The Man Who Invented Christmas (11 page)

Though it dawns on Scrooge that “the case of this unhappy man might be my own,” even a visit to a deserted bedchamber where a corpse lies wrapped in sheeting cannot entirely lift the fog of his obliviousness. When he begs the Spirit for a glimpse of anyone in all London who might mourn this dead man’s passing, Scrooge is permitted to watch one couple lament that their creditor has died before the husband could beg him to relieve their debt.

The culmination of the final Spirit’s visit comes with a visit to the Cratchit home, where Bob Cratchit has just returned from a visit to Tiny Tim’s grave. As he tries to keep himself together, the clerk admonishes his family to remember Tim’s mild example. “We shall never quarrel among ourselves, and forget poor Tiny Tim in doing it,” Cratchit says, and his remaining children assure him that they will not.

By now the entire family is in tears, with Cratchit doing his best to hold up. “I am very happy,” says young Bob junior, “I am very happy!” And the whole group comes to embrace their wretched father.

With that, the Ghost of Christmas Yet To Come snatches Scrooge away, conveying him quickly past his closed-up office and to a churchyard, and thence to a tombstone in it, where the mystery, if it has not yet sunk in, is finally revealed. Our miser stands reading the chiseled name of
EBENEZER SCROOGE
upon the stone in shock, then—enlightened at last—turns to beg his guide for one more chance to mend his ways.

“Oh, tell me I may sponge away the writing on this stone,” cries Scrooge. He lunges for the spectral hand of the phantom, holding tightly to it in supplication…and wakens then to find himself clutching the wooden post of his own bed, daylight flooding the room, and the bedclothes he had seen pawned in a boneyard back in their rightful place.

A breathless Scrooge runs to his window to thrust his head out and call to a shop boy in the streets below. It is but Christmas Day, the boy assures him, and Scrooge marvels that the Spirits have done their work in the space of a single night after all. Overjoyed to find himself still alive, he sends the shop boy off to the poulterer’s for a turkey—“Not the little prize Turkey: the big one,” and sends the thing—“twice the size of Tiny Tim”—off to the Cratchits’.

As quickly as he can manage it, he is shaved and dressed and out into the streets, where he meets the do-gooder whom he rebuffed the day before. When he whispers an unspecified amount into the gentleman’s ear, it leaves his beneficiary gaping in astonishment.

From that encounter he is off to his nephew Fred’s, for dinner, and after that delightful time, returns home for a good night’s rest. The next morning he is quickly off to his office morning to await the arrival of Bob Cratchit, who enters in a nervous sweat, a “full eighteen minutes and a half behind his time.”

“I am not going to stand this sort of thing any longer,” Scrooge tells the frightened Cratchit—then claps his clerk jovially on the back. “I’ll raise your salary, and endeavour to assist your struggling family, and we will discuss your affairs this very afternoon, over a Christmas bowl of smoking bishop, Bob! Make up the fires, and buy another coal-scuttle before you dot another
i,
Bob Cratchit!”

Ever afterwards, we are told, it was always said of Scrooge that he knew how to keep Christmas well, “if any man alive possessed the knowledge. May that be truly said of us, and all of us! And so, as Tiny Tim observed, God bless Us, Every One!”

I
n summary,
A Christmas Carol
is a bald-faced parable that underscores Dickens’s enduring themes: the deleterious effects of ignorance and want, the necessity for charity, the benefits of goodwill, family unity, and the need for celebration of the life force, including the pleasures of good food and drink, and good company. And, admittedly, Dickens is in some ways repeating concepts that he had put in print before.

But that aside, the accomplishment of this slender story, which more than one critic has termed Dickens’s “most perfect” work, is to be found in the details of its rendering. In
A Christmas Carol,
a contemptible gravedigger is replaced by the much more estimable figure of a wealthy businessman. Ebenezer Scrooge is no castoff drunk, but the very emblem of economic achievement. And in place of specious advice to parents who might well want to grieve a lost child at Christmastime, he offers but a chilling vision of the Cratchit family’s life without Tiny Tim, then hurries to bring that crippled child back to life again.

Furthermore, the ghosts who assail him are not vaguely drawn creatures from familiar myths. The tripartite Spirits of Christmas, preceded by the shade of Scrooge’s dead partner, are as originally conceived as they are powerful in their detailed, quasi-human form. Marley appears looking very nearly as he had in life, save for the fact that “His body was transparent; so that Scrooge, observing him, and looking through his waistcoat, could see the two buttons on his coat behind….[Scrooge] felt the chilling influence of its death-cold eyes; and marked the very texture of the folded kerchief bound about its head and chin, which wrapper he had not observed before.”

Lest all this frightfulness open the artist to the charge of melodrama, however, Dickens slips in a typically caustic aside: “Scrooge had often heard it said that Marley had no bowels, but he had never believed it until now.”

It is the sort of wit that creeps in throughout, allowing the cynical reader to proceed contentedly through the story alongside the sentimentalist. (It is not surprising, then, that one of the more enjoyable modern interpretations of the tale is performed by the comedian Jonathan Winters, master of the cutting jibe.)

And while only the hardest hearts fail to be moved along with Scrooge by the plight of the Cratchit family and the stiff-upper-lippedness of Tiny Tim, there are also moments in the text when Dickens’s powers distinguish him as much as a stylist as he is a master dramatist.

Of the vast, echoing staircase in Scrooge’s dimly lit town home, the narrator says, “You may talk vaguely about driving a coach-and-six up a good old flight of stairs, or through a bad young Act of Parliament; but I mean to say you might have got a hearse up that staircase, and taken it broadwise, with the splinter-bar towards the wall and the door toward the ballustrades: and done it easy. There was plenty of width for that, and room to spare; which is perhaps the reason why Scrooge thought he saw a locomotive hearse going on before him in the gloom.”

The cadences, the detail, the wry humor, and the ease with which the narrator shifts from what is real to what is not—these are elements that are sometimes unrevealed to modern audiences who know
A Christmas Carol
only from dramatic adaptations, where the author’s descriptive voice is replaced by a camera or by a set designer’s vision. But this quality of writing contributes as much to the book’s ability to work its magic upon readers as do any number of fine and noble sentiments. In such details lie the reasons why Ebenezer Scrooge and his preposterous self-centeredness would live on through history, and why Gabriel Grub, cut from the same thematic bolt of cloth, would not.

10.

F
or all the strengths that are evident to the modern eye in
A Christmas Carol,
and despite his own confidence in the power of his tale, Dickens had at least two good reasons to be apprehensive as publication day for his story approached. One had to do with the nature of the holiday itself, and the other with the dire financial straits he found himself in.

As for the first, Christmas in 1843 was not at all the premier occasion that it is today, when Christmas stories and their Grinches and elves and Santas abound, when “Christmas stores” purvey Yule decorations the four seasons round, and a marketing effort that begins sometime in mid-October is said to determine the fate of an entire year for retailers.

There were no Christmas cards in 1843 England, no Christmas trees at royal residences or White Houses, no Christmas turkeys, no department-store Santa or his million clones, no outpouring of “Yuletide greetings,” no weeklong cessation of business affairs through the New Year, no orgy of gift-giving, no ubiquitous public display of nativity scenes (or court fights regarding them), no holiday lighting extravaganzas, and no plethora of midnight services celebrating the birth of a savior. In fact, despite all of Dickens’s enthusiasms, the holiday was a relatively minor affair that ranked far below Easter, causing little more stir than Memorial Day or St. George’s Day does today. In the eyes of the relatively enlightened Anglican Church, moreover, the entire enterprise of celebrating Christmas smacked vaguely of paganism, and were there Puritans still around, acknowledging the holiday might have landed one in the stocks.

In fact, for much of the first two centuries of settlement in New England, Christmas was scarcely celebrated. As Yule scholar Stephen Nissenbaum points out, from 1659 to 1681 there was actually a law on the books in the Massachusetts Colony that forbade the practice and levied a fine of five shillings upon anyone caught in the act. Sitting down with their new native friends for a Thanksgiving feast might have been perfectly acceptable, but when Governor William Bradford discovered a few of his fellow Pilgrims trying to celebrate Christmas the year after their arrival, he broke up the ceremonies and ordered everyone back to their jobs.

Part of the reason that Puritans found the holiday such anathema lies in the holiday’s roots in pagan celebrations that date back to Roman times. There is in fact no reference in the Christian gospels to the birth of Jesus taking place on the twenty-fifth of December, or in any specific month at all. When Luke says, “For unto you is born this day in the city of David a Savior,” there is not the slightest indication of what day that might have been. Moreover, as climatologists have pointed out, the typical weather patterns in the high desert region, then as now, make it difficult to believe that shepherds would have been out tending their flocks during frigid, late-December nights, when nighttime lows often dipped below freezing.

For the first several hundred years of Christianity’s practice, and while the death and rebirth of Jesus were venerated upon the highest holy day of Easter, the birth of the savior was not celebrated. It was Pope Julius I who, during the fourth century, designated December 25 as the official date for the birth of Jesus, and scholars believe that he chose the date so that Christianity might attract new members by co-opting the lingering sentiments for the ancient festival of Saturnalia, held annually by Romans in honor of their god of agriculture. Beginning the week before the winter solstice (which occurs between December 20 and 23 each year) and for an entire month, Romans turned their ordinary world topsy-turvy and embarked upon an orgy of drinking and feasting, during which businesses and schools were closed, the government of the city was turned over to the peasants, and slaves were relieved of their masters.

The decision to create Christmas (the term derives from the original “dismissal” or “festival,” i.e., “Mass of Christ”), officially celebrating the birth of Jesus for the first time, brought mixed blessings to the Church. Indeed, many pagans found the new religion that embraced their old customs inviting, and the membership rolls grew. On the other hand, Church leaders found that their new Christmas celebrations often got out of hand. As soon as services were over for the day, churchgoers in early modern Europe found it perfectly acceptable to transition directly to a drunken bacchanal, especially if they were part of the disenfranchised class.

One young man of no special standing would be chosen as the “lord of misrule,” and was often provided with a “wife” for the day. The revelers would eagerly make themselves available to carry out his whimsical orders, especially if they involved some mischief at the expense of their true masters. Throngs of the needy and less fortunate would present themselves at the gates of the wealthy, demanding food and drink.

In time, elements of these practices were modified into the custom of Boxing Day in England, during which members of the upper classes would package up some of their castoff goods and clothing as year-end gifts for their servants. And, Nissenbaum points out, even to this day, officers of the British Army are compelled to wait upon their enlisted men at Christmas meals. On this side of the Atlantic, Halloween has become the day when anyone has the right to bang on any door and demand a gift from those inside, and the December issues of popular magazines print “tipping guides” for those who wish to stay in the good graces of their paperboys, manicurists, and barbers for the ensuing year.

By the early 1600s, however, the excesses of “Christmas-keepers” in England had only increased, when such practices as “mumming” had become common. Among other things, mumming men and women were wont to exercise their passion for the season by exchanging their clothing and going from one neighbor’s house to the next, engaging in the sorts of behavior that one might expect when undressing and cross-dressing were involved. Such carnality distressed Anglicans such as the Reverend Henry Bourne of Newcastle most grievously; in his eyes, Christmas was “a pretense for Drunkenness, and Rioting, and Wantonness.” His Puritan counterpart in America, Cotton Mather of Boston, whose outrage would carry over to the Salem witch trials, chimed in: “Christ’s Nativity is spent in Reveling, Dicing, Carding, Masking and in all Licentious Liberty.”