“Dickens dead? Then will Father Christmas die too?”
When a little girl in the 19th-century streets of London received news of Charles Dickens’ death, she wondered: Could there be Christmas without the one who recorded its stories? For her, Dickens represented the Christmas spirit. For many of us — through his classic novella A Christmas Carol — he represents the Christmas spirit, too.
Dickens had a particular vision of the good life on Christmas morning. He exhorted, “Nearerer and closer to our hearts be the Christmas spirit, which is the spirit of active usefulness, perseverance, cheerful discharge of duty, kindness, and forbearance.” He repeats this exhortation in his preface to A Christmas Carol, admitting his desire to “to awaken some loving and forbearing thoughts, never out of season in a Christian land.”
Finding the Spirit of Christmas
Karen Swallow Prior reminds us that literature “forms our visions of the good life” in her book On Reading Well. Dickens wished Christmas to shape and transform our vision of the good life, which included the sacred acts of giving and receiving.
Dickens knew what it was to suffer. Poverty ate away at his younger years. His dad was imprisoned for debt so he worked in a factory as a child, Leland Ryken writes in his guide to Dickens’ work. Viewed as a “champion of the poor” by his contemporaries, Dickens’ vision for the good life is unmistakable: If one has much, goodness is giving generously, while wickedness entails giving nothing at all.
Dickens painted this moral vision in many of his Christmas stories, but A Christmas Carol is familiar to most, in which three spirits visit Ebenezer Scrooge, a selfish and stingy man, and he is transformed. As readers, we’re left with a subtle but important choice: We can choose to live for ourselves and receive what we’re due, or, we can choose to live for others and receive what we’re due. Through the story of Scrooge’s life, Dickens encourages us to choose wisely.
The chasm between those two ways of living — for ourselves or for others — stays with readers of Dickens’ work. As Prior writes in her discussion of how literature truly can shape our vision of a good life, “we must imagine what virtue looks like in order to live virtuously,” and through Scrooge, we see what vice looks like in order to avoid it. Who is Scrooge before his transformation? When cheery carolers come to his door, he scares them away. He argues with his good-natured clerk about time off even for Christmas day. And when asked for an offering for the poor, Scrooge refuses, remarking that the death of the poor could “decrease the surplus population.”
When Scrooge’s deceased business partner, Marley, visits him from the afterlife, this spirit arrives dragging chains and eager to explain his plight. When a man does not give his life for the good of fellow men, his spirit is condemned to walk the earth and observe all the ways he could have brought joy to others. And the spirit’s chains? Marley forged each through his wickedness; now he’s forced to bear these chains forever in death. Invisible to the human eye, the spirit reveals, Scrooge has his own chains.
Suddenly, there is chaotic mourning outside — reminiscent of the wails of the outer darkness (Matt 25:30) — and Marley joins in. In a moment, Scrooge’s eyes are opened to the spirit world. Phantoms in chains move restlessly through the city, hellishly lamenting their inability to do good for those in need. This is Dickens’ own rendering of eternal chains and utter darkness (Jude 6; 2 Pet 1:7).
What life deserves this judgment? A life that refuses to love a neighbor. A life that pursues gold instead of the Golden Rule (Mark 12:31). A life that renounces the Christmas spirit that Dickens held so dear. In other words, a scrooge.
Is There Hope for a Scrooge?
Scrooge’s transformation does not happen all at once. The Ghost of Christmas Past invites the first hints of change as he reminds Scrooge of the goodness of childhood. Yes, Scrooge lived some lonely years, but he also lived full, happy ones, too.
The Ghost of Christmas Present comes next, and everywhere he visits, he brings gaiety with him. Games, feasts, families, friends, and songs fill home after home that Scrooge visits with this spirit. This taste of happy Christmases furthers the transformation in his heart.
Yet Scrooge would not be forever changed without a visit from the final spirit, the Ghost of Christmas Future. Alongside this last phantom, he visits the darkened room of a dead man, pilfered even of the bed curtains and sheets that once shielded his body. Outside, conversations suggest this mysterious corpse is all but forgotten — that no one truly loved him. Who was this man? Scrooge is desperate to know. The ghost then leads him to a grave, etched with his own name, EBENEZER SCROOGE. Scrooge, in disbelief, sees the ghost point at him; Scrooge is the man.
In this moment, remorse makes way for repentance, and Scrooge vows to honor Christmas in his heart. Scrooge needed to face his own death so that he might live. His transformed life is a work of the supernatural and not the natural. Scrooge needed three spirits to wake him from the dead and release his hellish chains.
Living in the Light of Christmas
What does it look like to live in light of the Christmas spirit? What is Dickens’ vision of the good life?
Scrooge wakes on Christmas morning a new man. He sends the largest turkey to his poor clerk’s home, generously cares for an errand boy, and visits his nephew’s home to celebrate the day. And his promises to care for those in need. He was “better than his word. He did it all, and infinitely more,” Dickens writes. His business is now mankind and common welfare: “charity, mercy, forbearance, and benevolence” [are], all, [his] business.”
With Scrooge, Dickens moves us readers closer to living in light of the Christmas spirit, but how? And what “light” could this be? Ryken urges us “neither [to] underestimate nor overestimate the Christian element in Dickens’ work.” Dickens shows us a biblical vision of the good life, and he teaches us to imagine what our own lives might be if transformed by the Christmas spirit. And the truth alluded to here is the one to which we cling in every season: Hope entered our world, not as a specter from the dead but as the infant of heaven.
