Everyone should read Charles Dickens’ “A Christmas Carol” once a Christmas – it is short and so well-written as to fill the brain and heart both with enough sustenance to last the holiday season.

I did so for the first time last year and really loved it. Last night I repeated the act and loved it even more, and in different ways.

Lessons from the First Reading

The first go-around, I highlighted the big classic parts of the story which have come down in the various adaptations which are known to practically everyone. Scrooge seeing Marley’s face in the knocker:

And then let any man explain to me, if he can, how it happened that Scrooge, having his key in the lock of the door, saw in the knocker, without its undergoing any intermediate process of change—not a knocker, but Marley’s face. Marley’s face. It was not in impenetrable shadow as the other objects in the yard were, but had a dismal light about it, like a bad lobster in a dark cellar.

Dickens, “A Christmas Carol”, p. 15

Or Tiny Tim saying “God bless us every one!”:

The compound in the jug being tasted, and considered perfect, apples and oranges were put upon the table, and a shovel-full of chestnuts on the fire. Then all the Cratchit family drew round the hearth, in what Bob Cratchit called a circle, meaning half a one; and at Bob Cratchit’s elbow stood the family display of glass. Two tumblers, and a custard-cup without a handle. These held the hot stuff from the jug, however, as well as golden goblets would have done; and Bob served it out with beaming looks, while the chestnuts on the fire sputtered and cracked noisily. Then Bob proposed: “A Merry Christmas to us all, my dears. God bless us!” Which all the family re-echoed. “God bless us every one!” said Tiny Tim, the last of all.

Ibid., p. 72

Or the wonderful description in Stave 3 of the bounty of the grocers, with the depiction of the Spanish onions. This is basically perfect English to me:

The poulterers’ shops were still half open, and the fruiterers’ were radiant in their glory. There were great, round, pot-bellied baskets of chestnuts, shaped like the waistcoats of jolly old gentlemen, lolling at the doors, and tumbling out into the street in their apoplectic opulence. There were ruddy, brown-faced, broad-girthed Spanish Onions, shining in the fatness of their growth like Spanish Friars, and winking from their shelves in wanton slyness at the girls as they went by, and glanced demurely at the hung-up mistletoe.

Ibid., p. 62

I also liked picking out a few more Dickensian genius-level remarks, the utter delight of his narrator’s voice. Scrooge’s nephew’s laugh:

If you should happen, by any unlikely chance, to know a man more blest in a laugh than Scrooge’s nephew, all I can say is, I should like to know him, too. Introduce him to me, and I’ll cultivate his acquaintance.

Ibid., p. 81

The necessity of establishing Marley’s death by contrasting with Hamlet:

If we were not perfectly convinced that Hamlet’s Father died before the play began, there would be nothing more remarkable in his taking a stroll at night, in an easterly wind, upon his own ramparts, than there would be in any other middle-aged gentleman rashly turning out after dark in a breezy spot—say Saint Paul’s Churchyard for instance—literally to astonish his son’s weak mind.

Ibid., p. 2

I noted also the idea that “Christmas Carol” is refutation of Bentham and Mill’s utilitarianism, which I first heard from some Dickens scholars on the wonderful episode of In Our Time about it. Although Mill’s big book on utilitarianism wouldn’t come out for about 20 more years, Bentham had been writing on the subject since the 1780s or so, so there was much for Dickens to lambaste in the subject by 1843.

Scrooge responds to the alms collectors’ protestations against the idea that the poor houses and prisons are where the poor should turn:

“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.”

Later, with the Ghost of Christmas Present, viewing the Cratchits, Scrooge asks:

“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.

Ibid.

Lessons from the Second Reading

This go-around I soaked up much more of the Dickensian genius. Every aside is wonderful, every narrator’s barb utterly fantastic. The second paragraph, where the narrator wonders why we say “dead as a door-nail”:

Old Marley was as dead as a door-nail.

Mind! I don’t mean to say that I know, of my own knowledge, what there is particularly dead about a door-nail. I might have been inclined, myself, to regard a coffin-nail as the deadest piece of ironmongery in the trade. But the wisdom of our ancestors is in the simile; and my unhallowed hands shall not disturb it, or the Country’s done for. You will therefore permit me to repeat, emphatically, that Marley was as dead as a door-nail.

Ibid., p. 1

Scrooge’s literal chill:

The cold within him froze his old features, nipped his pointed nose, shrivelled his cheek, stiffened his gait; made his eyes red, his thin lips blue; and spoke out shrewdly in his grating voice. A frosty rime was on his head, and on his eyebrows, and his wiry chin. He carried his own low temperature always about with him; he iced his office in the dog-days; and didn’t thaw it one degree at Christmas.

Ibid.

I have always really liked that there’s so much of contemporary London society in the story, and in the rest of Dickens. I think the literati of our times are afraid to inject the little-p politics of our era into their stories, lest they fail in some measure of timelessness, a sort of fear of the posthumous re-burial of Sir Walter Scott, who now is really only a punchline. And yet Dickens just throws around jokes about funding of public institutions like the poorhouse, the treadmill, etc.:

“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.”

In discussing the knocker, there’s this odd line about the level of fancy that certain groups in London enjoy, which I almost understand but am not bothered too much by missing out on:

It is also a fact, that Scrooge had seen it, night and morning, during his whole residence in that place; also that Scrooge had as little of what is called fancy about him as any man in the city of London, even including—which is a bold word—the corporation, aldermen, and livery.

There is also the stuff in the Ghost of Christmas Past that it totally incomprehensible to a modern audience – they dance to “Sir Roger de Coverley,” which Wikipedia tells me was a famous Scottish folk dance with a long history. In both the past and the present, they play blindman’s buff, which is apparently just Marco Polo, and Scrooge’s nephew’s friend uses it to flirt with the sister.

I spent this reading paying more attention to the character of Scrooge’s nephew. I think it’s funny that Dickens never names him, or his mom and Scrooge’s sister. His speech at the start of the story is a wonderful expression of the Christmas spirit, and also another mention of their times, as Scrooge asks why he doesn’t go into Parliament:

There are many things from which I might have derived good, by which I have not profited, I dare say,” returned the nephew. “Christmas among the rest. But I am sure I have always thought of Christmas time, when it has come round—apart from the veneration due to its sacred name and origin, if anything belonging to it can be apart from that—as a good time; a kind, forgiving, charitable, pleasant time; the only time I know of, in the long calendar of the year, when men and women seem by one consent to open their shut-up hearts freely, and to think of people below them as if they really were fellow-passengers to the grave, and not another race of creatures bound on other journeys. And therefore, uncle, though it has never put a scrap of gold or silver in my pocket, I believe that it has done me good, and will do me good; and I say, God bless it!”

I think it’s funny that Dickens invented from whole cloth an occult notion of what ghosts are up to after their death. Marley’s ghost explains, and shows to Scrooge:

The apparition walked backward from him; and at every step it took, the window raised itself a little, so that when the spectre reached it, it was wide open.

It beckoned Scrooge to approach, which he did. When they were within two paces of each other, Marley’s Ghost held up its hand, warning him to come no nearer. Scrooge stopped.

Not so much in obedience, as in surprise and fear: for on the raising of the hand, he became sensible of confused noises in the air; incoherent sounds of lamentation and regret; wailings inexpressibly sorrowful and self-accusatory. The spectre, after listening for a moment, joined in the mournful dirge; and floated out upon the bleak, dark night.

Scrooge followed to the window: desperate in his curiosity. He looked out.

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.

The Ghost of Christmas Present, also roughly compared to the Christian God, appears in a great vision of bounty. Somewhat hilariously, Scrooge asks him about the practice of closing shops on Sunday, supposedly done for Christian reasons, to which the Ghost says:

“Spirit,” said Scrooge, after a moment’s thought, “I wonder you, of all the beings in the many worlds about us, should desire to cramp these people’s opportunities of innocent enjoyment.”

“I!” cried the Spirit.

“You would deprive them of their means of dining every seventh day, often the only day on which they can be said to dine at all,” said Scrooge. “Wouldn’t you?”

“I!” cried the Spirit.

“You seek to close these places on the Seventh Day?” said Scrooge. “And it comes to the same thing.”

“I seek!” exclaimed the Spirit.

“Forgive me if I am wrong. It has been done in your name, or at least in that of your family,” said Scrooge.

“There are some upon this earth of yours,” returned the Spirit, “who lay claim to know us, and who do their deeds of passion, pride, ill-will, hatred, envy, bigotry, and selfishness in our name, who are as strange to us and all our kith and kin, as if they had never lived. Remember that, and charge their doings on themselves, not us.”

Anyway, it’s all lovely, and full of so many lessons that it sort of staggers the mind to take it in quickly, in one sitting. Maybe I shouldn’t do that anymore.