Charles Dickens was recently described, in a book by Les Standiford and a movie by Indian director Bharat Nalluri, as “the man who invented Christmas.” That is an exaggeration; Dickens did not invent Christmas, but his 1843 masterpiece, “A Christmas Carol,” went a long way toward transforming the holiday from the thinly Christianized pagan bacchanalia—so debasing that the Puritan-influenced “long parliament” banned it in the mid-17th Century—to a truly Christian observance that the Protestant Anglophone world of the mid-19th Century could wholeheartedly celebrate.
Dickens’ 100-page novella features “Ebenezer Scrooge,” a heartless miser whose vaguely described business seems to involve usuriously lending money. Scrooge has no regard for anything other than money, no interests beyond his personal financial gain.
But on the night of Christmas Eve, Scrooge is visited by four spirits, the first being that of his deceased partner, Jacob Marley. Marley is bound by a long chain of his own making—“I wear the chain I forged in life, I made it link by link, and yard by yard”—and is doomed to wander among his fellow creatures for all eternity, because while he was alive he never cared for anyone but himself—"I cannot rest, I cannot stay, I cannot linger anywhere. . . . In life, my spirit never roved beyond the narrow limits of our money-changing hole; and weary journeys lie before me!” Marley warns Scrooge that he will suffer the same fate, and that Scrooge’s chain is much longer than Marley’s, Scrooge having lengthened his during the seven years since Marley passed away.
Scrooge is then visited by “The Ghost of Christmas Past,” who reviews with Scrooge his childhood at a boarding school, his apprenticeship under the generous, jovial “Fezziwig,” and his engagement to a poor, dowery-less young lady, which she breaks off, with his too readily given consent, when she sees how avarice has changed him, how a “golden idol” has displaced her in his heart.
The “Ghost of Christmas Present” shows how Christmas was then being celebrated in England among the various classes, including how the family of Scrooge’s clerk, Bob Cratchit, are not only content but joyful with the modest Christmas celebration Cratchit is able to afford on his pitiful salary of 15 shillings a week. Then, without a pause, the Ghost of Christmas Future” shows Scrooge, to his growing horror, that people will react positively to his death.
When the final ghost leaves him in his bedchamber, Scrooge is a changed man, ready to be generous and charitable with his money, sociable with his nephew, Fred, (and Fred’s dowry-less wife), kind to his clerk, Bob Cratchit, and a second father to Cratchit’s crippled son, Tiny Tim. In the book’s final paragraph, we are told that Scrooge knew how to keep Christmas, and kept it well the rest of his life, having no need of further frightening visits:
“He had no further intercourse with Spirits, but lived upon the Total Abstinence Principle [this is a joke based upon avoiding another type of “spirits,” hard liquor] ever afterward; and it was always said of him, that he knew how to keep Christmas well, if any man alive possessed the knowledge. May that be truly said of us, and all of us! And so, as Tiny Tim observed, God bless Us, every one!”
“A Christmas Carol” has become almost as closely identified with Christmas as the Christmas tree. Dickens can be said to have “invented” Christmas in its Protestant dimensions because the central message of “A Christmas Carol” is what evangelical Christians refer to as “sanctification,” which means to become a better, more Christlike person. The message of “A Christmas Carol” is that it is not enough to be “a good man of business”; one must be kind, charitable, and actively involved in helping people and making the world a better place to live in.
Some Adventists may be put off “A Christmas Carol” because Dickens uses “spirits” in his parable. But only Jacob Marley’s ghost is the ghost of a dead man; the other three are not ghosts in that sense, but are, at the least, angelic messengers. They stand in for God or for Christ. This is clear in a passage, not often depicted in the movie versions of “A Christmas Carol,” in which Dickens condemns, in no uncertain terms, those who agitate for Sunday Laws.
As the “Ghost of Christmas Present” is conducting Scrooge on a tour of Christmas Day London, circa 1843, they see a bakery selling Christmas treats. Scrooge is reminded that people of his day who did not have access to a kitchen would often take their food to a bakery for heating; hence the bakeries became a sort of proto-restaurant in which the poorer classes could have their food heated, then sit down and eat a hot meal. But Scrooge is also reminded that some people want to force the bakeries to close on Sunday, which was the only day off for many working-class Londoners:
“Spirit,” said Scrooge, after a moment’s thought, “I wonder [why] you, of all the beings in the many worlds about us, should desire to cramp these people’s opportunities of innocent enjoyment.”
“I!” cried the Spirit.
“You would deprive them of their means of dining every seventh day, often the only day on which they can be said to dine at all,” said Scrooge, “wouldn’t you?”
“I!” cried the Spirit.
“You seek to close these places on the Seventh Day,” said Scrooge. “And it comes to the same thing.”
“I seek!” exclaimed the Spirit.
“Forgive me if I am wrong. It has been done in your name, or at least in that of your family,” said Scrooge.
“There are some upon this earth of yours,” returned the Spirit, “who claim to know us, and who do their deeds of passion, pride, ill will, hatred, envy, bigotry, and selfishness in our name, who are as strange to us, and all our kith and kin, as if they had never lived. Remember that, and charge their doings on themselves, not us.”
Scrooge promised that he would and they went on, invisible, as they had been before, into the suburbs of the town.
Note how the “Ghost of Christmas Present” is anxious that the deeds of the Sunday law agitators should not be charged to him “or his kin,” meaning the Christmases that had preceded this one. Dickens’ pointed message is that those who want Sunday laws are not acting in the true spirit of Christmas nor, indeed, in the true spirit of Christ.
The chief Sunday law agitator of Dickens’ day was Sir Andrew Agnew (1793-1849). Agnew was a Member of Parliament for Wigtownshire from 1830 to 1837, and pressed for the banning of all secular labor on Sunday. He introduced four Sabbath Observance Bills in the House of Commons, none of which became law. On his third attempt, in 1836, Dickens published a scathing essay called, “Sunday Under Three Heads.” This, obviously, was an issue near and dear to Dickens’ heart, and he invested the time necessary to write a tract opposing Sunday laws.
“A Christmas Carol” was written seven years later, and six years after Agnew had resigned from parliament without having successfully enacted a Sunday law, yet the issue still rankled Dickens, hence we see this reference to it in his great Christmas novella.
The only movie version I’ve seen refer to this passage is Robert Zemeckis’ 2009 animated version starring Jim Carrey, Gary Oldman, Colin Firth, Robin Wright Penn, Bob Hoskins, and Cary Elwes. By coincidence, I recently re-read the book, for the first time in over 30 years, and then a couple of days later watched Zemeckis’ 2009 version and noticed the reference. Here was the dialogue in that movie:
Scrooge: “These poor people have no means with which to heat their food, yet you seek to close the only place where they can warm their meat or meals every seventh day.”
GoCP: “Hear me, Scrooge, there are some upon this earth of yours who claim to know me and my brothers, and do their deeds of selfishness and ill will in our name. But these so-called men of the cloth are as strange to me and my kin as if they never lived. Charge their doings to them, not us.”
Scrooge: “Aye. I will.”
Now that I know the passage is in the book, and is in at least one motion picture version of the story, I will look closely for it in other filmed versions.
For me, “A Christmas Carol” is an indispensable part of the Christmas season. I try to watch at least one version of it every year. The fact that Dickens was a strong opponent of Sunday laws, and put that issue in the book, is just another reason to love it.