Note: This post first appeared on my other blog back in December 2012. It's here to explain why I love "A Christmas Carol" so much.
Folk tales, fairy stories and nursery rhymes are perhaps
the most powerful narratives that we have, because they have been subjected to
the strongest and most stringent editorial processes possible. Over hundreds,
in some cases perhaps thousands, of years, they have been polished clean and
smooth in the telling and the retelling, as one generation hands them on to the
next.
All the rough edges are gone, only plots and characters
that are the most engaging and affecting remain. The collective popular
consciousness is a fine judge of when a story works and when it does not, which
is why the narratives formed in this way have stood the test of time, and why
these tales first heard in childhood are often the ones that stay strongest in
the memory.
It takes a special talent, then – perhaps a unique one –
to consciously and single-handedly create a story so organic, so natural and so
powerful that it feels like a folk
tale.
And yet,
A Christmas Carol did indeed spring from the mind of
Charles Dickens. He was
influenced of course by the world and the society around him, of attitudes and
realities of the early Victorian age; and he had, after a fashion, piloted the
story before, in the
The Story of the Goblins Who Stole a Sexton. No piece of writing is created entirely in
isolation, but when Dickens sat down in the autumn of 1843 and formed the plot
to convey his message, he hit upon something so utterly perfect in every way
that he initiated one of the few folk tales – the only one, perhaps? – with a
very definite date of publication and a single author. Characters who are familiar
touchstones in popular culture to this day, and will remain so for generations
to come – Scrooge, the three spirits, even Tiny Tim; he came up with them all.
These adaptations vary from
the sublime to
the ridiculous, but whatever the heights some of them can reach, there is nothing
that can match the joy and the sheer excellence of the prose in the original.
If you’ve never read it,
I beseech you to try it – you may have some idea of
Dickens as being overly long and ‘difficult’, but
A Christmas Carol remains perhaps his most readable work. You can
polish it off in an afternoon, it has a lightness of touch that comes perhaps
from his driving sense of purpose and message, and from not being weighed down by
having to be published in serial form.
A
Christmas Carol, unlike his longer works, first appeared all of a piece; a
perfect whole, ideal for consumption in a single sitting.
In
an early entry on this blog, I played with an analogy
of writers as footballers, musing that I was more of a Steve Claridge than a
Maradona or a Pele.
A Christmas Carol
shows why Dickens was clearly Maradona, Pele, Best, Messi and anyone else you
may care to mention all rolled into one. Take, just as an example, the initial description
of Scrooge’s house:
“They were a gloomy suite of rooms, in a
lowering pile of building up a yard, where it had so little business to be,
that one could scarcely help fancying it must have run there when it was a
young house, playing at hide-and-seek with other houses, and have forgotten the
way out again.”
The text is fairly littered with gems such as this,
scattered so frequently through the story that each page is turned with the
delight of a walk in the woods where you continually find diamonds underfoot. It
actually feels a disservice to lower
A
Christmas Carol to the level of being a mere “text”, but there we go; I am
an English Literature graduate, after all.
The
very first page alone must surely be one of the
greatest single pages of any piece of prose fiction in the English literary
canon. In the pantheon of great opening lines, Dickens is perhaps better known
for “
It was the best of times, it was the worst of times...” but that doesn’t set up the mystery and wonder of the
story anywhere near as well as the
Carol’s
“
Marley was dead, to begin with.”
The very first sentence – this chap Marley is dead, but
only to begin with? How can there be any further story to come after that...?
Further down the page we have Dickens’s clarification of
Marley’s status: “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.” In between, we’ve had Dickens’s
playful musings on the nature of one of the great English similes; he compares
Marley to being “as dead as a door-nail,”
and then points out that:
“Mind! I don't mean to say that I know, of
my own knowledge, what there is particularly dead about a door-nail. I might
have been inclined, myself, to regard a coffin-nail as the deadest piece of
ironmongery in the trade. But the wisdom of our ancestors is in the simile; and
my unhallowed hands shall not disturb it, or the Country's done for. You will
therefore permit me to repeat, emphatically, that Marley was as dead as a
door-nail.”
To use another footballing analogy, Dickens is – as my colleague
Rob Butler would perhaps put it – “unplayable.”
If Charles Dickens had never written another word after A Christmas Carol – or indeed, another
word except for it – then such is its
quality, he would still be famous. Such is the power of the book that it has
even been credited with inventing, or at least helping to invent, the modern
celebration of Christmas as we know it in the English-speaking world. It is a
high watermark, not simply for Dickens, but for all of literature – and even
the man himself was never again to match it. What perhaps makes this all the more amazing is that Dickens wrote the Carol quickly, and because he needed the money. Having said that, he clearly had some idea he was on to a good thing, as he later related how he would pace the streets of London at night, forming the storyline in his head, laughing and crying at the wonder of what he was concocting.
After the instant success of the Carol, Dickens did his best to capture the lightning in a bottle. For each of the following three Christmases, and again in 1848, he
produced another Christmas book. None of them come anywhere close to the Carol, however, and even had they not
been overshadowed by it, they would probably still have been pretty much
forgotten among his lesser works.
The Chimes
feels too much like an artist doing a cover version of his own hit record;
The Cricket on the Hearth verges too far
into the territory of the twee fairytale, although the construction of its
title did inspire a much lesser scribbler in
the titling of one of his own works many years later;
The Battle of Life was poorly-regarded by even Dickens himself, although the first two or
three pages are worth a look, as Dickens rather startlingly seems to invent
First World War literature about 70 years early; and
The Haunted Man is a stodgy and confusing read.
None of Dickens’s attempts to replicate the success of A Christmas Carol can ever cheapen the
impact of the original, however. It is a story for the ages, and in these more
secular times it has perhaps in some quarters become the Christmas story. After all, it is just as believable, and a
much more satisfying read, than the tale to which Christians cling.
Indeed, it would not surprise me if, in the future, there
are children who understand Christmas to be the season when we celebrate the
redemption of Ebenezer Scrooge. And why not? If the genius and sentiment of A Christmas Carol isn’t worth a day of
praise and commemoration, then I don’t know what is.
