Why Dickens Needed to “Invent” Christmas
Victorian literature scholar Michael Brooks on A CHRISTMAS CAROL: the story, the holiday, and the social conditions of the time
Returning to the stage December 2 through 27, 2023, and streaming on demand December 15, 2023, through January 7, 2024, Lantern Theater Company is thrilled to again present this original adaptation of Charles Dickens’ A Christmas Carol, created by acclaimed playwright and actor Anthony Lawton in collaboration with Christopher Colucci and Thom Weaver, and presented in partnership with Lawton’s Mirror Theatre Company. With this Searchlight article we welcome guest writer Michael Brooks, retired professor of English Literature at West Chester University. A scholar of Victorian fiction and drama, Brooks has written extensively on how the interaction of economic and technological change on society is represented in literature. His works include John Ruskin and Victorian Architecture; A Walking Tour of Manhattan: A Guidebook to Cast Iron Architecture (with Margot Gayle); The Aesthete as Realist: A Study of the Novels of George Moore; and Subway City: Riding the Trains, Reading New York, which traces the development of the subway from its inception, including how it has been represented in film and art. He has been a featured speaker at multiple Lantern In Conversation programs.
A Christmas Carol unites opposites — Christmas and Scrooge. Both have more complicated stories than is usually believed.
It is sometimes said that Charles Dickens invented the modern Christmas. Not quite. The old twelve-day mid-winter celebration had fallen into disuse in an industrializing England, and the nation’s great landowners were glad to see it go.
Its fading left three distinct attitudes toward the Christmas festival.
One was hostility. Puritans saw its pagan origins and often deplored it as a Papist import. The Presbyterian Scots preferred to celebrate Hogmanay at New Year. Christmas itself did not become a public holiday in Scotland until 1958.
But a greater danger to Christmas was indifference. David Parker, long head of London’s Charles Dickens Museum, surveyed Christmas customs and found that by the 1840s the wealthy and fashionable regarded the holiday as distinctly out-of-fashion and a bit plebeian.
But Parker also shows that the working classes and the growing middle classes adored Christmas. The wealthy could gather the family for a feast any time they wanted. The middle and lower classes could afford to do it only once a year, and they took full advantage of the opportunity.
There was a great meal — centering on a goose or a turkey. There was mistletoe. There were presents for the children. There was the singing of carols and the telling of stories — surprisingly often, Parker found, ghost stories.
So Dickens’ purpose wasn’t to reinvent Christmas. It was to celebrate it in all its comfortably cozy glory. That required feasts and plenty and good cheer. It didn’t necessarily demand a villain.
If Dickens’ Christmas festival belongs to tradition, Scrooge belongs to what historians still call the Hungry Forties. In A Christmas Carol (1843) Dickens uses Christmas to remind his readers of the condition of the poor. His tale belongs on the same shelf as Friedrich Engels’ The Condition of the Working Class in England (1845).
As London grew, its poor had become both more numerous and more visible. Their alarming presence needed to be explained, and Thomas Malthus’ An Essay on the Principle of Population (1798) gave a simple and popular explanation. The growth of the population, he said, would always outrun any increase in the harvests. The result would be a “surplus population” that could only be reduced by famine and disease.
Malthus’ ideas lay behind the new Poor Law of 1834. It was designed to make the welfare system universal, rational, and cheap. It offered relief to those who entered a workhouse while simultaneously making life in the workhouse so unpleasant that few would burden the public purse by actually entering one. Husbands and wives were separated. Grinding physical labor — including hours on a treadmill — was required.
Dickens evokes this situation early in A Christmas Carol. Two charitable businessmen approach Scrooge asking for a donation.
“Many thousands are in want of common necessaries,” they say; “hundreds of thousands are in want of common comforts.”
Scrooge replies with the right-wing buzz words of the time. “Are there no prisons,” he demands. “And the Union workhouses . . . Are they still in operation? . . . The Treadmill and the Poor Law are in full vigour, then?”
Told that conditions in the workhouses are so bad that many would rather die than go there, Scrooge replies that “If they would rather die they had better do it, and decrease the surplus population.”
Dickens then leaves his social theme in abeyance for a while. Scrooge’s fundamental problem is that he is hard-hearted and he isn’t likely to develop a better attitude toward the poor until his personal meanness has been transformed. Accordingly, the Spirit of Christmas Past takes him back to childhood and melts his heart with old memories. Then the second of the three spirits brings him to the universal good cheer of Bob Cratchit’s Christmas feast.
Only when Scrooge has learned to delight in the happiness of others does the spirit challenge him with the miseries of the poor.
First he takes him to a miner’s cottage, then to a lighthouse keeper’s home surrounded by a pounding sea. Finally, when for the first time in decades Scrooge has become cheerful, generous, and light of heart, the spirit challenges him with two children of the poor:
“They were a boy and girl. Yellow, meager, ragged, scowling, wolfish . . . Where graceful youth should have filled their features out and touched them with its freshest tints, a stale and shriveled hand, like that of age, had pinched, and twisted them, and pulled them into shreds. Where angels might have sat enthroned, devils lurked and glared out menacing. No change, no degradation, no perversion of humanity, in any grade, through all the mysteries of wonderful creation, has monsters half so horrible and dread.”
The man who had once recommended a speedy death for the surplus population is now appalled. It is here, even more than when he gives Bob Cratchit a raise, that Scrooge is finally reformed.
More great reading: See other recent articles and interviews on the Lantern Searchlight blog
Lantern Theater Company’s original adaptation of Charles Dickens’ A Christmas Carol returns to the stage December 2–27, 2023, and will be available to stream on demand December 15, 2023, through January 27, 2024. Visit our website for tickets and information.
