Trying to Save Piggy Sneed (43 page)

One of them — a 12-year-old contortionist, a girl named Laxmi who was also skilled as a tightrope walker — saw me looking at the TV. Since I was the foreigner among them, I suppose Laxmi thought I needed to be told something about
A Christmas Carol;
she mistook my astonishment at what I was seeing and where I was seeing it — she assumed I was ignorant of the characters and the narrative.

“Scrooge,” she said, identifying old Ebenezer for me. “A ghost,” Laxmi said, indicating the shade of the late Jacob Marley. “More coming,” she added.

“A Christmas Carol”
I replied. This didn't impress Laxmi; Christmas wasn't her subject.

It was then that the ringmaster and lion tamer, who was also the chief trainer of the child performers, spoke to me. Pratap Singh was not a man who kept Christmas either. “The children's favorite ghost story,” Pratap explained. I remember thinking that Charles Dickens would have been pleased.

A Christmas Carol
was originally subtitled “Ghost Story of Christmas”; the accent on the ghostly
{not
the Christmasy) elements of the tale was further emphasized in Dickens's Preface to the 1843 edition. “I have endeavoured in this Ghostly little book, to raise the Ghost of an Idea, which shall not put my readers out of humour with themselves, with each other, with the season, or with me.”

If that doesn't alert his readers sufficiently, Dickens titles the first stave of his
Carol
“Marley's Ghost,”
and
the author states no fewer than four times in the first four paragraphs that Marley is dead. “Marley was dead: to begin with” — the first sentence of the first paragraph. “Old Marley was as dead as a doornail” — the last sentence of the first paragraph. “You will therefore permit me to repeat, emphatically, that Marley was as dead as a door-nail” — the last sentence of the second paragraph. And, finally: “There is no doubt that Marley was dead. This must be distinctly understood, or nothing wonderful can come of the story I am going to relate” — the second and third sentences of the fourth paragraph.

I think we get the idea. An editor of today's less-is-more school of fiction would doubtless have found this repetitious, but Dickens never suffered a minimalist's sensibilities; in Dickens's prose, the refrain is as common as the semicolon.

Also common is Dickens's penchant for the juxtaposition of extremes. (In his own words: “It is a fair, even-handed, noble adjustment of things, that while there is infection in disease and sorrow, there is nothing in the world so irresistibly contagious as laughter and good-humour.”) Scrooge's nephew is the old curmudgeon's opposite, a true celebrant of Christmas — “the only time I know of,” the nephew says, “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.”

But Ebenezer Scrooge
is
from “another race of creatures.” From the beginning, Scrooge's cantankerous character is unsparing with his cynicism; his miserliness — more so, his utter shunning of humanity— makes him seem a fair match for any ghost. “The cold within him froze his old features,” as Dickens describes him. “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.” Even beggars don't dare to approach him. “Even the blindmen's dogs” give Scrooge a wide berth. “It was the very thing he liked. To edge his way along the crowded paths of life, warning all human sympathy to keep its distance” — Ebenezer Scrooge is the original Bah-humbug man. “If I could work my will,” Scrooge declares, “every idiot who goes about with ‘Merry Christmas,' on his lips, should be boiled with his own pudding, and buried with a stake of holly through his heart.”

Old Ebenezer may strike us as a mere caricature of anti-Christmas scorn; yet, to Dickens, Scrooge's greed was both realistic and detestable. Dickens hated the political economists of his time — namely, their rationalizing that ruthlessness was justified for the sake of gain; that wealth and industrial power were the “natural” objectives of 19th-century society; that if Scrooge's poor clerk, Bob Cratchit, is unable to support his large family on his small wages, Bob should have had a smaller family. Today, the discrepancy between Scrooge's tyrannical authority and Bob Cratchit's meekness might be dismissed as Dickensian exaggeration, but Dickens stood squarely on Bob Cratchit's side. Modern critics have been skeptical of Dickens's flagrantly sentimental choice: to emotionally railroad the reader's sympathy for Bob Cratchit, Dickens saddles poor Bob with a crippled child — Tiny Tim. Dickens's answer to skeptics, like Scrooge, is to terrify them with ghosts.

Scrooge is such a pillar of skepticism he at first resists believing in Marley's Ghost. (“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!”) Yet Scrooge is converted; beyond the seasonal lessons of Christian charity,
A Christmas Carol
teaches us that a man — even a man as hard as Ebenezer Scrooge — can change. What is heartening about the change in Scrooge is that he learns to love his fellowman; in the politically correct language of our insipid times, Scrooge learns to be
more caring.
But, typical of Dickens, Scrooge has undergone a deeper transformation: that he is persuaded to believe in ghosts means that Scrooge has been miraculously returned to his childhood, and to a child's powers of imagination and make-believe.

Dickens's celebration of ghosts, and of Christmas, is but a small part of the author's abiding faith in the innocence and magic of children; Dickens believed that his own imagination — in fact, his overall well-being — depended on the contact he kept with his childhood. Furthermore, his popularity with his fellow Victorians, which is reflected by the ongoing interest of young readers today, is rooted in Dickens's remarkable ability for rendering
realistically
what many adults condescendingly call “fantasy.”

Additionally, it was Dickens's “fullness of heart” that caused Thackeray to praise
A Christmas Carol
to the skies. “Who can listen to objections regarding such a book as this?” Thackeray wrote. “It seems to be a national benefit, and to every man or woman who reads it a personal kindness.” Even the dour Thomas Carlyle was so moved by
A Christmas Carol
that he was (in the words of his wife) “seized with a perfect
convulsion
of hospitality”; apparently, this was quite contrary to the Scots philosopher's nature. Remember: as Chesterton once wrote of Dickens, “The man led a mob.” Part of the reason is that relationship which Dickens forces his readers to maintain with children.

As for the ghosts — “You will be haunted by Three Spirits,” Marley's Ghost warns Scrooge — they have become emblematic of
our
Christmases, too. The first of these phantoms is the easiest to bear. “It was a strange figure — like a child: yet not so like a child as like an old man, viewed through some supernatural medium, which gave him the appearance of having receded from the view, and being diminished to a child's proportions.”

Shortly thereafter, the spirit introduces himself: “I am the Ghost of Christmas Past.”

“Long past?” Scrooge asks.

“No. Your past,” the ghost answers — a chilling reply.

It is from the Ghost of Christmas Present that Scrooge is confronted by his own words; his own in-sensitivity is thrown back at him and leaves him “overcome with penitence and grief.” This happens because Scrooge asks the spirit if Tiny Tim will live. “I see a vacant seat in the poor chimney-corner,” replies the ghost, in a ghostly fashion, “and a crutch without an owner, carefully preserved.” When Scrooge protests, the spirit quotes Scrooge verbatim: “If he be like to die, he had better do it, and decrease the surplus population.”

As for the last visitor, that silent but most terrifying phantom, the Ghost of Christmas Yet to Come appears before Scrooge “draped and hooded, coming, like a mist along the ground, towards him.” This ghost is taking no prisoners; this spirit shows Scrooge his own corpse. “He lay in the dark empty house, with not a man, a woman, or a child, to say that he was kind to me in this or that, and for the memory of one kind word I will be kind to him. A cat was tearing at the door, and there was a sound of gnawing rats beneath the hearth-stone. What
they
wanted in the room of death, and why they were so restless and disturbed, Scrooge did not dare to think.”

This is a Christmas story, yes; yet it is first and foremost a cautionary tale.
We
are that corpse whose face is covered with a veil; we dare not take the veil away, for fear we shall see ourselves lying there. (“Oh cold, cold, rigid, dreadful Death, set up thine altar here, and dress it with such terrors as thou hast at thy command: for this is thy dominion!”) This is a Christmas story, yes; as such, it has a happy ending. But, as Marley's Ghost tells Scrooge, the tale is truly a warning. We had best improve our capacity for human sympathy — or else! We must love one another or die unloved.

Most of us have seen so many renditions of
A Christmas Carol
that we imagine we know the story, but how long has it been since we've actually
read
it? Each Christmas we are assaulted with a new
Carol;
indeed, we're fortunate if all we see is the delightful Alastair Sim. One year, we suffer through some treacle in a Western setting: Scrooge is a grizzled cattle baron, tediously unkind to his cows. Another year, poor Tiny Tim hobbles about in the Bronx or in Brooklyn: old Ebenezer is an unrepentant slum landlord. In a few years, I'll be old enough to play the role of Scrooge in one of those countless amateur theatrical events that commemorate (and ruin)
A Christmas Carol
every season. We should spare ourselves these syrupy enactments and reread the original — or read it for the first time, as the case may be.

It may surprise us to learn that there is not one scene of Scrooge
interacting
with Tiny Tim, although that is a cherished moment in many made-for-television versions; it is also surprising that, in the epilogue, Dickens anticipates his own detractors. Of Scrooge, the author writes: “Some people laughed to see the alteration in him, but he let them laugh, and little heeded them; for he was wise enough to know that nothing ever happened on this globe, for good, at which some people did not have their fill of laughter in the outset; and knowing that such as these would be blind anyway, he thought it quite as well that they should wrinkle up their eyes in grins, as have the malady in less attractive forms. His own heart laughed: and that was quite enough for him.

“He had no further intercourse with Spirits,” the author adds in the final paragraph.

Ironically, the success of
A Christmas Carol
prompted greed of such a shameless nature that only Ebenezer Scrooge
{before
his conversion) could have been pleased. It was not the first time that Dickens was plagiarized. Previously there had been published
The Posthumous Notes of the Pickwickian Club
, and
Nichelas Nickleberry
— and even
Oliver Twiss.
But the imitations of
A Christmas Carol
were more offensive, more bold; in a weekly called
Parley's Illuminated Library
there appeared a plagiarism of
A Christmas Carol
— together with the outrageous claim that it was “reoriginated from the original by Charles Dickens.” Dickens attempted to stop publication, but the pirate publishers argued that when they had “reoriginated”
The Old Curiosity Shop
and
Bar-naby Rudge
, Dickens hadn't objected. Furthermore, the pirates argued, they had actually “improved”
A Christmas Carol;
among their additions to the original was a song for Tiny Tim!

The legal efforts that Dickens made were not rewarded; in fact, his court costs of 700 pounds were a bitter blow to him. In
A Christmas Carol
, he had written of greed and redemption, but the law had treated him as if he “were the robber instead of the robbed.” Only his readers would treat him faithfully.

To his readers, Charles Dickens called himself “Their faithful Friend and Servant.” In his Preface to the 1843 edition of
A Christmas Carol
, Dickens bestowed a generous benediction; he confessed his hopes for his “Ghostly little book”
and
for his readers — “May it haunt their houses pleasantly.” In truth, even in the troupe tent of an Indian circus — not to mention here and now, 150 years after the
Carol
was written — Dickens's “Ghost Story of Christmas” continues to haunt us pleasantly.

The most famous child cripple in fiction is still wringing hearts. “His active little crutch was heard upon the floor,” Dickens writes. Indeed, we can hear Tiny Tim's crutch tapping today.

An Introduction to
A Christmas Carol
(1993)

AUTHOR'S NOTES

A few fragments of this Introduction to
A Christmas Carol
first appeared in the same essay (“In Defense of Sentimentality”) that
The New York Times Book Review
published on November 25, 1979, but that essay is more clearly identifiable as the origin of my Introduction to
Great Expectations
than it is recognizable as the origin of
this
Introduction. It is mystifying to me, however, to see how many readers reserve Dickens— and hopefulness in general — for Christmas. Indeed, what we applaud in Dickens — his kindness, his generosity, his belief in our dignity — is also what we condemn him for (under another name) in the off-Christmas season. (The other name is sentimentality.) The same Dickens of
A Christmas Carol
can be found in Dickens's other work; yet today
A Christmas Carol
is loved around the world — while much of Dickens's “other work” is not nearly as widely read.