Holiday Special 2019: ‘A Christmas Carol’
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All about the 1843 Christmas ghost story by Charles Dickens, which totally transformed the way the world observes the holiday.
If you want to read / re-read / or listen to the holiday classic, use the links below and you’ll also be supporting the Industrial Revolutions at no extra cost to you.
Sources for this episode include:
Broich, John. “The Real Reason Charles Dickens Wrote A Christmas Carol.” Time Magazine. Dec 13, 2016. https://time.com/4597964/history-charles-dickens-christmas-carol/
Dickens, Charles. A Christmas Carol: In Prose Being A Ghost Story of Christmas. Chapman & Hall. 1843.
Eschner, Kat. “Why Do People Tell Ghost Stories on Christmas?” Smithsonian Magazine. Dec 23, 2016. https://www.smithsonianmag.com/smart-news/why-do-ghost-stories-go-christmas-180961547/
Sutherland, John. “The Origins of A Christmas Carol.” Discovering Literature: Romantics & Victorians. The British Library. May 15, 2014. https://www.bl.uk/romantics-and-victorians/articles/the-origins-of-a-christmas-carol
Full Transcript
Okay, so we’ve all heard “The 12 Days of Christmas” – and even if we can’t remember all the gifts given, we still remember there are 12 days of Christmas.
Wait, what?
This always confused me, growing up, and I’m guessing the same goes for many of you listening. But traditionally, Christmastide – as it was known – was celebrated from December 25th until the Epiphany in January. Now, different Christian churches use different calendars, but historically in Western Christianity, this time totaled 12 days. It was less of a holiday and more of a festival.
And that’s not the only Christmas song with lyrics which demand historical context.
You’ve all probably heard this line from “It’s the Most Wonderful Time of the Year”…
There'll be parties for hosting
Marshmallows for toasting
And caroling out in the snow
There'll be scary ghost stories
And tales of the glories of
Christmases long, long ago…
Sorry, did he say “scary ghost stories”? Who tells ghost stories for Christmas, much less scary ones?
Well, it’s important to remember that the Christmas festival, celebrating the birth of Jesus, was actually adapted to overlap and replace earlier pagan winter festivals. One such festival among Germanic peoples, including the Anglo-Saxons, was Yuletide – a period of eleven days following the Winter Solstice. As the darkest day of the year, the solstice was considered a day “when the dead would have particularly good access to the living,” according to religious scholar Justin Daniels.
And much like the Yule log and caroling, one of the Yule traditions that Europeans kept alive (after they converted to Christianity and started celebrating Christmas) was the telling of ghost stories.
The most famous Christmas ghost story, of course, was written a little more recently. And it totally changed the way the world observed Christmas.
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This is the Industrial Revolutions Holiday Special 2019: “A Christmas Carol”
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The novella A Christmas Carol was written by Charles Dickens and first published in 1843, toward the end of the First Industrial Revolution. Dickens is a character who has come up several times in passing over the course of this podcast, and I intend to go into his remarkable life and career more in 2020.
The story revolves around a Mr. Ebenezer Scrooge, a miserly capitalist who cares not for the poor and says “bah, humbug!” to Christmas. But then, one Christmas Eve, he is visited by the tormented ghost of his former business partner, and then by the ghosts of Christmas Past, Christmas Present, and Christmas Yet to Come.
The ghosts show him his life and death – and the Christmases of the world around him – convincing Scrooge to change his ways.
You know what the most played Wham! song on Spotify is? “Last Christmas”. The Pogues? “Fairytale of New York”, their Christmas song. Mariah Carey? You guessed it: “All I Want for Christmas is You” (followed by serval other Christmas songs).
Was A Christmas Carol Dickens’ most important work? No, I wouldn’t say so.
Dickens wrote eye-opening and thought-provoking stories like Oliver Twist, David Copperfield, A Tale of Two Cities, and Great Expectations. But there’s no one Dickens story the world is more familiar with than A Christmas Carol.
Simply put, this is because – like those songs I mentioned before – it’s the one work by Dickens that gets revisited year after year. As the literary world moves on to non-seasonal works by new writers, they return every December to the holiday classic. It’s also why you’ve probably seen “Christmas Vacation” more than any other Chevy Chase film.
And, frankly, there’s no holiday story that stands out like A Christmas Carol. But to explain why, some historical context is in order.
Christmastide had been celebrated for centuries as a 12-day feast. You’d attend Mass on Christmas Eve, then spend nearly two weeks exchanging gifts, eating meat, drinking wine, dancing, etc. You typically weren’t working over Christmas, you were partying.
And it wasn’t just Christmastide. The Medieval Christian calendar was full of these “holy days” – or holidays, as we say. Sometimes in some places, there were as many as 40 or more holidays per year. And these weren’t like the optional holidays we have today. The Church would demand you take off work to observe them. And, these were on top of dozens of other rest days too – days for fairs, markets, etc. During the 14th Century, peasants were working as little as 150 days per year.
Well, guess who didn’t like that? Our old friends, the Puritans. The time off work encouraged decadence and vice, they argued, making these days the very opposite of holy. Drinking and dancing to celebrate the birth of Christ? Good heavens.
When Parliamentary forces overthrew Charles I, the Puritans reached their height of power. The new Puritan Lord Protector, Oliver Cromwell, was on a mission to end all these holidays – arguing that Sunday was the only off-day in the Bible. He banned Christmas carols and other excesses of the festival. In 1647, Parliamentary ordinance abolished the feasts of Christmas, Easter and Whitsun outright, although many people continued celebrating them modestly.
Even after the restoration of the monarchy, Christmastide, as a 12-day festival, never really recovered in England. And taking fewer days off, the working population increased their productivity over the course of the next hundred years, in that “Industrious Revolution” which preceded the “Industrial Revolution”.
This was especially true among the nonconformist Protestants – the descendants of the Puritans – who also saved the money they were earning, accumulating capital which they re-invested. Without Christmas, we see the origins of industrialization and capitalism. The heirs of this Puritan tradition – the British bourgeoisie – did not give their workers off for Christmas, only Sundays.
It wasn’t until the early 19th Century that people started becoming interested in Christmas again. And it was thanks to story tellers. Washington Irving wrote a series of sketches about Christmas in his Sketch Book of Geoffrey Crayon, Gent. His fellow American author, Clement Clarke Moore (or possibly Henry Livingston Jr.) wrote “A Visit from St. Nicolas” – better known to us as “‘Twas the Night Before Christmas” – in 1822. And in the late 1830s, the young English author Charles Dickens wrote a couple short stories about Christmas, before his most famous – and most consequential – 1843 story.
In A Christmas Carol, Scrooge – a bourgeois capitalist – holds the Puritan view of Christmas in a world that is more and more embracing the holiday.
When his jovial nephew asks him why he is cross, Scrooge responds,
“What else can I be…when I live in such a world of fools as this? Merry Christmas! Out upon merry Christmas! What’s Christmas time to you but a time for paying bills without money; a time for finding yourself a year older, but not an hour richer; a time for balancing your books and having every item in ’em through a round dozen of months presented dead against you? If I could work my will,” said Scrooge indignantly, “every idiot who goes about with ‘Merry Christmas’ on his lips, should be boiled with his own pudding, and buried with a stake of holly through his heart. He should!”
Later in the stave, Scrooge’s clerk – Bob Cratchit – asks to have the day off on Christmas.
“You’ll want all day to-morrow, I suppose?” said Scrooge.
“If quite convenient, sir.”
“It’s not convenient,” said Scrooge, “and it’s not fair. If I was to stop half-a-crown for it, you’d think yourself ill-used, I’ll be bound?”
The clerk smiled faintly.
“And yet,” said Scrooge, “you don’t think me ill-used, when I pay a day’s wages for no work.”
The clerk observed that it was only once a year.
“A poor excuse for picking a man’s pocket every twenty-fifth of December!” said Scrooge, buttoning his great-coat to the chin. “But I suppose you must have the whole day. Be here all the earlier next morning.”
The clerk promised that he would; and Scrooge walked out with a growl.
The capitalist has compromised. The worker no longer gets all 12 days off for Christmas. But at least he now gets the first day off – Christmas Day.
Yet, this isn’t the only story behind the story. There was also Dickens’ personal story, which he brought into so many of his works. And with it came his characteristic commitment to social reform.
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Much like the sheepish and woefully underpaid Bob Cratchit, Dickens’ father had been a clerk. John Dickens worked in the Navy Pay Office at Portsmouth before relocating the family to London and then Kent. They were middle class enough that John could send young Charles to school for a while.
But then, in 1824, John’s escalating debts finally caught up with him. He was thrown in debtors’ prison, along with the family. The 12-year-old Charles was forced to leave school and – to help the family – work in the grueling conditions of a shoe-polishing factory for ten hours a day, earning a measly six shillings a week. It was only after John’s mother died, and left her son an inheritance, the family escaped the bitter poverty. Charles was eventually able to go back to school and build a successful writing career.
In the months leading up to the publication of A Christmas Carol, Dickens came across a government report on child labor in the United Kingdom. The report included interviews of children describing their crushing labors, interviews compiled by a friend of Dickens. Earlier that year, Dickens had toured tin mines in Cornwall, where he had been appalled by the sight of children working in the dangerous settings.
Originally conceived as a pamphlet titled “An Appeal to the People of England on behalf of the Poor Man’s Child,” A Christmas Carol both carries Dickens’ anger over the conditions faced by the working class and his own sense of personal guilt for escaping said conditions.
When the Ghost of Christmas Past shows Scrooge his schoolboy years, it’s revealed that the young Ebenezer was being pulled out of school by his parents to “become a man” and never return to the classroom. Later, it’s revealed that he pulled himself out of poverty and became single-minded on preventing a return to it, neglecting both personal pleasures and charitable actions.
Martha Cratchit, Bob’s daughter, is described as a “poor apprentice at a milliner’s” who works long hours and looks forward to Christmas as a day she can finally rest at home. It’s believed her character was based on the testimonies Dickens read of girls who sewed dresses for the expanding market of middle-class consumers, girls who regularly worked 16-hour days, 6 days a week, rooming above the factory.
And then there’s the time Scrooge is shown around by the Ghost of Christmas Yet to Come:
They left the busy scene, and went into an obscure part of the town, where Scrooge had never penetrated before, although he recognised its situation, and its bad repute. The ways were foul and narrow; the shops and houses wretched; the people half-naked, drunken, slipshod, ugly. Alleys and archways, like so many cesspools, disgorged their offences of smell, and dirt, and life, upon the straggling streets; and the whole quarter reeked with crime, with filth, and misery.
Dickens makes the forceful argument that the poverty to be found in the midst of industrializing England was not to be ignored. When the ghost of Scrooge’s miserly business partner, Jacob Marley, tells him, how misused his life’s opportunities were, Scrooge counters, “But you were always a good man of business, Jacob.”
“Business!” cried the Ghost, wringing its hands again. “Mankind was my business. The common welfare was my business; charity, mercy, forbearance, and benevolence, were, all, my business. The dealings of my trade were but a drop of water in the comprehensive ocean of my business!”
As discussed in previous episodes of the Industrial Revolutions, the agrarian advancements made in England during the 18th Century had both led to population growth and a reduced demand for labor. Poverty was rising. But the government, which was increasingly taking the views of the industrial class, was generally uninterested in addressing the situation. The 1834 Poor Law replaced the proto-welfare system that had existed with a “union workshop” system, where the poor were essentially rounded up to work in these pauper workhouses.
Scrooge himself did not think it was his business to care about the poor. When, in the opening scene, he is visited by two men collecting donations.
“At this festive season of the year, Mr. Scrooge,” said the gentleman, taking up a pen, “it is more than usually desirable that we should make some slight provision for the Poor and destitute, who suffer greatly at the present time. Many thousands are in want of common necessaries; hundreds of thousands are in want of common comforts, sir.”
“Are there no prisons?” asked Scrooge.
“Plenty of prisons,” said the gentleman, laying down the pen again.
“And the Union workhouses?” demanded Scrooge. “Are they still in operation?”
“They are. Still,” returned the gentleman, “I wish I could say they were not.”
“The Treadmill and the Poor Law are in full vigour, then?” said Scrooge.
“Both very busy, sir.”
“Oh! I was afraid, from what you said at first, that something had occurred to stop them in their useful course,” said Scrooge. “I’m very glad to hear it.”
Before leaving Scrooge for the final spirit, the Ghost of Christmas Present shows Scrooge two wretched figures.
They were a boy and girl. Yellow, meagre, ragged, scowling, wolfish; but prostrate, too, in their humility. Where graceful youth should have filled their features out, and touched them with its freshest tints, a stale and shrivelled hand, like that of age, had pinched, and twisted them, and pulled them into shreds. Where angels might have sat enthroned, devils lurked, and glared out menacing. No change, no degradation, no perversion of humanity, in any grade, through all the mysteries of wonderful creation, has monsters half so horrible and dread.
Scrooge started back, appalled. Having them shown to him in this way, he tried to say they were fine children, but the words choked themselves, rather than be parties to a lie of such enormous magnitude.
“Spirit! are they yours?” Scrooge could say no more.
“They are Man’s,” said the Spirit, looking down upon them. “And they cling to me, appealing from their fathers. This boy is Ignorance. This girl is Want. Beware them both, and all of their degree, but most of all beware this boy, for on his brow I see that written which is Doom, unless the writing be erased. Deny it!” cried the Spirit, stretching out its hand towards the city. “Slander those who tell it ye! Admit it for your factious purposes, and make it worse. And bide the end!”
“Have they no refuge or resource?” cried Scrooge.
“Are there no prisons?” said the Spirit, turning on him for the last time with his own words. “Are there no workhouses?”
The population of England had grown 64% between Dickens’ birth in 1812 and the year of the child labor report. The old cottage industry and guild systems had been totally upended by mass-scale manufacturing. Employers were beginning to see their employees like commodities – they didn’t share our modern views about the humanity of every human being. They viewed them as resources, the value of which could measured by their productivity in the factory.
Dickens didn’t think of himself as a socialist. I would rather suggest he was a preacher of humanism. He pressed on the world a new idea: that all human beings have value as human beings. That they were more than just commodities; they deserved basic kindness, basic dignity, basic relief from suffering.
And that humanist message would be the greatest legacy of A Christmas Carol.
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One of the most significant consequences of the Industrial Revolution was the breaking down of the traditional class structure. Rather than a separation between the gentry and the commoners, a new chasm was opening between the capitalists and the working class.
Take, for example, the scene where the Ghost of Christmas Past shows Scrooge the time he was dumped by his sweetheart:
“It matters little,” she said, softly. “To you, very little. Another idol has displaced me; and if it can cheer and comfort you in time to come, as I would have tried to do, I have no just cause to grieve.”
“What Idol has displaced you?” he rejoined.
“A golden one.”
“This is the even-handed dealing of the world!” he said. “There is nothing on which it is so hard as poverty; and there is nothing it professes to condemn with such severity as the pursuit of wealth!”
“You fear the world too much,” she answered, gently. “All your other hopes have merged into the hope of being beyond the chance of its sordid reproach. I have seen your nobler aspirations fall off one by one, until the master-passion, Gain, engrosses you. Have I not?”
“What then?” he retorted. “Even if I have grown so much wiser, what then? I am not changed towards you.”
She shook her head.
“Am I?”
“Our contract is an old one. It was made when we were both poor and content to be so, until, in good season, we could improve our worldly fortune by our patient industry. You are changed. When it was made, you were another man.”
Dickens was writing at a time – the first time, really – when such rags-to-riches stories were possible. And for many of the nouveau rich, there was little interest in helping the many who were struggling in the new economic order.
Cornelius Vanderbilt (shout out Chapter 34!) was hailed for his gift of $1 million – the largest philanthropic donation in history at that point – to found Vanderbilt University in the aftermath of the U.S. Civil War. But it was only about 1% of his net worth, it only came because his second wife pressured him into it, and (besides some small gifts to various churches) it was the only serious philanthropy of his life.
As the conversation between Scrooge and the men seeking donations continued…
“Under the impression that they scarcely furnish Christian cheer of mind or body to the multitude,” returned the gentleman, “a few of us are endeavouring to raise a fund to buy the Poor some meat and drink, and means of warmth. We choose this time, because it is a time, of all others, when Want is keenly felt, and Abundance rejoices. What shall I put you down for?”
“Nothing!” Scrooge replied.
“You wish to be anonymous?”
“I wish to be left alone,” said Scrooge. “Since you ask me what I wish, gentlemen, that is my answer. I don’t make merry myself at Christmas and I can’t afford to make idle people merry. I help to support the establishments I have mentioned—they cost enough; and those who are badly off must go there.”
“Many can’t go there; and many would rather die.”
“If they would rather die,” said Scrooge, “they had better do it, and decrease the surplus population. Besides—excuse me—I don’t know that.”
“But you might know it,” observed the gentleman.
“It’s not my business,” Scrooge returned. “It’s enough for a man to understand his own business, and not to interfere with other people’s. Mine occupies me constantly. Good afternoon, gentlemen!”
The line “decrease the surplus population” carried a particular sting. Devoted listeners will recognize this line of thought from Chapter 9. It follows from the Essay on the Principle of Population by the political economist Thomas Malthus.
But when the Ghost of Christmas Present shows Scrooge the Cratchit family Christmas – putting a human face on the lives of the less fortunate – he challenges that thinking.
“Spirit,” said Scrooge, with an interest he had never felt before, “tell me if Tiny Tim will live.”
“I see a vacant seat,” replied the Ghost, “in the poor chimney-corner, and a crutch without an owner, carefully preserved. If these shadows remain unaltered by the Future, the child will die.”
“No, no,” said Scrooge. “Oh, no, kind Spirit! say he will be spared.”
“If these shadows remain unaltered by the Future, none other of my race,” returned the Ghost, “will find him here. What then? If he be like to die, he had better do it, and decrease the surplus population.”
Scrooge hung his head to hear his own words quoted by the Spirit, and was overcome with penitence and grief.
“Man,” said the Ghost, “if man you be in heart, not adamant, forbear that wicked cant until you have discovered What the surplus is, and Where it is. Will you decide what men shall live, what men shall die? It may be, that in the sight of Heaven, you are more worthless and less fit to live than millions like this poor man’s child. Oh God! to hear the Insect on the leaf pronouncing on the too much life among his hungry brothers in the dust!”
After waking from this night of visions, Scrooge resolves to be a better man. He spends Christmas with his nephew and sends a turkey to the Cratchits. Then he gives Bob a raise and becomes a second father to Tiny Tim.
A Christmas Carol was an instant classic. Released on December 19th, 1843, it was completely sold out by that Christmas Eve. It was so popular that several copyright infringers tried getting in on the action, forcing Dickens to sue. And, starting in 1852, Dickens delivered popular public readings of the story every Holiday Season until his death.
The story has been adapted in countless films, TV shows, plays, musicals, parodies, and even video games.
It provided the English-speaking world with new ideas about how to celebrate Christmas. And as the British Empire came to dominate the world, the Victorian Christmas traditions became the world’s Christmas traditions.
Rather than the big public festival of the Middle Ages, Christmas became a family-oriented holiday – the kind described in the story – with both religious and secular elements, including food, drink, games, and laughter. And, yes, ghost stories. Ghost stories were revamped as a popular Christmas tradition well into the early 20th Century.
And it cemented Christmas as a time of giving – not just of exchanging gifts, but of being generous with mankind. Apparently in 1867, one American businessman attended a reading of A Christmas Carol and was so moved that he closed his factory on Christmas Day and sent every employee a turkey. Nowadays, it’s quite common to have Christmas off. Scrooge and “Bah, humbug!” have entered the popular lexicon to apply to those who aren’t sufficiently spirited during the Holidays. And today, philanthropy’s best month (every year) is December.
And so, as Tiny Tim observed, God bless Us, Every One!
Have a wonderful holiday and a Happy New Year.