Short Reflections On ‘A Christmas Carol’

In 2023, Cambridge historian Sir Christopher Clark published his new book, Revolutionary Spring: Fighting For A New World 1848-1849. Readers of the blog know that I’m a big fan of Sir Christopher and believe he is criminally underrated by the general reading public. This latest work is no exception. Lucid, insightful, and groundbreaking, Revolutionary Spring opened my eyes to a subject I knew nothing about: the European Revolutions of 1848-49.

This cover shows one of the earliest ever photographs—an abandoned Paris barricade.

If you’re American like me, then Europe in 1848 has no file in your memory cabinet. After all, our country was busy polarizing itself into two hostile blocs over the issue of slavery. The rest of world seemed very far away. European states, on the other hand, used the opportunity of 1848 to take a stab at this whole ‘life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness’ business we hot-dog chuggers cooked up seventy years earlier, to varying degrees of success.

Clark’s book splendidly details the origins and causes of these simultaneous revolutions. To crudely summarize, various economic and agricultural shocks afflicted the European continent in the 1840s. Most notably, a blight affecting the potato crop in Ireland led to a famine so cataclysmic that, and I was shocked to learn this, the country is still below its pre-1840s population levels. As I kept reading, I couldn’t help but feel like I’d read this book before. The setting, the societal themes, the issues affecting Europe all felt familiar.

Then it hit me: I have read the story of 1848 before, along with every educated person in the Western world. More specifically, I and everyone else read the PREQUEL to Christopher Clark’s book.

It was Charles Dickens’s ‘A Christmas Carol’.

This is my edition and my preferred copy. Shout out to Professor Emeritus Michael Slater for doing a smashing job editing this anthology.

There’s no point in me reviewing A Christmas Carol. Everything opinion written by those whose intellect far surpasses mine is true. That Ebenezer Scrooge is a character with peerless cultural weight goes without saying. That the Carol is the best modern, non-sectarian morality play also goes without saying. And that it surpasses every other Christmas tale still goes without saying (take that Charlie Brown).

There’s nothing left to review.

However, I’ll make one editorial. Personally I believe this is the best story Dickens ever created. Unlike the other famous novels—Tale of Two Cities, Bleak House, Oliver Twist, David Copperfield—the Carol does not overstay its welcome. It is surprisingly short, running ~130 pages depending on your edition.

Why does this matter? Well, here’s the thing about reading Charles Dickens in a silent room: the experience totally sucks. Now before you throw rotting produce at me, let me add the very important caveat: reading Dickens out loud is the way to do it.

This is because Dickens’ writing style makes for fantastic performative and oratorical spectacles, which is NOT synonymous with cognitively easy reading. I have struggled to silently read every one of Dickens’s full length novels. Then, one day, when the urge struck me, I took out my copy of A Christmas Carol and (feeling like a total moron) I read the chapters out loud to my silent bedroom.

To the surprise of me and my Pokémon plushies, I had a great time. For whatever reason, Dickens is meant to be read slow because when he wrote his books, reading aloud was common entertainment. Admittedly I’m stretching my imagination, but I suspect that most books written pre-1914 have this trait.

Which brings me back to The Carol. The story of Ebenezer Scrooge is so succinct that it captures everything amazing about Charles Dickens with none of the previously listed drawbacks. Everything—from the character with a weird name so distinctive that we now use the word ‘Dickensian’ to describe it to the intensely realistic Victorian setting—is present and accounted for.

No matter what you do, none of the original magic is lost.

And What Does This Have To Do With 1848?

Ah, right. I almost forgot.

As there’s nothing really to say about the story of A Christmas Carol, I thought it’d be worth briefly exploring the era in which the original novella was published. Readers first met Ebenezer Scrooge on December 19th, 1843, and I believe they knew exactly who he was. The 1840s were known as ‘The Hungry Forties’ because of the frequent famines and aforementioned economic shocks. In that context, these now-iconic characters were not the eccentric cartoons we’re familiar with, but shockingly vivid contemporaries. Paupers living lives as wretched if not worse than the Cratchit family were the norm in Europe due to these conditions. As Clark’s Revolutionary Spring makes clear, the side-effects of industrialism resulted in a world where people flocked to cities to escape the famines and crop failures of the countryside. The insatiable maw of the factories meant every available human body had to be pressed into service. Yet despite this grim reality, not everyone seemed to have it so bad. The wealthy and privileged benefited by doing little more than exploiting the working man…and which miserly main character at the beginning of A Christmas Carol does that sound like?

For people like Dickens, who actually explored the mines where children were used as cheap labor, it seemed like society lost its collective Christian compass. And so, a story with a redemptive arc and a reconnection with traditional themes of Christmas—a home run for a story in any holiday season—was particularly perfect in 1843.

Obviously A Christmas Carol doesn’t have the space to explore the other ingredients that Sir Christopher Clark’s 1848 book spends time with: politics. The conditions Dickens encountered were already enough to trigger food riots, but the European countries of the 1840s were also monarchical autocracies lacking what we yankees would call ‘inalienable rights’.

In these circumstances, the need for reform was urgent. ‘A Christmas Carol’ was but one printed work among many calling for change. The present could not be tolerated. Of course, not everyone would listen to the proverbial Ghosts of Christmas and, five years later, a European revolution erupted.*

*Ironically, Britain itself would not have a revolution in 1848, but there was a movement known as the Chartists which made the case for various reforms.

Conclusion

A Christmas Carol is a masterpiece year-after-year, but I believe why it sticks with us in an era completely unlike Scrooge’s stems from its impact on the original audience. In that time and in that place, this story was so urgently needed that its emotional resonance went immediately down to the bottom of the brain stem. The original audiences could never forget it, and they ensured their descendants never would either.