By Stuart Mitchner
On my desk is a small red book, the facsimile edition of A Christmas Carol, which was published 182 years ago on December 19, 1843. Since then, Charles Dickens’s tale has been so thoroughly absorbed into the media of the season it celebrates that it may be at once the best known and least actually read story in the English language. Except for some stock phrases, the peculiar quality of the writing that delivered the tale to the world — the essence of Dickens, the poet of Christmas Eve — has been mostly ignored by the multitudes who revel in the holiday he helped put on the map. In fact, it’s Cameron Knight as Ebenezer Scrooge, not Dickens as Dickens, that people are coming to see at McCarter Theatre this month.
The Demon Muse
First things first. Dickens was a writer possessed. He didn’t sit down to write a nice moral fable extolling the Christmas spirit. Among other things, he needed to make money to pay off a debt, and while he clearly intended to use the occasion to spread secular good will, attack social injustice, and expose such infamies as poor laws, workhouses, and treadmills, he was equally devoted to enjoying another tryst with his demon muse. He had neither time nor inclination for a performance on the grand scale — to have the book ready for the Christmas season, it had to be written in a matter of months. His muse wasn’t all demon, of course: it could take the form of a passionate advocate for the poor, especially the children of the poor. But above all, Dickens was an actor and a puppeteer, not to mention a literary libertine who could get drunk on a metaphor and had a perverse desire to, like the fat boy in Pickwick Papers, make “your flesh creep” and then set you sobbing a paragraph later.
In the brief introduction to his “Ghostly little book,” Dickens expressed his wish to raise “the Ghost of an idea” that will “pleasantly” haunt the houses of his readers. But what an opening. It’s not exactly a bedtime story; instead of “Once upon a time,” you get death: “Marley was dead: to begin with. There was no doubt whatever about that…. Old Marley was dead as a doornail.”
It’s not long, however, before the Dickens who never outgrew Christmas invades the character of Bob Cratchit, as Scrooge’s clerk escapes from the office, goes “down a slide on Cornhill, at the end of a lane of boys … in honour of its being Christmas Eve,” and then runs “home to Camden Town as hard as he could pelt, to play at blindman’s-buff.” Since Dickens grew up in that neighborhood, you know he slid down the slide himself, ran the homeward run, and couldn’t resist having this beaten but unbowed clerk do the same. In the next paragraph, where his mission is to describe Scrooge’s dreary domicile, he can’t resist a little more fun when he writes of that “gloomy suite of rooms, in a lowering pile of building up a yard, where it had so little business to be, that one could scarcely help fancying it must have run there when it was a young house, playing at hide-and-seek with other houses, and forgotten the way out again.” A paragraph later he sneaks in a reference to his art when he tells us that Scrooge, who is about to see his old business partner Marley’s face in a doorknocker, “had as little of what is called fancy about him as any man in the City of London.”
Needless to say, Dickens at 31 and in full flight, could qualify as the patron saint of “fancying.”
Dark vs. Light
I admit to having a preference for the dark, crazed aspect of the tale, the same way I prefer the hushed haunted aura of Christmas Eve to the daylit doings on Christmas morning. As Scrooge becomes happily Christmasized, things do inevitably get, as will happen with Dickens, a bit maudlin. Tiny Tim’s cry of “God bless us, every one!” doesn’t do nearly as much for me as Scrooge’s response when Marley’s ghost asks him, “Why do you doubt your senses?” and Scrooge looks right at him and says, “Because … a little thing affects them. A slight disorder of the stomach makes them cheats. You may be an undigested bit of beef, a blot of mustard, a crumb of cheese, a fragment of an underdone potato. There’s more of gravy than of grave about you, whatever you are!’”
Gravy and the grave! — As much as I appreciate all the good things of the season, along with the saving of Scrooge’s soul, I’m most thankful for the demon poet in Dickens who, in spite of his better nature, knew his ghosts and could both celebrate and spurn the mystery.
Dickens Trims a Tree
At a time “when all common things become uncommon and enchanted” and “all lamps are wonderful; all rings are talismans,” Dickens trims a tree in his story “A Christmas Tree” (1850). He begins with a “multitude of little tapers” illuminating the towering tree that “everywhere sparkled and glittered with bright objects,” such as “rosy-cheeked dolls, hiding behind the green leaves,” real watches “dangling from innumerable twigs,” “French-polished tables, chairs, bedsteads, wardrobes, eight-day clocks and various other articles of domestic furniture … perched among the boughs, as if in preparation for some fairy housekeeping.”
Show Dickens a Christmas tree and he’ll show you the world. After the “jolly, broad-faced little men … full of sugar-plums,” there were “fiddles and drums… tambourines, books, work-boxes, paint-boxes, sweetmeat-boxes, peep-show boxes,” and “trinkets for the elder girls, far brighter than any grown-up gold and jewels; there were baskets and pincushions in all devices; there were guns, swords, and banners; there were witches standing in enchanted rings of pasteboard, to tell fortunes; there were teetotums, humming-tops, needle-cases, pen-wipers, smelling-bottles, conversation-cards, bouquet-holders; real fruit, made artificially dazzling with gold leaf; imitation apples, pears, and walnuts, crammed with surprises.” Dickens sums it up as “a lively realization of the fancies of childhood” that sets him thinking of “all the trees that grow and all the things that come into existence on the earth.”
Berlioz Provides the Music
For years our music of choice for the benign ritual of the tree trimming has been the “Shepherds’ Chorus” (also known as the “Shepherds’ Farewell”) from L’Enfance du Christ, composed by Hector Berlioz, whose December 11th birthday coincides with tree-trimming week. Who else but the great Hector could compose music at once so tender and so tremendous? It should be noted that this choice of ceremonial accompaniment transcends all religious considerations. This is beauty for beauty’s sake, beauty that could or should touch the heart of anyone with or without a faith. It doesn’t matter whether these shepherds are on their way to or from Bethlehem or Mecca or Brooklyn. What matters is the hushed, simple, swelling beauty of the singing and for us the gentle grace it lends to the ritual of the tree.
Dostoevsky’s View
Writing on Christmas 1876 in a St. Petersburg journal he edited around the time he was writing The Brothers Karamazov, Feodor Dostoevsky imagines a story about a very poor, very hungry little boy of 6 wandering the streets of “some huge city during a bitter frost.” It’s Christmas Eve, the boy sees “floods of light, light everywhere,” and finds himself gazing through “a huge window and, beyond it, a hall with a tree reaching up to the ceiling. It’s a Christmas tree covered with gleaming lights, with sparkling bits of gold paper and apples, and all around are little dolls, toy-horses,” while “lots of beautifully dressed children are running about the hall,” laughing and playing, eating, and drinking. “And just listen to the music! You can hear it from inside, coming through the window!” In another window he sees tables loaded with cakes, almond cakes, red cakes, yellow cakes, “and in yet another window gaily dressed dancing puppets that for a moment he thought were alive.”
This Dickensian scene as pictured by Dostoevsky does not end well for the little boy. Chased by bullies, he escapes to a strange courtyard, hides behind a pile of kindling wood, dozes off, and dreams he’s in a place where everything sparkles and glitters and shines, and there are many other little girls and boys, who, like him, have died in alleys and on doorsteps of Petersburg officials and in hospital wards. This being a diary recording Dostoevsky’s impressions apropos of everything that strikes him, the author asks himself why he should make up such a story, one that conforms so little to an ordinary, reasonable diary, disingenuously concluding, “I really don’t know what to tell you, and I don’t know whether or not this could have happened. Being a novelist, I have to invent things.”
Christmas Eve 2025
Dostoevsky’s grim “invention” and Dickens’s demon muse would be better suited to a news cycle as grim as the one haunting this Christmas Eve. There’s a paragraph in A Christmas Carol that still resonates, if not as darkly as it did the first time I read the book as a child on a particularly creepy Christmas Eve when we were living in postwar housing where the chimney was a stovepipe that even Plastic Man would have been challenged by, let alone Santa. The paragraph that made my flesh creep comes when Scrooge peers out the open window at the sky over London through which the spirits of Christmas past, present, and future will lead him: “The air was filled with phantoms, wandering hither and thither in restless haste, and moaning as they went. Every one of them wore chains like Marley’s Ghost; some few (they might be guilty governments) were linked together; none were free. Many had been personally known to Scrooge in their lives. He had been quite familiar with one old ghost, in a white waistcoat, with a monstrous iron safe attached to its ankle, who cried piteously at being unable to assist a wretched woman with an infant, whom it saw below, upon a door-step. The misery with them all was, clearly, that they sought to interfere, for good, in human matters, and had lost the power for ever.”