nation, and the increasing gap between the lower and upper classes
Charles Dickens is playing the prophet in this story which proclaims the ancient truths of charity, compassion and justice which are cloaked in the lessons of Advent. Charles Dickens is preaching to the Christians of his day who had shut the poor out and he was not subtle or unapologetic about his intent to make the English Christian world uncomfortable by haunting them with the Advent lessons. He prefaces his book by writing:
“I have endeavored in this ghostly little book, to raise the ghost of an idea, which shall not put my readers out of humor with themselves, with each other, with the season, or with me. May it haunt their houses pleasantly, and no one wish to lay it.” So as the Church was encouraged to examine their life through the Advent lessons to prepare to ready themselves for the coming of Christ in their lives, so Scrooge is being prepared to welcome the lessons of Christianity in his life through the coming of Spirits
Industrialism in Victorian England developed a type of Darwinian economics that claimed the right to judge a persons value solely by their ability to make a profit. “If the poor, the insufficiently aggressive, and the mediocre in ability were unable to live on what they could get, they must starve-or put up with the treadmill and the workhouse-even these institutions were seen as concessions to humanity and must be forbidden as soon as possible33.”
Charles Dickens knew all too well the sad reality of debtor’s prison from his father’s failures. Because if Charles Dickens’ age he could not join his father in prison with the rest of his family because at age fourteen he could make a living at a factory. So it was from Charles own lonely adolescence he knew something of the work house when he worked the blacking factory. While these institutions kept the poor and struggling out of sight from respectable society, they mercilessly split up families. Women and young children were worked to death in the work house and debtor’s prison destroyed any opportunity for head of households to redeem their debt.
Many lawmakers saw the injustice of this system and tried to create laws to reform it but the profits made by cheap labor in the factories outweighed any moral motivation to regulate the system. In fact, the remark Scrooge makes “are there no prisons, are there no workhouses!” may have been a remark that Charles Dickens heard himself as young man when he worked as a reporter reporting on the daily secessions of Parliament for “Mirror of Parliament”. Imagine the rage and shame the young Dickens must have felt knowing that these remarks were addressed toward his family members.
This devaluing of human life is not sanctioned in the Church of England’s Common Book of Prayer. If anything, there is strong theology that encourages justice toward the poor with strong warnings that God holds the wealthy accountable for showing no mercy. But factories could not have succeeded unless the most prominent members of that society practiced these sad values in their business dealings. The most affluent and powerful Christians of that culture were clearly living a double life between faith and practice
As to the question of the worth of human life, Scripture reminds us that God doesn’t always choose the physically strongest for longevity or prosperity or the most intellectual for matters of great faith.
“Who is like the LORD our God, the One who sits enthroned on high, who stoops down to look on the heavens and the earth? He raises the poor from the dust and lifts the needy from the ash heap; he seats them with princes, with the princes of their people. He settles the barren woman in her home as a happy mother of children. Praise the LORD.” Psalm 113:5-9
“Brothers, think of what you were when you were called. Not many of you were wise by human standards; not many were influential; not many were of noble birth. But God chose the foolish things of the world to shame the wise; God chose the weak things of the world to shame the strong. He chose the lowly things of this world and the despised things— and the things that are not—to nullify the things that are, so that no one may boast before him.” 1 Corinthians 1:26-29
3. Idea from the talk he had given
The idea for the work came suddenly and almost rapturously. Following an address
he had just given at the Athenaeum in Manchester about the importance of education for all classes, he was back in London walking the streets, recalling with great satisfaction the rapport he had established with the audience on that evening. The prospect of writing another story for this audience—a story that both portrayed the plight of the English poor and offered a profound and spiritual solution for the country’s economic disparities—was deeply satisfying. Bit by bit the story came together, and Dickens described to his biographer how he was moved both to tears and laughter at his new prospect.
Status of Christmas
One year before Carol was published (1843), for example, there was no custom of exchanging Christmas
cards, nor anything like a written Christmas greeting.
Depictions of Christmas celebrations commonplace before Carol first appeared were associated with rural life. Dickens’s juxtaposition of bustling Christmas activity in the brown, foggy air and along the hard stones of the city’s paved streets and sidewalks was deliberately established to inspire the English people dwelling in urban areas to participate in Christmas celebrations as fully as they had formerly done in their rural past.
The first one appeared the same year as Carol and depicted a festive scene harking back to the Christmas revelers in medieval England. Its images of feasting and decorative greenery, however, are more recognizable to contemporary celebrators of Christmas than those in 1843
The relatively spare version of Christmas observances at the time was partly due to the expanding division of the population— due to England’s industrialization—into urban and rural dwellers. Those who fled the countryside seeking work in the city often left behind their traditions and parts of their extended families. Family members who would have gathered to celebrate were now too far away from one another to reasonably do so. Calvinist Puritanism, another influence, opposed the celebration of Christmas. “Whether lost on the exodus into the new towns or stifled by the smothering hand of Calvinism, the old English Christmas was largely a memory by the beginning of the nineteenth century” (Davis 19).
The memories, however, were kept alive in the popular imagination by various publications—Robert Seymour’s Book of Christmas (1837) is an example—that recorded for nostalgic purposes images and ideas from an earlier time in history. Davis includes a print of a painting from 1838 of a medieval Christmas celebration (Merry Christmas in the Baron’s Hall, 21) depicting elaborate festivities being enjoyed by members of the baronial family in the company of members of the servant class along with random townspeople—all united in a common celebration rather than divided by social class in separate observances. This blending of all members of the English population appealed to Dickens and served his desire to be known as a writer for all classes of people.
Publication
Coming onto the market just before Christmas 1843 and designed with a red-and-gold cover to appear enticingly festive, the book was an instant success, selling out its first run of 6,000 copies in a few days. Its social message was a plea to its English readers to develop a social conscience through opening their hearts to the plight of others and sharing the collective wealth. Its promise was that such a gesture would connect readers to the real source of human happiness that comes from leading less selfish lives. The message reconnected with the biblical Christian teachings and together became the foundation for a revival of the English celebration of Christmas
Christmas Carol is the first of five Christmas books Dickens published between 1843 and 1848. The Chimes, A, Cricket on the Hearth, The Battle of Life, and The Haunted Man are the others.
The tradition of public readings of A Christmas Carol that Dickens initiated is almost as popular as the story itself. He believed that reading aloud created a valuable intimacy between a writer and his audience. This rapport was a social good as well. He emphasized how important it was to bring together people from all social classes in a spirit of goodwill. And, whenever he could, he insisted that there would always be seats selling for a single shilling at each performance.
The performances were also popular because Dickens put so much physical energy into the readings. Many reports exist revealing how he made happy smacking sounds as he pretended to taste the applesauce at the feast and how he used a knife and his fingers to illustrate Mr. Fezziwig’s famous dancing trick. After one of his readings, he remarked, “The town was drunk with the Carol far into the night”