The Battle for Christmas (40 page)

For if Bob Cratchit is not a member if the industrial working class, neither is Ebenezer Scrooge an upper-class industrial capitalist. This is true in a purely economic sense, since Scrooge seems to be a merchant and not an industrialist. And it is also true in a behavioral sense. In terms of his own lowly origins (he began as an apprentice to Old Fezziwig) and also his adult behavior, Scrooge, too, is essentially a member of the petite bourgeoisie, a self-made man who has spent his life striving hard (and at the cost of all human relationships, whether public or private) to attain a sense of security. He is a man who has not managed to grasp the point that such mighty striving is no longer required of him. No matter how wealthy he may be, Scrooge is not really a rich man; it might be more accurate to describe him as a poor man who has a lot of money.

That is, until the end of the book. Whatever else Scrooge’s conversion represents, it also marks his realization that he has “made it,” after all—that he can finally afford to ease up on himself and others. Considered sociologically, Scrooge’s conversion may mark his entry into the easy culture of the upper-middle-class world, a world for which he has previously been eligible only in an economic sense, but which his temperament has heretofore barred him from joining. In the more contemporaneous language of Charles Loring Brace, Scrooge is finally ready to transform the emotionally hollow culture of sheer greed into a more fulfilling culture in which everyday activities and relationships are softened by family values.
From both perspectives, one of the signs of Scrooge’s social rise is that he finally accepts his obligation to treat his clerk, Cratchit, in a more humane fashion.

That obligation, however, has its limits, even at Christmas. For when, at the very end of the book, Scrooge signifies to the Cratchits that he has changed, he does so by giving them a Christmas turkey, the largest bird he can find. But he has the turkey
sent
to the Cratchits; he does not deliver it in person—despite what several of the movie versions of
A Christmas Carol
may suggest. Presents, yes, but not “presence.” Scrooge is the “founder of the feast,” but he does not participate in the Cratchits’ actual Christmas dinner. Instead, he chooses to take dinner with his own family—at the house of his nephew, Fred. The message was clear: It was enough to
provide
such known employees with a gift. (And while this is surely not the point of the book, it is of course evident that even the gift amounts to good business practice. For henceforth Scrooge will surely be able to count on Bob Cratchit’s heightened loyalty and diligence: Cratchit will become an even better employee.)

In other words,
A Christmas Carol
addressed the relationship of the well-to-do not with the faceless poor but with the poor who were personally known and whose predicament might provoke pangs of conscience. It offered a perspective on how to deal with people who neither belonged to one’s own family or social circle nor were members of the anonymous proletariat. This was a real problem in a society where Christmas rituals were becoming domesticated and class differences themselves were being reshaped. Scrooge was not a country squire; Cratchit was not his tenant or apprentice. Maybe, had either been the case, each would have known just what to do at Christmas (and, of course, there would have been no story). But the creation, in England and America, of vast armies of middle-class people and wage earners produced a new type of society in which the old rituals of inversion and misrule no longer made much sense.

Indeed, the relationship between the youthful Scrooge and his master, Old Fezziwig, had been a paternalist one, a relationship of patron and client. Scrooge was Fezziwig’s apprentice, not his employee. Indeed, Fezziwig held an old-time Christmas, too, attended by an array of his dependents. But as Dickens himself well knew, that was in an earlier age, in a precapitalist culture. Cratchit could never have been Scrooge’s apprentice. The economic system had changed, and with it the social relationships between patron and client. (In a still later age, employers might re-create Old Fezziwig’s Christmas in the form of an office party—but the
employees’ families would not participate in that.) The fact that Scrooge did not share a meal with the Cratchits makes the point: The rituals were changing. What Dickens showed his readers was how to navigate the ritual waters of the Christmas season so as to avoid the dual shoals of the guilt that might stem from not giving at all across class lines and the messiness (not to say futility) that would result from giving to every beggar who walked the streets or knocked on one’s door.

Still, and for all that, there is something elusive about
A Christmas Carol
. Its message has proven malleable, subject to different readings. During the century and a half since its publication in 1843, progressive liberals have claimed this book as a plea to ameliorate the evils of industrial capitalism. And free-enterprise conservatives have been equally able to claim it for their own. Thus the
New York Times
in 1893, in the depths of a very severe depression, used
A Christmas Carol
to make the point that private charitable resources were sufficient to relieve pressing want, and the commitment of the city’s most wealthy citizens to do so was strong: “[A]t no time in the history of the city has private helpfulness come more eagerly cr more prodigally to the reinforcement of good public deeds.” Philanthropically minded employers had “plunged into the fray with all the noble ardor of all the benevolent philanthropists ever fabled by Charles Dickens,” performing “prodigies of kindness” reminiscent of a “recreated and rejuvenated Scrooge.” For the
Times
, the message was clear: “Who … shall dare to say hereafter that corporations have no souls …?”
⁵

That editorial was based on a plausible reading of A
Christmas Carol
. But it was equally plausible to read the book as an attack on capitalism. The elusiveness of
A Christmas Carol
may in part be what has allowed it to become an enduring literary classic—or, actually, more than a classic, for this book has entered a legendary realm beyond the category of literature itself. The name
Scrooge
has entered the language as a generic descriptive, and his story has become part of the common lore of the English-speaking world.

A Christmas Carol
does deal, briefly, with larger questions of wealth and poverty, first at the very beginning of the book and once again at the very end. Scrooge is approached at the start by a pair of men who visit his office to solicit a cash donation to help the destitute. These men represent
an unnamed charitable agency, and their own social status is clear: They are “gentlemen” (meaning that they are of a class above that to which Scrooge himself belongs). Scrooge, of course, turns these gentlemen down, in the famous exchange in which he retorts that there are prisons and workhouses to house the destitute, and that he is paying taxes to support these. Then, at the end of the book, after his conversion, Scrooge sees these same two gentlemen on the street, and he approaches them and proceeds to offer the contribution he had earlier refused. (We never learn how
large
a contribution, since Scrooge whispers the sum in their ear. All we know is that the charitable gentlemen are delighted.)

In that sense, Scrooge’s conversion also has to do with his new ability to make a distinction between the different kinds of Christmas obligations he owes to different kinds of people. To members of his family he owes face-to-face participation, and (as we have seen) to the known poor with whom he deals regularly, he must send a present. But his debt to the unknown poor, the faceless suffering poor of industrial society, can be paid at a greater distance, by offering a donation to a private charitable agency; and the agency itself will provide the poor with “meat and drink, and means of warmth.” Scrooge’s conversion entails his ability to create a new categorical distinction. If the reborn Scrooge were approached by a beggar on the street, or at his door, he could now respond with a clear conscience by saying, in effect,
I gave at the office
.

By the 1840s, Christmas giving was beginning to be polarized into just those two different activities. Gifts for one’s own family and friends now took the form of “presents,” while gifts that were given to the needy took the form of “charity.” There were important differences between the two. The gifts given to family and friends consisted of luxury items, ordinarily purchased by the givers and presented directly to their recipients, either face-to-face or accompanied by a personal note. The gifts given to the faceless poor consisted mostly of necessities, which were ordinarily purchased and distributed not by the givers but by a charitable organization, which mediated between the other parties and eliminated the need for any direct contact between donor and recipient.

It had not always been that way. Before the era of the domestic and commercial Christmas in the nineteenth century, as we have seen, “presents” and “charity” were one and the same, and they were given to the same people—directly and face-to-face. Indeed, on a small scale such rituals persisted well into the nineteenth century (and beyond). For example, in 1837 the Lenox, Massachusetts, branch of the Sedgwick family held just such an event. It was centered, interestingly enough, around a Christmas
tree—the first such tree that any member of the Sedgwick family had ever erected. Joining the children around this tree, in the parlor of Charles Sedgwicks house, was a group of the family’s local dependents who had been “collected” (the word used by Susan Ridley Sedgwick, Charles’ sister-in-law, who described the scene in a private letter to her husband). Among the dependents, Susan Sedgwick reported, were “several of Charles’ poor pensioners, several blacks, and among others the deaf & dumb lad, whom you may remember to have applied for, to get him in at Hartford [i.e., a School for the Deaf and Dumb].” The lad “looked perfectly delighted,” Susan Sedgwick noted, and she went on to report with pride that a little black girl named Josey (a crippled child, apparently) joined in dancing around the Christmas tree, “turning round
&c
round, now assisted by one, & now by another of the children—all fear of amalgamation [i.e., race mixing] entirely forgotten.” “It was really quite affecting to witness [Susan Sedgwick insisted] so much happiness, so diffused, and yet created from such simple materials….”
⁶

But that kind of ritual was becoming increasingly difficult to carry off. Lenox, Massachusetts, represented a vestigial pocket of rural paternalism—a self-conscious pocket, at that—and the Sedgwicks were both willing and able to play the role of gracious squires to their poor “pensioners.” In the urban areas of the nation, especially, such gestures were much more difficult to bring off. The urban poor were now living in separate neighborhoods, and (except for domestics and menials) they had little occasion for personal contact with the well-to-do. And when such contacts did take place, especially at Christmas, they were likely to take an awkward or even hostile form, mixed perhaps with a bit of mockery, and the whole exchange lubricated with alcohol.

Still, the distinction between presents and charity was new, and it should not be surprising that it required a good deal of reinforcement. During the middle decades of the nineteenth century, the press, the economic elite, and even those who were most deeply concerned with helping the poor, all pressed the notion that organized charities provided the most appropriate means of assisting the poor.

Horace Greeley, for example, reminded his
New York Tribune
readers in 1843 that “enough was expended on this festival uselessly … which would, if rightfully appropriated, have set in operation the means of ultimately banishing Pauperism and its attendant miseries from the land.”
⁷
Rightfully appropriated
was the operative phrase here: Money should be offered to the poor through organized charities rather than through what was now being universally attacked with a dismissive phrase: “indiscriminate
giving.” Greeley was especially critical of what had become the dominant form of face-to-face charity—begging on the streets. One
Tribune
Christmas editorial opened with the blunt heading “
DO NOT GIVE TO STREET BEGGARS
,” and went on to dismiss that practice in no uncertain terms: “Whenever you see one of these City pests approaching, button up both pockets….”
⁸
Another editorial (this one from a depression year) explained that “the evil of street-begging” would inevitably increase as a result of the hardness of the times. “Impostors will abound more than ever,” for example. But buttoning up one’s pockets was psychologically difficult: “he who rejects a petition for the needs of a night’s lodging or a meal may have his own warm rest disturbed by the reasonable apprehension that fearful exposure and distress have resulted from his prudence.”
⁹

On this occasion the
Tribune
handed out meal tickets instead of cash to beggars. But making contributions to organized charity offered a more effective solution. It would obviate the need for face-to-face encounters along with the danger of fraud, and it would be far more efficient. The
Tribune
pleaded with its readers to send their donations to one of the charity organizations, because “that way of helping the poor” might not be perfect, but “it is more effectual and humane than any other yet adopted.”
¹⁰
Or, as the same paper put it in still another Christmas editorial: “Let us give not merely as cases of destitution may present themselves, but through the regularly organized channels for the dispensation of social charity wherewith our own and most other cities are blessed….”
¹¹

If the middle-class press criticized “indiscriminate giving,” it also generally attacked another alternative to private charities: governmental support for the poor through programs of public assistance or public works. Many workingmen themselves called for just such programs, especially during years of severe depression—the kind of devastating depression that regularly shook the new capitalist economy. When the times were hard, many employers simply laid their workers off—and there was no unemployment insurance to see them through. In one depression year, 1854, a large group of unemployed New York workers held a meeting on Christmas Day, forming themselves as the “Mechanics’ and Working-men’s Aid Association.” The assembled workers passed a resolution that demanded that tenants “shall not be turned out of their homes by avaricious landlords” and called for what amounted to a rent strike by appointing a “vigilant committee” to oversee the response. The city had made a special $10,000 appropriation for the poor, and the workers demanded that some of those funds be given directly to the association itself.
One speaker denounced the municipal soup kitchens as “haughty and contemptuous” (and added that they served watery soup). Another speaker called for public-works programs instead of soup kitchens. A third demanded that the city itself subsidize up to 50 percent of rent payments for the unemployed.
¹²