A Christmas Carol
A
Christmas Carol. In Prose. Being a Ghost Story of Christmas, commonly known as A Christmas Carol, is a novella by Charles
Dickens, first published in London by Chapman
& Hall in 1843 and illustrated by John Leech. A Christmas Carol recounts the story of Ebenezer
Scrooge, an elderly miser who is visited by the ghost of his former business partner Jacob
Marley and the spirits of Christmas Past,
Present and Yet to Come. After their visits, Scrooge is transformed into a kinder,
gentler man.
Dickens
wrote A Christmas Carol during a period when the British were exploring
and re-evaluating past Christmas traditions, including carols, and newer customs such as Christmas trees.
He was influenced by the experiences of his own youth and by the Christmas
stories of other authors, including Washington
Irving and Douglas
Jerrold. Dickens had written three
Christmas stories prior to the novella, and was inspired following a visit to
the Field Lane Ragged School,
one of several establishments for London's street children. The treatment of
the poor and the ability of a selfish man to redeem himself by transforming
into a more sympathetic character are the key themes of the story. There is
discussion among academics as to whether this is a fully secular story, or if
it is a Christian allegory.
Published
on 19 December, the first edition sold out by Christmas
Eve; by the end of 1844 thirteen
editions had been released. Most critics reviewed the novella favourably. The
story was illicitly copied
in January 1844; Dickens took legal action against the publishers, who went
bankrupt, further reducing Dickens's small profits from the publication. He
went on to write four other Christmas stories in subsequent years. In 1849 he
began public readings of the story, which proved so successful he undertook 127
further performances until 1870, the year of his death. A Christmas Carol
has never been out of print and has been translated into several languages; the
story has been adapted
many times for film, stage, opera and other
media.
A
Christmas Carol captured the zeitgeist of the mid-Victorian revival of the Christmas holiday. Dickens had acknowledged
the influence of the modern Western observance of Christmas and later inspired
several aspects of Christmas, including family gatherings, seasonal food and
drink, dancing, games and a festive generosity of spirit.
Stave one
A
Christmas Carol opens on a bleak, cold Christmas
Eve in London, seven years after the
death of Ebenezer Scrooge's
business partner, Jacob Marley.
Scrooge, an ageing miser,
dislikes Christmas and refuses a dinner invitation from his nephew Fred—the son
of Fan, Scrooge's dead sister. He turns away two men who seek a donation from
him to provide food and heating for the poor and only grudgingly allows his
overworked, underpaid clerk,
Bob
Cratchit, Christmas Day off with pay to
conform to the social custom.
That
night Scrooge is visited at home by Marley's ghost, who wanders the Earth
entwined by heavy chains and money boxes forged during a lifetime of greed and
selfishness. Marley tells Scrooge that he has a single chance to avoid the same
fate: he will be visited by three spirits and must listen or be cursed to carry
much heavier chains of his own.
Stave two
The
first spirit, the Ghost of Christmas Past, takes Scrooge to Christmas scenes of Scrooge's boyhood,
reminding him of a time when he was more innocent. The scenes reveal Scrooge's
lonely childhood at boarding
school, his relationship with his beloved
sister Fan, and a Christmas party hosted by his first employer, Mr
Fezziwig, who treated him like a son.
Scrooge's neglected fiancée Belle is shown ending their relationship, as she
realises that he will never love her as much as he loves money. Finally, they
visit a now-married Belle with her large, happy family on the Christmas Eve
that Marley died. Scrooge, upset by hearing Belle's description of the man that
he has become, demands that the ghost remove him from the house.
Stave three
The
second spirit, the Ghost of Christmas Present, takes Scrooge to a joyous market with people buying the
makings of Christmas dinner
and to celebrations of Christmas in a miner's cottage and in a lighthouse. Scrooge and the ghost also visit Fred's Christmas party. A
major part of this stave is taken up with Bob Cratchit's family feast and
introduces his youngest son, Tiny Tim, a happy boy who is seriously ill. The spirit informs
Scrooge that Tiny Tim will die unless the course of events changes. Before
disappearing, the spirit shows Scrooge two hideous, emaciated children named
Ignorance and Want. He tells Scrooge to beware the former above all and mocks
Scrooge's concern for their welfare.
Stave four
The
third spirit, the Ghost of Christmas
Yet to Come, shows Scrooge a Christmas Day in
the future. The silent ghost reveals scenes involving the death of a disliked
man whose funeral is attended by local businessmen only on condition that lunch
is provided. His charwoman,
laundress and the local undertaker steal his possessions to sell to a fence.
When he asks the spirit to show a single person who feels emotion over his
death, he is only given the pleasure of a poor couple who rejoice that his
death gives them more time to put their finances in order. When Scrooge asks to
see tenderness connected with any death, the ghost shows him Bob Cratchit and
his family mourning the death of Tiny Tim. The ghost then allows Scrooge to see
a neglected grave, with a tombstone bearing Scrooge's name. Sobbing, Scrooge
pledges to change his ways.
Stave five
Scrooge
awakens on Christmas morning a changed man. He makes a large donation to the
charity he rejected the previous day, anonymously sends a large turkey to the
Cratchit home for Christmas dinner and spends the afternoon with Fred's family.
The following day he gives Cratchit an increase in pay, and begins to become a
father figure to Tiny Tim. From then on Scrooge treats everyone with kindness,
generosity and compassion, embodying the spirit of Christmas.
Background
The
writer Charles Dickens
was born to a middle-class family which got into financial difficulties as a
result of the spendthrift nature of his
father John. In 1824 John was committed to the Marshalsea, a debtors'
prison in Southwark, London. Dickens, aged 12, was forced to pawn his collection of books, leave school and work at a dirty
and rat-infested shoe-blacking
factory. The change in circumstances gave him what his biographer, Michael
Slater, describes as a "deep personal and social outrage", which
heavily influenced his writing and outlook.[1]
By
the end of 1842 Dickens was a well-established author, having written six major
works,[n
1] as well as several short stories,
novellas and other pieces.[2] On 31 December that year he began publishing his novel Martin
Chuzzlewit as a monthly serial;[n
2] the novel was his favourite work,
but sales were disappointing and he faced temporary financial difficulties.[3]
Celebrating
the Christmas season
had been growing in popularity through the Victorian
era.[4] The Christmas
tree had been introduced in Britain
during the 18th century, and its use was popularised by Queen
Victoria and Prince Albert.
Their practice was copied in many homes across the country.[5] In the early 19th century there had been a revival of
interest in Christmas carols,
following a decline in popularity over the previous hundred years. The
publication of Davies Gilbert's
1823 work Some Ancient Christmas Carols, With the Tunes to Which They Were
Formerly Sung in the West of England and William Sandys's 1833 collection Christmas Carols, Ancient and Modern
led to a growth in the form's popularity in Britain.[6]
Dickens
had an interest in Christmas, and his first story on the subject was
"Christmas Festivities", published in Bell's Weekly Messenger in 1835; the story was then published as "A Christmas
Dinner" in Sketches by Boz
(1836).[7] "The Story of the Goblins Who Stole a Sexton",
another Christmas story, appeared in the 1836 novel The Pickwick Papers. In the episode, a Mr Wardle relates the tale of Gabriel
Grub, a lonely and mean-spirited sexton, who undergoes a Christmas conversion after being visited
by goblins who show him the past and future.[8] Slater considers that "the main elements of the Carol
are present in the story", but not yet in a firm form.[9] The story is followed by a passage about Christmas in
Dickens's editorial Master Humphrey's Clock.[9] The professor of English literature Paul Davis writes that
although the "Goblins" story appears to be a prototype of A
Christmas Carol, all Dickens's earlier writings about Christmas influenced
the story.[10]
Literary influences
Dickens
was not the first author to celebrate the Christmas season in literature.[11] Among earlier authors who influenced Dickens was Washington
Irving, whose 1819–20 work The Sketch Book of
Geoffrey Crayon, Gent. included
four essays on old English Christmas traditions that he experienced while staying at Aston
Hall near Birmingham.[12] The tales and essays attracted Dickens, and the two authors
shared the belief that the staging of a nostalgic English Christmas might help
restore the social harmony that they felt had been lost in the modern world.[13]
Several
works may have had an influence on the writing of A Christmas Carol,
including two Douglas Jerrold
essays: one from an 1841 issue of Punch,
"How Mr. Chokepear Keeps a Merry Christmas" and one from 1843,
"The Beauties of the Police".[14] More broadly, Dickens was influenced by fairy tales and
nursery stories, which he closely associated with Christmas, because he saw
them as stories of conversion and transformation.[15]
Social influences
Dickens
was touched by the lot of poor children in the middle decades of the 19th
century.[16] In early 1843 he toured the Cornish tin mines, where he was angered by seeing children
working in appalling conditions.[17] The suffering he witnessed there was reinforced by a visit
to the Field Lane Ragged School,
one of several London schools set up for the education of the capital's
half-starved, illiterate street children.[18]
In
February 1843 the Second Report of the Children's Employment Commission
was published. It was a parliamentary report exposing the effects of the Industrial Revolution upon working
class children. Horrified by what he
read, Dickens planned to publish an inexpensive political pamphlet tentatively
titled, An Appeal to the People of England, on behalf of the Poor Man's
Child, but changed his mind, deferring the pamphlet's production until the
end of the year.[19] In March he wrote to Dr Southwood Smith,
one of the four commissioners responsible for the Second Report, about
his change in plans: "you will certainly feel that a Sledge hammer has
come down with twenty times the force—twenty thousand times the force—I could
exert by following out my first idea".[20]
In
a fundraising speech on 5 October 1843 at the Manchester Athenaeum, Dickens urged workers and employers to join together to
combat ignorance with educational reform,[21] and realised in the days following that the most effective
way to reach the broadest segment of the population with his social concerns
about poverty and injustice was to write a deeply felt Christmas narrative
rather than polemical pamphlets and essays.[22]
Writing history
By
mid-1843 Dickens began to suffer from financial problems. Sales of Martin
Chuzzlewit were falling off, and his wife, Catherine, was pregnant with their fifth child. Matters worsened when
Chapman & Hall,
his publishers, threatened to reduce his monthly income by £50 if sales dropped
further.[23] He began A Christmas Carol in October 1843.[24] Michael Slater, Dickens's biographer, describes the book as
being "written at white heat"; it was completed in six weeks, the
final pages being written in early December.[25] He built much of the work in his head while taking
night-time walks of 15 to 20 miles (24 to 32 km) around London.[26] Dickens's sister-in-law wrote how he "wept, and
laughed, and wept again, and excited himself in a most extraordinary manner, in
composition".[27] Slater says that A Christmas Carol was
intended
to open its readers' hearts towards those struggling to survive on the lower
rungs of the economic ladder and to encourage practical benevolence, but also
to warn of the terrible danger to society created by the toleration of
widespread ignorance and actual want among the poor.[16]
George
Cruikshank, the illustrator who had earlier
worked with Dickens on Sketches by Boz (1836) and Oliver
Twist (1838), introduced him to the
caricaturist John Leech. By 24 October Dickens invited Leech to work on A
Christmas Carol, and four hand-coloured etchings and four black-and-white
wood engravings by the artist accompanied the text.[28] Dickens's hand-written manuscript of the story does not
include the sentence in the penultimate paragraph "... and to Tiny
Tim, who did not die"; this was added later, during the printing
process.[29][n
3]
Characters
The
central character of A Christmas Carol is Ebenezer Scrooge, a miserly
London-based businessman,[30] described in the story as "a squeezing, wrenching,
grasping, scraping, clutching, covetous old sinner!"[31] Kelly writes that Scrooge may have been influenced by
Dickens's conflicting feelings for his father, whom he both loved and
demonised. This psychological conflict may be responsible for the two radically
different Scrooges in the tale—one a cold, stingy and greedy semi-recluse, the
other a benevolent, sociable man.[32] The professor of English literature Robert
Douglas-Fairhurst considers that in the opening part of the book covering young
Scrooge's lonely and unhappy childhood, and his aspiration for money to avoid
poverty "is something of a self-parody of Dickens's fears about
himself"; the post-transformation parts of the book are how Dickens
optimistically sees himself.[33]
Scrooge
could also be based on two misers: the eccentric John Elwes,
MP,[34] or Jemmy Wood,
the owner of the Gloucester Old Bank
and also known as "The Gloucester Miser".[35] According to the sociologist Frank W. Elwell, Scrooge's
views on the poor are a reflection of those of the demographer and political economist
Thomas Malthus,[36] while the miser's questions "Are there no
prisons? ... And the Union workhouses? ... The treadmill and the Poor
Law are in full vigour, then?" are a reflection of a sarcastic question
raised by the philosopher Thomas
Carlyle, "Are there not treadmills,
gibbets; even hospitals, poor-rates, New Poor-Law?"[37][n
4]
There
are literary precursors for Scrooge in Dickens's own works. Peter
Ackroyd, Dickens's biographer, sees
similarities between the character and the elder Martin Chuzzlewit character,
although the miser is "a more fantastic image" than the Chuzzlewit
patriarch; Ackroyd observes that Chuzzlewit's transformation to a charitable
figure is a parallel to that of the miser.[39] Douglas-Fairhurst sees that the minor character Gabriel
Grub from The Pickwick Papers was also an influence when creating
Scrooge.[40][n
5] Scrooge's name came from a
tombstone Dickens had seen on a visit to Edinburgh. The grave was for Ebenezer
Lennox Scroggie, whose job was given as a meal man—a corn merchant; Dickens
misread the inscription as "mean man".[42][n
6]
When
Dickens was young he lived near a tradesman's premises with the sign
"Goodge and Marney", which may have provided the name for Scrooge's
former business partner.[44] For the chained Marley, Dickens drew on his memory of a
visit to the Western Penitentiary in Pittsburgh,
Pennsylvania, in March 1842, where he saw—and was affected by seeing—fettered
prisoners.[37] For the character Tiny Tim, Dickens used his nephew Henry,
a disabled boy who was five at the time A Christmas Carol was written.[45][n
7] The two figures of Want and Ignorance,
sheltering in the robes of the Ghost of Christmas Present, were inspired by the
children Dickens had seen on his visit to a ragged
school in the East End of London.[18]
Themes
The
transformation of Scrooge is central to the story.[47] Davis considers Scrooge to be "a protean figure always in process of reformation";[48] Kelly writes that the transformation is reflected in the
description of Scrooge, who begins as a two-dimensional character, but who then
grows into one who "possess[es] an emotional depth [and] a regret for lost
opportunities".[49] Some writers, including Grace Moore, the Dickens scholar,
consider that there is a Christian theme running through A Christmas Carol,
and that the novella should be seen as an allegory
of the Christian concept of redemption.[50][n
8] Dickens's biographer, Claire
Tomalin, sees the conversion of Scrooge as
carrying the Christian message that "even the worst of sinners may repent
and become a good man".[53] Dickens's attitudes towards organised religion were
complex;[n
9] he based his beliefs and principles
on the New Testament.[52] Dickens's statement that Marley "had no bowels"
is a reference to the "bowels of compassion" mentioned in the First Epistle of John, the reason for his eternal damnation.[56][n
10]
Other
writers, including Kelly, consider that Dickens put forward a "secular
vision of this sacred holiday".[11] The Dickens scholar John O. Jordan argues that A
Christmas Carol shows what Dickens referred to in a letter to his friend John Forster as his "Carol philosophy, cheerful views, sharp
anatomisation of humbug, jolly good temper ... and a vein of glowing,
hearty, generous, mirthful, beaming reference in everything to Home and
Fireside".[57] From a secular viewpoint, the cultural historian Penne
Restad suggests that Scrooge's redemption underscores "the conservative,
individualistic and patriarchal aspects" of Dickens's "Carol
philosophy" of charity
and altruism.[58]
Dickens
wrote A Christmas Carol in response to British social attitudes towards
poverty, particularly child poverty, and wished to use the novella as a means
to put forward his arguments against it.[59] The story shows Scrooge as a paradigm for self-interest,
and the possible repercussions of ignoring the poor, especially children in
poverty—personified by the allegorical figures of Want and Ignorance.[60] The two figures were created to arouse sympathy with
readers—as was Tiny Tim.[61] Douglas-Fairhurst observes that the use of such figures
allowed Dickens to present his message of the need for charity, without alienating
his largely middle-class readership.[62]
Publication
As
the result of the disagreements with Chapman and Hall over the commercial
failures of Martin Chuzzlewit,[63] Dickens arranged to pay for the publishing himself, in
exchange for a percentage of the profits.[33] Production of A Christmas Carol was not without
problems. The first printing contained drab olive endpapers that Dickens felt were unacceptable, and the publisher
Chapman and Hall quickly replaced them with yellow endpapers, but, once
replaced, those clashed with the title page, which was then redone.[64] The final product was bound in red cloth with gilt-edged
pages, completed only two days before the publication date of 19 December 1843.[65] Following publication, Dickens arranged for the manuscript
to be bound in red Morocco
leather and presented as a gift to his
solicitor, Thomas Mitton.[66][n
11]
Priced
at five shillings (equal to £25 in 2020 pounds),[67] the first run of 6,000 copies sold out by Christmas Eve.
Chapman and Hall issued second and third editions before the new year, and the
book continued to sell well into 1844.[69] By the end of 1844 eleven more editions had been released.[70] Since its initial publication the book has been issued in
numerous hardback and paperback editions, translated into several languages and
has never been out of print.[71] It was Dickens's most popular book in the United States,
and sold over two million copies in the hundred years following its first
publication there.[51]
The
high production costs upon which Dickens insisted led to reduced profits, and
the first edition brought him only £230 (equal to £23,000 in 2020 pounds)[67] rather than the £1,000 (equal to £99,000 in 2020 pounds)[67] he expected.[72] A year later, the profits were only £744, and Dickens was
deeply disappointed.[63][n
12]
Reception
According
to Douglas-Fairhurst, contemporary reviews of A Christmas Carol
"were almost uniformly kind".[74] The Illustrated
London News described how 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".[75] The critic from The Athenaeum, the literary magazine, considered it a "tale to make
the reader laugh and cry – to open his hands, and open his heart to
charity even toward the uncharitable ... a dainty dish to set before a
King."[76] William Makepeace Thackeray, writing in Fraser's Magazine, described the book as "a national benefit and to every
man or woman who reads it, a personal kindness. The last two people I heard
speak of it were women; neither knew the other, or the author, and both said,
by way of criticism, 'God bless him!'"[73]
The
poet Thomas Hood,
in his own journal, wrote that "If Christmas, with its ancient and
hospitable customs, its social and charitable observances, were ever in danger
of decay, this is the book that would give them a new lease."[77] The reviewer for Tait's Edinburgh Magazine—Theodore
Martin, who was usually critical of
Dickens's work[74]—spoke well of A Christmas Carol, noting it was
"a noble book, finely felt and calculated to work much social good".[78] After Dickens's death, Margaret
Oliphant deplored the turkey and plum
pudding aspects of the book but admitted that in the days of its first
publication it was regarded as "a new gospel", and noted that the
book was unique in that it made people behave better.[74] The religious press generally ignored the tale but, in
January 1884, Christian Remembrancer thought the tale's old and hackneyed subject was treated in
an original way and praised the author's sense of humour and pathos.[79] The writer and social thinker John
Ruskin told a friend that he thought
Dickens had taken the religion from Christmas, and had imagined it as
"mistletoe and pudding – neither resurrection from the dead, nor rising of
new stars, nor teaching of wise men, nor shepherds".[80]
There
were critics of the book. The New Monthly Magazine praised the story, but thought the book's physical
excesses—the gilt edges and expensive binding—kept the price high, making it
unavailable to the poor. The review recommended that the tale should be printed
on cheap paper and priced accordingly.[81] An unnamed writer for The Westminster Review mocked Dickens's grasp of economics, asking "Who went
without turkey and punch in order that Bob Cratchit might get them—for, unless
there were turkeys and punch in surplus, someone must go without".[82]
Following
criticism of the US in American
Notes and Martin Chuzzlewit,
American readers were less enthusiastic at first, but by the end of the American Civil War,
copies of the book were in wide circulation.[83] In 1863 The New York Times published an enthusiastic review, noting that the author
brought the "old Christmas ... of bygone centuries and remote manor
houses, into the living rooms of the poor of today".[84]
Aftermath
In
January 1844 Parley's Illuminated Library published an unauthorised version of
the story in a condensed form which they sold for twopence.[n
13] Dickens wrote to his solicitor
I
have not the least doubt that if these Vagabonds can be stopped they
must. ... Let us be the sledge-hammer in this, or I shall be beset
by hundreds of the same crew when I come out with a long story.[86]
Two
days after the release of the Parley version, Dickens sued on the basis of copyright infringement and won. The publishers declared themselves bankrupt and
Dickens was left to pay £700 in costs.[87] The small profits Dickens earned from A Christmas Carol
further strained his relationship with his publishers, and he broke with them
in favour of Bradbury and Evans,
who had been printing his works to that point.[16]
Dickens
returned to the tale several times during his life to amend the phrasing and
punctuation. He capitalised on the success of the book by publishing other
Christmas stories: The Chimes
(1844), The Cricket on the Hearth (1845), The Battle of Life (1846) and The Haunted Man and
the Ghost's Bargain (1848);
these were secular conversion tales which acknowledged the progressive societal
changes of the previous year, and highlighted those social problems which still
needed to be addressed. While the public eagerly bought the later books, the
reviewers were highly critical of the stories.[88]
Performances and adaptations
Main article: Adaptations of A
Christmas Carol
By
1849 Dickens was engaged with David
Copperfield and had neither the time nor the
inclination to produce another Christmas book.[89] He decided the best way to reach his audience with his
"Carol philosophy" was by public readings.[90] During Christmas 1852 Dickens gave a reading in Birmingham Town Hall to the Industrial and Literary Institute; the performance
was a great success.[91] Thereafter, he read the tale in an abbreviated version 127
times, until 1870 (the year of his death), including at his farewell
performance.[92]
In
the years following the book's publication, responses to the tale were
published by W. M. Swepstone (Christmas Shadows, 1850), Horatio
Alger (Job Warner's Christmas,
1863), Louisa May Alcott
(A Christmas Dream, and How It Came True, 1882), and others who followed
Scrooge's life as a reformed man – or some who thought Dickens had got it
wrong and needed to be corrected.[93]
The
novella was adapted for the stage almost immediately. Three productions opened
on 5 February 1844, one by Edward Stirling being sanctioned by Dickens and
running for more than 40 nights.[94] By the close of February 1844 eight rival A Christmas
Carol theatrical productions were playing in London.[74] The story has been adapted for film and television more
than any of Dickens's other works.[95] In 1901 it was produced as Scrooge, or,
Marley's Ghost, a silent black-and-white
British film; it was one of the first known adaptations of a Dickens work on
film, but it is now largely lost.[96] The story was adapted in 1923 for BBC
radio.[97] The story has been adapted to other media, including opera,
ballet, animation, stage musicals and a BBC mime production starring Marcel
Marceau.[98]
Davis
considers the adaptations have become better remembered than the original. Some
of Dickens's scenes—such as visiting the miners and lighthouse keepers—have
been forgotten by many, while other events often added—such as Scrooge visiting
the Cratchits on Christmas Day—are now thought by many to be part of the
original story. Accordingly, Davis distinguishes between the original text and
the "remembered version".[99]
Legacy
The
phrase "Merry Christmas" had been around for many years – the earliest known
written use was in a letter in 1534 – but Dickens's use of the phrase in A
Christmas Carol popularised it among the Victorian public.[100] The exclamation "Bah!
Humbug!" entered popular use in the
English language as a retort to anything sentimental or overly festive;[101] the name "Scrooge" became used as a designation
for a miser, and was added to the Oxford English Dictionary as such in 1982.[102]
In
the early 19th century the celebration of Christmas was associated in Britain
with the countryside and peasant revels, disconnected to the increasing
urbanisation and industrialisation taking place. Davis considers that in A
Christmas Carol, Dickens showed that Christmas could be celebrated in towns
and cities, despite increasing modernisation.[103] The modern observance of Christmas is largely the result of
a mid-Victorian revival of the holiday. The Oxford
Movement of the 1830s and 1840s had produced
a resurgence of the traditional rituals and religious observances associated
with Christmastide
and, with A Christmas Carol, Dickens captured the zeitgeist while he reflected and reinforced his vision of Christmas.[104]
Dickens
advocated a humanitarian focus of the holiday,[105] which influenced several aspects of Christmas that are
still celebrated in Western culture, such as family gatherings, seasonal food
and drink, dancing, games and a festive generosity of spirit.[106][n
14] The historian Ronald
Hutton writes that Dickens "linked
worship and feasting, within a context of social reconciliation".[107]
The
novelist William Dean Howells, analysing several of Dickens's Christmas stories,
including A Christmas Carol, considered that by 1891 the "pathos
appears false and strained; the humor largely horseplay; the characters
theatrical; the joviality pumped; the psychology commonplace; the sociology
alone funny".[108][109] The writer James
Joyce considered that Dickens took a
childish approach with A Christmas Carol, to produce a gap between the
naïve optimism of the story, and the realities of life at the time.[109]
Ruth
Glancy, a professor of English literature, states that the largest impact of A
Christmas Carol was the influence felt by individual readers.[110] In early 1844 The Gentleman's Magazine attributed a rise of charitable giving in Britain to
Dickens's novella;[111] in 1874, Robert Louis Stevenson, after reading Dickens's Christmas books, vowed to give
generously to those in need;[112] and Thomas Carlyle expressed a generous hospitality by
hosting two Christmas dinners after reading the book.[113] In 1867 one American businessman was so moved by attending
a reading, that he closed his factory on Christmas Day and sent every employee
a turkey,[74] while in the early years of the 20th century Maud
of Wales – the Queen
of Norway – sent gifts to London's crippled
children signed "With Tiny Tim's Love".[114] On the novella, the author G.
K. Chesterton wrote "The beauty and blessing
of the story ... lie in the great furnace of real happiness that glows
through Scrooge and everything around him. ... Whether the Christmas
visions would or would not convert Scrooge, they convert us."[115]
Davis,
analysing the changes made to adaptations over time, sees changes to the focus
of the story and its characters to reflect mainstream thinking of the period.
While Dickens's Victorian audiences would have viewed the tale as a spiritual
but secular parable, in the early 20th century it became a children's story,
read by parents who remembered their parents reading it when they were younger.
In the lead-up to, and during, the Great
Depression, Davis identifies that while some
see the story as a "denunciation of capitalism, ...most read it as a
way to escape oppressive economic realities".[116] The film versions of the 1930s were different in the UK and
US. British-made films showed a traditional telling of the story, while US-made
works showed Cratchit in a more central role, escaping the depression caused by
European bankers and celebrating what Davis calls "the Christmas of the
common man".[117] In the 1960s, Scrooge was sometimes portrayed as a Freudian
figure wrestling with his past. By the 1980s he was again set in a world of
depression and economic uncertainty.[117]
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