The divine and the humane

In A Christmas Carol, Dickens flies over the terrain he travels more heavily in his door-stopper novels

December 24, 2014 07:59 pm | Updated 07:59 pm IST

Dickens’ Christmas A Still from the 3D animated film ‘Disney's A Christmas Carol’

Dickens’ Christmas A Still from the 3D animated film ‘Disney's A Christmas Carol’

Many classics, whether written for children or adults, use the Christmas holiday to celebrate family and the warmer virtues, but more than 140 years after his death, Charles Dickens still owns Christmas. One columnist is wondering what was in Bob Cratchit’s punch, another is calling the Tories Scrooges, and a traditional Christmas dinner is still defined by a Dickensian vision of flaming pudding. The season aside, this short work is an abstract of all Dickens’s fiction, flying over the same terrain he explores in his door-stopper novels. In spite of its lightweight name and small size, A Christmas Carol is about the connections between one human being and another, connections we acknowledge more actively on some days.

Ebenezer Scrooge, having oppressed his clerk, brushed off his nephew’s warm invitation, insulted the benevolent men collecting money for the poor, and in general ridiculed the idea that any man should think beyond his own comfort, even on Christmas, goes home to spend the evening alone. Just as he approaches his house, which used to belong to his equally money-obsessed late partner Marley, he sees Marley’s face in the knocker of the door.

Scrooge does not shake off the horror of that vision, as we might expect from one who has just declared Christmas itself to be humbug. Instead, he carefully checks the back of the door and the corners of each room before hunching over his stingy fire with his bowl of gruel, starting at every creak on the steps. When Marley’s ghost appears, Scrooge is frightened but braves it out at first. Then the ghost unties his jaw and lets it drop on his chest, and Scrooge caves in. “Mercy!” he cries. “Dreadful apparition, why do you trouble me?” The horror of it is intense, and there are aftershocks, as when the ghost tells Scrooge he has often sat invisible next to him. But within a few pages Scrooge has progressed from insensibility to fright to submission.

To Scrooge’s dismay, Marley promises more ghostly visits. When the Ghost of Christmas Past asks Scrooge to step out of his (upstairs) window and follow him, Scrooge pleads, “I am a mortal, and liable to fall.” “Bear but a touch of my hand there ,” answers the Spirit, laying his hand on the old miser’s heart, “and you shall be upheld in more than this!” That reassurance shows the Spirit is divine, not just dream, and Scrooge is already moved by a healing repentance.

Yet, when Scrooge follows that ghost he finds not some external deity but simply the remembrance of what he himself once was, a lonely schoolboy glad to be reunited with his sister and father, an apprentice whose hard work was leavened with joyous holidays granted by a kind master, and a young lover ready to live in poverty with his sweetheart. Those memories awaken the threads of affection that still connect him to his society and make him breathe unconsciously in time with every family he invisibly visits on Christmas.

They prepare him for the shock of the last ominous visions of his future, emboldening him to protest that lonely death and instead change his destiny. From the first vision to that decision to take a different road, everything Scrooge experiences actually originates within himself.

In Dickens’ vision, humanity is inseparable from divinity, and each soul progresses toward eternity by understanding that. And that is a vision that resonates far beyond a single day or a single creed.

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