Long read (17-18 min.).
As cold winds blow down from the north towards the end of November, households start prepping for Christmas. We’re going to take a stroll back to Victorian times, via a story that has been a beloved part of the holiday season for 180 years. Steep some mulled wine and pour a mug while you read/stroll.
Every author secretly hopes that their book will have a legacy, will create an impact on literature beyond their own lifetime, whether they admit it or not 😉. Having said that, many literary scholars believe there are only seven basic narrative plots in all of storytelling, told over and over again with variations:
- Overcoming the Monster
- Rags to Riches
- The Quest
- Voyage and Return
- Rebirth
- Comedy
- Tragedy
Writers will customize their story with characters, settings, and overall personality, but the basic framework remains more-or-less the same. Even copy writers for organizations will use these same themes to create relatable business promos.
Is it then possible for a writer to stand out? Once in a while, an author has come along who developed such a unique take on a basic plot that it blazes across the literary firmament, and takes up a lasting place in our imaginations. Bram Stoker, when he wrote about Dracula, Mary Shelley’s tale of an arrogant scientist who thought to play God by creating his own ‘human’ being out of assorted parts, and (not last nor least) Charles Dickens, when he wrote A Christmas Carol in Prose; Being a Ghost Story of Christmas.
Dickens’ classic could be classified as a basic Rebirth tale – which the author intended – but the idea of three ghosts leading a terrible man to redemption was both simple and profound.
Charles Dickens was a passionate reformer and crusader for change in the lives of poor people in Victorian England. He’d come from a middle-class home, but his father, John, mismanaged the family income and ended up being committed to the Marshalsea, a grimly notorious debtor’s prison. Mrs. Dickens and their youngest children joined him there, per the practice at the time.
Charles, then only 12 years old, was only slightly better off by boarding with Elizabeth Roylance, a family friend living in impoverished circumstances herself. He had to leave school, pawn his collection of books, and work 10-hour days at Warren’s Blacking Warehouse (near present-day Charing Cross railway station), a dirty, rat-infested factory where he earned six shillings a week pasting labels on pots of boot blacking. As he grew up, he learned very well how inhuman and degrading the class system was, and it influenced his adult life deeply.
Dickens’ grandmother passed away a few months later and bequeathed John £450, enough to get him out of prison. The family joined Charles at Mrs. Roylance’s, but mother Elizabeth still wanted Charles to keep working at the dreadful factory, something he never forgave her for.
Able to resume his education, in a seedy academy run by a sadistic headmaster, Dickens eventually found work in a law office as a junior clerk, and began exploring the worlds of theatre and journalism. He began writing stories, using his wide range of life circumstances for fodder, along with a burgeoning sense of wit and sarcasm.
When it came to writing his holiday masterpiece, he was influenced by a number of factors.
- Celebrating the Christmas season had been growing in popularity. Queen Victoria and Prince Albert were putting up a Christmas tree every year, and many homes around the country began emulating them.
- Dickens had a general interest in Christmas, as well as in ghost stories, and in fairy tales and nursery stories, which he felt were stories of transformation.
- Christmas carols, which had actually fallen off over the previous hundred years, were enjoying a revival.
- Dickens was concerned about the plight of poor children at the time, having suffered miserably himself. Two recent experiences in particular raised his hackles: a tour of tin mines in Cornwall, where he saw the appalling conditions small children worked under there, and a visit to the Field Lane Ragged School, one of several less-than-savoury London schools supposedly run for the education of the illiterate street children.
In a fundraising speech that October, 1843, Dickens urged workers and employers to join together to combat ignorance with educational reform. However, he came to realize he could reach more people if he wrote a Christmas story illustrating his message than more political pamphlets and essays.
He started on his novella, A Christmas Carol, that very month, and completed it in only six weeks. Apparently he created much of the contents in his head while taking night-time walks of 15 to 20 miles (24 to 32 km) around London. According to his sister-in-law, he “wept, and laughed, and wept again, and excited himself in a most extraordinary manner, in composition”, and published the work that December.
I’m assuming everyone’s seen at least one movie version of the famous story – most people consider the 1951 version Scrooge, with Alastair Sim as the title character, a classic, but there are other greats – but you may never have read the original work, and it’s worth a look.
Dickens was as adept at creating atmosphere as he was skewering out-of-touch wealthy people who blissfully ignored the lot of the country’s poor. (I think he would have heartily enjoyed the outraged reaction during the first COVID lockdowns to wealthy celebrities complaining about being confined to their palatial estates.)
Reading Dickens’ description of pre-Christmas London (above) early in the story, you’re immediately drawn almost full-bodied into the novel. The darkness and chill of the day are vivid – we’ve all experienced winter days like that, when all you want to do is get home, put a fire on if you have a fireplace or wood stove (or turn the furnace up), and wrap your hands around a hot cup of tea.
We enter the life of Ebenezer Scrooge, a hardened miser with a heart of stone who lives a joyless life despite his wealth, on a most fateful night.
Scrooge despises Christmas and anything resembling happiness or charity, and ends up nastily rebuffing both his nephew, who stops by the premises of “Scrooge & Marley” on Christmas Eve to invite his uncle to dinner the next day, and two gentlemen collecting donations to help the poor through the holidays. After barely agreeing to allow his clerk, Bob Cratchit, the luxury of spending the big day with his family with pay, he goes to his home to spend another evening alone, with a bowl of gruel for supper – or so he thinks.
His deceased partner Jacob Marley shows up, an equal miser when he was alive and now a phantom doomed to wander endlessly with “the chain I forged in life”, and no hope of passing into heaven. He warns Ebenezer that his fate will be even worse, as Scrooge has had seven years longer (since Marley died) to forge more links, unless he changes. Three spirits will arrive to show Scrooge the way to redemption, if he’s willing to listen.
As Marley departs out the window, Scrooge is horrified to see that:
What follows is an emotional and sometimes harrowing journey for Scrooge, who sees how much he’s changed from when he was a happy young man apprenticing at the warehouse of Mr. Fezziwig, and fell in love with a young woman he would have married were he not captivated even more by his growing greed.
The second ghost, of Christmas present, shows Scrooge many scenes of people around the country celebrating a day of kindness and family whatever their circumstances. All around London are scenes of Victorian holiday bounty, so enticing that they’ve shaped what we think of nostalgically as the perfect Christmas ever since:
At the home of Ebenezer’s clerk, we get a very personal snapshot of Victorian Christmas Eve traditions that have been handed down to this day, meager as the family’s dinner is on Cratchit’s measly salary.
Poorer families of the time didn’t have stoves or ovens, and had to cook their roasts at a public facility. The potatoes and gravy were cooked in a pot on the hearth that heated the home, while the Christmas pudding dessert was cooked, wrapped in a clean cloth, in a copper basin used for washing clothes. Nevertheless, the entire family is exuberant for this special meal, eaten once a year, and determined to enjoy the evening to the fullest.
Next came Mrs. Cratchit’s dessert pudding, looking like a ‘speckled cannon-ball’, which doesn’t sound very appetizing, but Dickens waxed poetic about her masterpiece:
If you were a Victorian woman and had a copy of the essential Mrs. Beeton’s Book of Household Management, you’d find ads for kitchen equipment like a special ‘Queen’s Pudding Boiler’ to make your life easier.
As Scrooge watches the merry evening transpire, he notices how ill the youngest child, Tiny Tim, is, and is told by the Spirit that the shadow of death is hanging over the boy, unless Bob’s circumstances improve enough for medical help. When the third Spirit, of the Future which may be, shows Scrooge that possible outcome, his heart breaks for his clerk and he finally understands the toll that his own miserly ways have taken on anyone he’s had dealings with.
I really do recommend reading the original novella to appreciate Dickens’ genius at letting his readers into the lives of others, as well as capturing the atmosphere of Victorian society and London at the time. You can download a copy from the Gutenberg.org website, in various formats.
Just like authors today, Dickens ran into some publishing issues – clearly some things never change! Because of disagreements with his publishers, Chapman and Hall, over the commercial failures of his previous work, Martin Chuzzlewit, Dickens even paid for the printing himself in exchange for a percentage of the profits.
Happily for Dickens’ pocketbook, the first run of 6,000 copies sold out by Christmas Eve. Second and third editions were issued before the new year, and the book continued to sell well into 1844 with eleven more editions released. Since its initial publication the book has never been out of print, translated into several languages and issued in numerous hardback and paperback editions.
However, that ensuing January, Parley’s Illuminated Library published an unauthorized version of the story in a condensed form. Dickens sued for copyright infringement and won, but Parley’s declared bankruptcy and Dickens had to pay £700 in costs, reducing his actual profits substantially.
Pundits at the time posted varying opinions of the novella.
The Illustrated London News wrote that the story’s “impressive eloquence … its unfeigned lightness of heart—its playful and sparkling humour … its gentle spirit of humanity” all put the reader “in good humour with ourselves, with each other, with the season and with the author”.
There were criticisms that Dickens stepped too far away from the religious aspects of Christmas; writer and social thinker John Ruskin thought Dickens had imagined it as “mistletoe and pudding – neither resurrection from the dead, nor rising of new stars, nor teaching of wise men, nor shepherds”. My impression is that Dickens understood his target audience very well, and emulated St. Francis of Assisi’s technique of creating the Nativity scene in common style in medieval Italy to teach in a form that his followers could relate to.
Throughout Dickens’ stories you can see where he drew on his own past and present for inspiration, as all authors do. There’s been speculation that Ebenezer Scrooge was partly inspired by Dickens’ own irresponsible father, whom he had conflicting feelings about. For rich misers, there were also two well-known men in London at the time: John Elwes, a miserable Member of Parliament, and Jemmy Wood, the owner of the Gloucester Old Bank who was called “The Gloucester Miser”. Both provided the author with plenty of source material.
Other influences were:
- a tradesman’s premises with the sign “Goodge and Marney” near where Dickens lived as a youth, which likely inspired the name for Scrooge’s former business partner
- a visit to the Western Penitentiary in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, in 1842, where he saw, and was deeply affected by, fettered prisoners – which may have inspired the chained ghost of Marley
- his nephew Henry, a disabled boy who was five at the time A Christmas Carol was written and became the character Tiny Tim
- his visit to a Ragged School in the East End of London, which clearly inspired both the dismal boarding school of Scrooge’s youth and the two miserable figures of Want and Ignorance hiding under the robes of Christmas Present.
A Christmas Carol in Prose; Being a Ghost Story of Christmas has had an enduring legacy beyond the many, many film, television and theatre productions over the decades.
- The phrase “Merry Christmas”, which didn’t enter popular usage, even though it had been around since the 1500s, until the publication of A Christmas Carol.
- The words “Bah! Humbug!”, still used today in various holiday contexts.
- Misers are typically called Scrooges – the word was even added to the Oxford English Dictionary as such in 1982.
- The introduction of turkey as the main meat of the Christmas meal (although nowadays pretty much anything goes, from ham to roast beef and all kinds of glammed-up vegetarian dishes). In Britain at the time the tradition had been to eat roast goose, especially for poorer families, but there was a turkey revolution after the publication of the book.
- Dickens’ emphasis on a more humanitarian kind of holiday, with generosity for those less fortunate, family gatherings, games and seasonal refreshments, is still the core of our modern Christmastime, even for those who aren’t religious.
Should you wish to add some Dickensian flair to your holiday meal and try making a Christmas Pudding, BBC Good Food has a recipe for Slow cooker Christmas pudding that would remove some of the fuss out of making one (definitely no washbasin steaming required). For what to serve with the pudding, you could try Nigella Lawson’s recipe for Eggnog Cream, a simple blend of whipped cream and Advocaat, a smooth and custardy Dutch liquor made from eggs, sugar, and brandy. Never tried it myself, but it sounds yummy.
I made a Christmas pudding once when I was a teenager at home; it’s dense and fruity, but nothing like a fruitcake if you’re not a fan of those. No overly-sweet maraschino cherries or other candied fruit in sight. You may have to do some hunting to find suet, or ask your grocery about getting some. Suet is the hard, raw fat from beef, lamb or mutton, and is a traditional ingredient in a number of British puddings (desserts) – if you can’t find any, Nigella has some suggestions for good substitutes.
If you’re planning on making your own Christmas pudding, you’ll need to start now, as it will need to ‘age’ to let all the flavours blend. Traditionally plum pudding is ‘made’ on ‘Stir Up Sunday’, the fifth Sunday before Christmas. According to the BBC recipe, after cooking and cooling, you can store the pudding for up to six months!
And after setting your pudding on fire to serve it, you can savour the entire meal peacefully as Bob Cratchit and his family did:
