Interpreting A Christmas Carol

During a recent online discussion of whether Dickens' A Christmas Carol is really a "great activist story for the Working Class" (imagine an adaptation inspired by Occupy Wall Street), I was asked offline to post my opinion of the book, by someone who isn't familiar with it.  This seems a reasonable thing to do on Christmas Eve.

For those not familiar with the story:  Ebenezer Scrooge is a very rich and successful Victorian businessman, not noted for his philanthropy.  ("Are there no prisons?  Are there no workhouses?")  On Christmas Eve he is visited by the ghost of his dead business partner, Jacob Marley - who tells him that he (Marley) is damned forever, and he (Scrooge) will also be damned forever unless he changes his ways.  Marley has arranged for Scrooge to be visited by the Ghosts of Christmas Past, Present, and Yet to Come, as a way to encourage him to change.  In the course of the visits he does change, and the book ends happily.  Terrible synopsis.

First of all, if you really have never read this book, read it.  It isn't long, it's available at every library, and it's a world classic.

Second, although the book is full of poor working people being treated poorly by the rich, the book isn't about them.  They're there because that was the world Scrooge lived in.  If you want a slightly different take on the same period, read the detective stories by Ann Perry, especially the ones about William Monk - they're set in the 1860s, about 20 years after Dickens' book, but it is the same world.

The center of A Christmas Carol is Ebenezer Scrooge, who has great wealth, but no happiness and no friends, at least in the sense we usually speak of friends.  He is tolerated at best and feared at worst, even by his relatives.  All his adult life he has focused on himself, his wealth, and his mastery (he's clearly proud of his skill at business).  At the peak of his career, that's all he has.  The ghostly intervention of Jacob Marley is meant to give him a second chance - a chance to reconsider whether his wealth and power are really so valuable that he should devote all his attention to them.

The three Ghostly Visitors show Scrooge events from Christmases in his past, from the Christmas being celebrated at the time by people he knows, and from a Christmas which may be celebrated in the near future.  In the course of all this, Scrooge changes his mind about charity and compassion - as Dickens means him to do.  In changing his mind, he changes his present and his future, and is happily absorbed into a society that values him for his willingness to be charitable.  I don't mean that he's willing to give away money, although he does; I mean that he comes to view other people, poor people, as human beings like himself ("fellow passengers to the grave"), worthy of his compassion and his help.  In Dickens' day, people still understood "charity" as being derived from caritas, or altruistic love of others.

The real statement of A Christmas Carol is that the worst of us can change.  No matter how evil we are, if we truly choose to do so, we can become something better.

I'm on thin ice here, because I haven't reread the book yet this year; but the really interesting thing about it is how "non-Christian" it is.  I don't recall that Scrooge changes because he's what we would now call "born again."  There's no mention of accepting Jesus as his savior.  Jesus is mentioned, if at all, in passing as a model of how a compassionate man would act.  Scrooge is "saved" because he chooses to change, and does change.  It is a story of personal redemption, after what must be the weirdest intervention in fiction.

Literary Echos

I've taken to frequenting my local library, largely because I'm running out of space for new purchased books.  (Someday I must prune.  After the surgery.)  Since the library has a complete bound set of Agatha Christie, I've been going through the ones I didn't buy - I have a fairly complete set of Hercule Poirots, and a lot of Miss Marples, but I never bought Tommy and Tuppence, or the non series books she wrote.  So on my last pass I picked up The Man in the Brown Suit, and it gave me a revelation.

Let me digress - there is a reason for this.  Another favorite detective series of mine is Elizabeth Peters' Amelia Peabody books, the increasingly outrageous tales of archaeology and intrigue in Egypt, anytime between the late 1880s and World War I.  In the first book, Crocodile on the Sandbank, Amelia introduces herself as the practical and down-to-earth daughter of an unworldly scholar father, who leaves her to deal with "the butcher and the baker," and all the other details of daily life, while he writes arcane papers on Egyptology.  Eventually he dies (it takes his club 3 days to realize it) and leaves Amelia stinking rich, and off she goes on an adventure.  This book was published in 1975.  Amelia's description of her father and herself has always been one of my favorite sequences, and I've read the book at least a dozen times.

So I sat down with The Man in the Brown Suit, and read the chapter about the exotic Russian dancer in Paris; and suddenly the scene shifts to England, and I'm listening to the first-person narrative of a young woman named Anne Beddingfeld, the down-to-earth and practical daughter of an unworldly scholar father, who leaves her to deal with "the butcher and the baker..."  Does this sound familiar to you?  It stopped me in my tracks.  It made me laugh out loud.  I haven't compared the two books word for word, but the passages where Anne and Amelia introduce themselves and describe their fathers are so similar that I was floored.  The rest of The Man in the Brown Suit isn't at all like Crocodile on the Sandbank - for one thing, Anne's father leaves her flat broke, and she goes off to South Africa, not Egypt - but I feel I've met the spiritual ancestor of Amelia Peabody.  And she was created in 1924 by one of England's great crime writers.

The Man in the Brown Suit answered another question for me.  My crime library contains a 1936 hardback edition of Christie's Cards on the Table, which is basically a Hercule Poirot novel, in which a quartet of detectives (Poirot, Superintendent Battle, Ariadne Oliver, and a Colonel Race) are matched with a quartet of people who may or may not be murderers - who knows?  They all sit down to play bridge, and then the host is murdered.  Now, from my reading of Poirot novels, I was well acquainted with him, and Mrs. Oliver, and Superintendent Battle, they're all regulars - but where did this Colonel Race come from?  (Supposed to be something in the Secret Service, you know.)  Well, he came from The Man in the Brown Suit - he's a major character in it.  I'll have to see if I can find any more about him.