A Christmas Carol, the Chimes & the Cricket on the Hearth Page 3

  “Spirit! are they yours?” Scrooge could say no more.

  “They are Man’s,” said the Spirit, looking down upon them. “And they cling to me, appealing from their fathers. This boy is Ignorance. This girl is Want. Beware of them both, and all of their degree, but most of all beware this boy, for on his brow I see that written which is Doom, unless the writing be erased” (p. 66).

  Dickens is uncompromising, not only in his portrayal of the degradations of poverty, but in his assertion that these disasters, Ignorance and Want, are the creation of human beings. Children are not born to be like Ignorance or Want; they are forced, shriveled, degraded into those states by our actions. By “vain man in his little brief authority” are these monsters created. They are our responsibility. Prisons and workhouses are not solutions; they do not address the real problem, the creation of Ignorance and Want—they are merely containers. Falsity brings death; only acting out of real compassion, thinking of other people, especially the poor—as Scrooge’s nephew says, “as if they really were fellow-passengers to the grave, and not another race of creatures bound on other journeys” (p. 12)—will bring us to any humane, just, or Christian means of addressing the trials of the world.

  We are not as horrified as Victorian readers would have been by what Scrooge sees under the aegis of the Ghost of Christmas Yet to Come. In the age of organ donors, we are not particularly disturbed by the theft of possessions from a dead man, even from his very body. But I have yet to meet anyone who has not found the Spirit itself, dark and hooded and visible only through a “spectral hand,” extremely creepy. Nonetheless, the point in the story is not so much how the reader is moved, but how Scrooge is moved. With Christmas Present, Scrooge truly came to appreciate the camaraderie of humanity, the joy of living, the necessity of compassion; with Christmas Yet to Come Scrooge is plunged back among people who have no human connections, who think of nothing but their immediate monetary (or dietary) benefit: “I don’t mind going if a lunch is provided.... But I must be fed” (p. 69).

  And it is important to note that Scrooge promises alteration of himself without any guarantee of salvation. He promises to change, not to save himself from death or even misery, but because he has come to understand that his alteration is the right thing to do; compassion for others ought to be his course because that is the humane, the truly moral, thing to do, not because of what he might get out of it. He enters that new world, laughing, “as merry as a school-boy,” giving generously, playing his joke upon Bob Cratchit, without any guarantees or insurance policies. He reaches out to his nephew without any sureties of his reception. He sees the emptiness of life as he had “lived” it for far too long. He is redeemed.

  The Chimes

  The Chimes can be a painful story to read. Its protagonist, Trotty Veck, is a poor man, and in Dickens’s world we are accustomed to feeling sympathy for the poor. Yet Trotty is the villain of the piece. He is not the most villainous character, but it is his attitude that leads to death and destruction, more than the actions of the infamous Mr. Filer or the Member of Parliament or the Alderman who speaks so eloquently what Trotty Veck thinks: Anyone who is poor is inherently bad.

  Similarly, the MP who “understands” the poor obviously does nothing of the sort—he arrives at his position with his attitudes already constructed, and all his supposed “understanding” is nothing but a working out of his attitudes. Even when he has the poor directly in front of him, in the person of Trotty Veck, he cannot see what is obvious, nor sympathize with suffering, nor show any comprehension of the actual lives of the people he supposedly represents and “champions.”

  It is clear from letters Dickens wrote about the construction of the story that he liked Trotty Veck. Yet Dickens had no hesitation in haunting him with goblins and taking him severely to task, casting him in the role of The Man Who Needs to be Corrected (Scrooge’s role in A Christmas Carol). The goblin-vision of Trotty’s daughter flinging herself and her child into the Thames to drown may be a nightmare, but it springs from Trotty reading in the newspaper about a woman who did so and presuming that this proves that the poor are indeed born irredeemably bad. Only a “bad” or “evil” person could commit such an act. Dickens had no tolerance for such an attitude, and he made it clear that it is the attitude itself, more than actual misery, that is so insupportable and so destructive. The Chimes is very much a story of the power of mental oppression. People can survive poverty—indeed, it is possible for the spirits of the poor even to thrive—but they cannot survive being treated as brutes, as undeserving of joy or romance or rest.

  Victorians, in general, were convinced that there were a few “deserving” poor who ought to be helped, but that most in poverty were “undeserving.” The determination of who was in which category lay not with those in the lower class, but with the already well-off and powerful. People outside the cycle of suffering decided who was “really” suffering. In neither case, however, was anything much done about it. The laws passed to “deal” with poverty were little more than ways of controlling masses of starving and desperate people, ways of keeping them out of sight of the middle class. The treadmill of the Treadmill Law had ceased to be any sort of actual engine; it was a mere device for containing and occupying the bodies of the unfortunate.

  In the early 1900s the women working in the weaving mills of Lawrence, Massachusetts, went on strike. They worked sixteen-hour days for barely enough money to keep themselves clothed and fed just shy of starvation. Their slogan was that they wanted “Bread—and Roses, Too.” The Chimes is about the real need of humans to have something more than mere survival in order actually to survive, and how the simple fact of being human is all the “deserving” one ought to have to show. No one is irredeemably bad—except perhaps those who choose to be blind to the reality of human life about them.

  The Cricket on the Hearth

  The theme of deceit, or blindness, runs strong in The Cricket on the Hearth. All the characters deceive themselves or some other character. Some self-deceits are harmless, such as that of the Carrier, John Peerybingle, thinking he “eats but little,” when his appetite flatly contradicts him. But some of the best-intentioned deceits are double-edged. Caleb, the poor toy-maker, has lied to his blind daughter, Bertha, for most of her life, to make her think their house is beautiful and their life pleasant, even altering his footsteps to make her think he is well and young. These deceits have given her comfort and pleasure. But to maintain this fiction, Caleb has also lied about their boss and landlord, Tackleton, the owner of the toy factory, a sly, cynical, selfish, and mean-spirited person. Caleb has deceived Bertha so successfully about Tackleton that she has fallen in love with the illusion of Tackleton and is consequently devastated when he announces his imminent marriage to someone else.

  Dickens is unsparing in his condemnation of the ways in which the most vulnerable people are taken advantage of, by society and even by the people who love them and ought to be taking care of them. Caleb has invented the kind Tackleton to spare Bertha the sort of humiliation he himself receives constantly from the man on whom he is dependent. But Caleb himself is almost destroyed by the realization of what he has done to his daughter: “Have I deceived her from her cradle, but to break her heart at last! ” (p. 230). Dot Peerybingle deceives her husband to help a friend, but it almost costs her her marriage. It is the honesty of the Carrier that saves the day: The Carrier recognizes—to the astonishment of his social “better,” Tackleton—that society gives women little or no control over their fates, and that this is unjust. As with the other Christmas stories, extra-normal forces appear, but they do not work the change; instead, they enable the characters to stand outside themselves enough to perceive that to which they have previously been blind.

  Enjoyable (and important) as Christmas is, the central event of Christianity is Easter, the death and resurrection of Jesus. Dickens uses fictional devices—a journey through Scrooge’s life, the stories and dreams of death in The Chimes, the return from
“death” of Dot Peerybingle’s friend and the near-death of the Peerybingle marriage—to act out what Dickens perceived to be the tenets of the Christian message, to join Christmas (God among us) to Easter (God redeeming us) in a way no other writer has done as successfully.

  Katharine Kroeber Wiley has a degree in English literature from Occidental College and writes fiction, poetry, and essays. Her writing has appeared in the scholarly journal Boundary Two and recently in the book Lore of the Dolphin. She has been reading Dickens since she was ten years old and, like him, is a fan of Christmas and what it stands for. She is studying Anglican theology and working on a book about Victorian Christmas writings.

  PREFACE

  The narrow space within which it was necessary to confine these Christmas Stories when they were originally published, rendered their construction a matter of some difficulty, and almost necessitated what is peculiar in their machinery I never attempted great elaboration of detail in the working out of character within such limits, believing that it could not succeed. My purpose was, in a whimsical kind of masque which the good-humour of the season justified, to awaken some loving and forbearing thoughts, never out of season in a Christian land.

  A CHRISTMAS CAROL, IN PROSE.

  BEING A GHOST STORY OF CHRISTMAS

  STAVE ONE.

  Marley’s Ghost.

  Marley was dead, to begin with. There is no doubt whatever about that. The register of his burial was signed by the clergy-man, the clerk, the undertaker, and the chief mourner. Scrooge signed it. And Scrooge’s name was good upon ’Change for anything he chose to put his hand to.

  Old Marley was as dead as a door-nail.

  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.

  Scrooge knew he was dead? Of course he did. How could it be otherwise? Scrooge and he were partners for I don’t know how many years. Scrooge was his sole executor, his sole administrator, his sole assign, his sole residuary legatee, his sole friend, and sole mourner. And even Scrooge was not so dreadfully cut up by the sad event, but that he was an excellent man of business on the very day of the funeral, and solemnized it with an undoubted bargain.

  The mention of Marley’s funeral brings me back to the point I started from. 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. If we were not perfectly convinced that Hamlet’s Father died before the play began, there would be nothing more remarkable in his taking a stroll at night, in an easterly wind, upon his own ramparts, than there would be in any other middle-aged gentleman rashly turning out after dark in a breezy spot—say Saint Paul’s Churchyard for instance—literally to astonish his son’s weak mind.

  Scrooge never painted out Old Marley’s name. There it stood, years afterwards, above the warehouse door: Scrooge and Marley. The firm was known as Scrooge and Marley. Sometimes people new to the business called Scrooge Scrooge, and sometimes Marley, but he answered to both names. It was all the same to him.

  Oh! But he was a tight-fisted hand at the grindstone, Scrooge! a squeezing, wrenching, grasping, scraping, clutching, covetous, old sinner! Hard and sharp as flint, from which no steel had ever struck out generous fire; secret, and self-contained, and solitary as an oyster. The cold within him froze his old features, nipped his pointed nose, shrivelled his cheek, stiffened his gait; made his eyes red, his thin lips blue; and spoke out shrewdly in his grating voice. A frosty rime was on his head, and on his eyebrows, and his wiry chin. He carried his own low temperature always about with him; he iced his office in the dog-days;1 and didn’t thaw it one degree at Christmas.

  External heat and cold had little influence on Scrooge. No warmth could warm, no wintry weather chill him. No wind that blew was bitterer than he, no falling snow was more intent upon its purpose, no pelting rain less open to entreaty. Foul weather didn’t know where to have him. The heaviest rain, and snow, and hail, and sleet, could boast of the advantage over him in only one respect. They often “came down” handsomely, and Scrooge never did.

  Nobody ever stopped him in the street to say, with gladsome looks, “My dear Scrooge, how are you? When will you come to see me?” No beggars implored him to bestow a trifle, no children asked him what it was o’clock, no man or woman ever once in all his life inquired the way to such and such a place of Scrooge. Even the blind-men’s dogs appeared to know him; and when they saw him coming on, would tug their owners into doorways and up courts; and then would wag their tails as though they said, “No eye at all is better than an evil eye, dark master!”

  But what did Scrooge care! It was the very thing he liked. To edge his way along the crowded paths of life, warning all human sympathy to keep its distance, was what the knowing ones call “nuts” to Scrooge.

  Once upon a time—of all the good days in the year, on Christmas Eve—old Scrooge sat busy in his counting-house. It was cold, bleak, biting weather: foggy withal: and he could hear the people in the court outside, go wheezing up and down, beating their hands upon their breasts, and stamping their feet upon the pavement stones to warm them. The city clocks had only just gone three, but it was quite dark already—it had not been light all day—and candles were flaring in the windows of the neighbouring offices, like ruddy smears upon the palpable brown air. The fog came pouring in at every chink and keyhole, and was so dense without, that although the court was of the narrowest, the houses opposite were mere phantoms. To see the dingy cloud come drooping down, obscuring everything, one might have thought that Nature lived hard by, and was brewing on a large scale.

  The door of Scrooge’s counting-house was open, that he might keep his eye upon his clerk, who in a dismal little cell beyond, a sort of tank, was copying letters. Scrooge had a very small fire, but the clerk’s fire was so very much smaller, that it looked like one coal. But he couldn’t replenish it, for Scrooge kept the coal-box in his own room; and so surely as the clerk came in with the shovel, the master predicted that it would be necessary for them to part. Wherefore the clerk put on his white comforter,2 and tried to warm himself at the candle; in which effort, not being a man of strong imagination, he failed.

  “A merry Christmas, uncle! God save you!” cried a cheerful voice. It was the voice of Scrooge’s nephew, who came upon him so quickly that this was the first intimation he had of his approach.

  “Bah!” said Scrooge. “Humbug!”

  He had so heated himself with rapid walking in the fog and frost, this nephew of Scrooge’s, that he was all in a glow; his face was ruddy and handsome; his eyes sparkled, and his breath smoked again.

  “Christmas a humbug, uncle!” said Scrooge’s nephew. “You don’t mean that, I am sure?”

  “I do,” said Scrooge. “Merry Christmas! What right have you to be merry? What reason have you to be merry? You’re poor enough.”

  “Come, then,” returned the nephew, gaily. “What right have you to be dismal? What reason have you to be morose? You’re rich enough.”

  Scrooge having no better answer ready on the spur of the moment, said, “Bah!” again; and followed it up with “Humbug!”

  “Don’t be cross, uncle!” said the nephew.

  “What else can I be,” returned the uncle, “when I live in such a world of fools as this? Merry Christmas! Out upon merry Christmas! What’s Christmas time to you but a time for paying bills without money; a time for finding yourself a year older, and not an hour richer; a time for balancing your books and having every item in ‘em through a round dozen of months presented dead against you? If I could work my will,” said Scrooge indignantly, “every idiot who goes about with ‘Merry Christmas,’ on his lips, should
be boiled with his own pudding, and buried with a stake of holly through his heart. He should! ”

  “Uncle!” pleaded the nephew.

  “Nephew!” returned the uncle, sternly, “keep Christmas in your own way, and let me keep it in mine.”

  “Keep it!” repeated Scrooge’s nephew. “But you don’t keep it.”

  “Let me leave it alone, then,” said Scrooge. “Much good may it do you! Much good it has ever done you!”

  “There are many things from which I might have derived good, by which I have not profited, I dare say,” returned the nephew. “Christmas among the rest. But I am sure I have always thought of Christmas time, when it has come round—apart from the veneration due to its sacred name and origin, if anything belonging to it can be apart from that—as a good time; a kind, forgiving, charitable, pleasant time; the only time I know of in the long calendar of the year, when men and women seem by one consent to open their shut-up hearts freely, and to think of people below them as if they really were fellow-passengers to the grave, and not another race of creatures bound on other journeys. And, therefore, uncle, though it has never put a scrap of gold or silver in my pocket, I believe that it has done me good, and will do me good; and I say, God bless it!”

  The clerk in the tank involuntarily applauded. Becoming immediately sensible of the impropriety, he poked the fire, and extinguished the last frail spark forever.

  “Let me hear another sound from you,” said Scrooge, “and you’ll keep your Christmas by losing your situation. You’re quite a powerful speaker, sir,” he added, turning to his nephew. “I wonder you don’t go into Parliament.”