All of us should read, or re-read Dickens’ Christmas classic

It's not just a fuzzy, humorous tale about money-grubbing Ebenezer Scrooge

During the holiday season, newspapers traditionally reprint Christmas stories and messages, both to celebrate the season and to cope with slowdowns of the news cycle. In keeping with this tradition, I am again reprinting my column about Charles Dickens’ classic tale “A Christmas Carol,” which should remind us to keep the Christmas spirit all the year through.

One of my favorite Christmas traditions is to watch, usually several times, the George C. Scott film version of Charles Dickens’ A Christmas Carol.

You all know the story. It’s a famous redemption tale about Ebenezer Scrooge, a “squeezing, wrenching, grasping, scraping, clutching, covetous old sinner,” as Dickens describes him. Ghosts of Christmases past, present and future haunt him the night of Christmas Eve, using shame, fright, regret, tenderness and nostalgia to teach him humility, love and compassion.

It’s story that everyone — especially all of our politicians — should watch or read every year. Compassion, humility and kindness are not yet “dead as a doornail,” as Dickens describes Jacob Marley, Scrooge’s late business partner. But they are on life support in some corners of power and public discourse. We are becoming a selfish, grasping and uncaring society — just like Ebenezer Scrooge.

The irony of the 1843 novella is that Dickens wrote it because he was in financial distress. He already was a wildly successful author, but his latest work, The Life and Adventures of Martin Chuzzlewit, had sold poorly. His publishers wanted to cut his pay by 25 percent. Dickens was in debt and his fifth child was on the way. Thus, the threat of financial ruin led him to write one of the most beloved Christmas stories of all time.

Yet it is a mistake to view “A Christmas Carol” strictly as an entertaining, cosy and sometimes humorous tale about the dangers of avarice and money grubbing. Dickens wanted to make his readers uncomfortable and more responsive to the plight of the poor and the rejected. The story about Scrooge, his clerk Bob Cratchit, “Tiny” Tim Cratchit and others is social commentary dressed up as a Christmas tale, a piece of moral fiction that still speaks to us.

Dickens had grown up poor himself, and his novels are filled with vivid descriptions of the grime and squalor that plagued the lower classes. He got the idea for A Christmas Carol during a lecture tour in Manchester, a northern England industrial town with a population tha\t was largely poor, starving, uneducated and exploited by factory owners. Poverty was treated as a crime. Child labor was rampant and abusive, tantamount to slavery and often fatal.

Through the character of Scrooge, “A Christmas Carol” is a diatribe against the bankers, merchants, industrialists and others who victimized the poor. Remember Scrooge’s most reprehensible line:

“If they had rather die, they had better do it, and decrease the surplus population,”
he says of the poor, when two visitors seek donations to buy holiday food and drink for the destitute. His remark reflects a common Victorian view that the poor were a nuisance and at fault themselves, not people to be helped.

“People were terrified of overpopulation, especially among the poor, and they believed that if people brought children into the world that they couldn’t afford to keep, they were almost committing a crime. This is what Dickens hated, this attitude,” Dickens biographer Michael Slater asserts.

If he were writing today, Dickens would indict those who grouse about the homeless and the immigrants trying to escape persecution and poverty — all while the rich few grow wealthier. A Christmas Carol reminds us that pursuit of greater and greater wealth — all while blaming the poor and homeless for their misfortune — is the real humbug.

As any great piece of literature, A Christmas Carol has many layers of meaning that speak across the centuries.

For one, it’s a call to accept and succor those who are different and unfortunate, like the sickly and lame Tiny Tim. In Dickens’ day, such people often were shunted into horrid institutions to live out short lives in squalor and chaos. His father, though, praises his son as “good as gold” and reports to his wife that earlier in the day “he told me that he hoped people saw him in the church, because he was a cripple, and it might be pleasant to them to remember on Christmas Day who made beggars walk and blind men see.”

I choke up when I think about Tiny Tim, because in his goodness and purity he is so much like my autistic son, Nicky, who also is as “good as gold.” And in today’s world, Tiny Tim is a reminder to accept all people who are marginalized, including those who are wrongly labeled misfits because of their gender identity or mental and physical condition.

Perhaps the most disturbing part of the story occurs when the Ghost of Christmas present unveils two gaunt and wretched children, a boy and a girl, calling them “ignorance” and “want.” Beware of them, the ghost warns, because they mean doom to all who deny their existence.

Like any good writer, Dickens foreshadows the theme of this book right at the start, when Jacob Marley’s ghost admonishes Scrooge for praising him as “a good man of business.”

“Business!” the ghost shrieks. “Mankind (should have been) my business. The common welfare was my business: charity, mercy, forbearance and benevolence were, all, my business. The dealings of my trade (as Scrooge’s business partner) were but a drop of water in the comprehensive ocean of my business!”

Speaking from the dead, Marley reminds us that caring for our fellow humans — engaging, respecting, nurturing them — is our true calling. And by recruiting three ghosts to reform miserable, detestable, mean old Ebenezer Scrooge, Marley’s spirit reminds us that nobody is beyond redemption. He and the other Spirits remind Scrooge that, in a just society, we all must practice compassion, tenderness and fair dealing, and that our moral obligation to the unfortunate far exceeds the taxes we pay.

Scrooge, as the novel concludes, promises that he “will not shut out the lessons” that the spirits teach. Thus — better than any other man — he keeps the Christmas spirit alive all the year through.

Let the same be said of all of us.