“A DICKENS OF A CAROL” PREPARED FOR THE HOPKINSVILLE ATHENAEUM HOPKINSVILLE, KY BY JOHN H. FREER DECEMBER 3, 1998 OUTLINE I. INTRODUCTION II. THE TIMES III. THE MAN-CHARLES DICKENS IV. THE STORY V. AN ANALYSIS OF THE STORY VI. CLOSING : “GOD BLESS US EVERYONE” As a young boy, I was introduced to Charles Dickens immortal tale, “A Christmas Carol” or as Dickens always referred to it “The Carol” by way of this World War II era Columbia Recording Company recording in which the part of Scrooge was read by the preeminent English actor, Basil Rathbone. Growing up in the isolated northern Ohio County town of Fordsville the radio, magazines and the few 78 RPM records we owned formed an important way in which we occupied many a night and afforded us contact with a world of ideas outside our ordinary realm of existence. As I grew older A Christmas Carol became almost imprinted in my brain and became in integral part of my Christmas celebration. No Christmas was complete or truly celebrated until I had heard the Basil Rathbone recording as least one time and heard phrases like, “Bah, Humbug” or “Are there no prisons; are there no workhouses?” or the immortal, “God Bless Us; God Bless Us Everyone!” Later it became a tradition to listen to it sometime on Christmas Day. As I thought of this evenings paper and Christmas again and again I was drawn to The Christmas Carol and I wanted to share some of my love of and enthausiasm for Dickens bleoved ghost tale with you, my dear fellow Athenaeum member. I wanted to learn more about this John Charles Huffman Dickens; the time in which The Carol was written, Victorian England, and reflect some on the story and in turn share some of what i learned and found with you this evening. II. THE TIMES The Industrial Revolution began in England in the 1700’s. England had the iron with which to build the machines needed in the factories and the coal to produce the iron and to provide the energy for the steam engines that powered the machines. The industries used the money that fianceers and the banks that grew up provided. They also needed the “counting houses” such as that of Scrooge and Marley, the precursors of today’s accounting firms to keep track of the business trtanscations, copy documents, write letters (remember this was well before even the typewritter, much less the word porcessor). The Industrial Revolution was a turning point in the history of the Western World. It changed the Western world from an agrarian and rural society to an urban and industrial society. It created an enormous increase in production of many kinds of goods and brought many material benefits but it also created a large number of problems such as slums, overcrowding and sickness, poverty, alcohol and later drug abuse, more rampant and more serious crime, inhumane working conditions and air and water pollution. Many, if not most of these problems continue to haunt us to the present day. In England of Dickens time factory wages for men were low and women and children worked 10-12 hours a day at even lower wages than the underpaid men. Most factory workers were desperately poor and could neither read or write and had no chance to learn to do so. Housing in the burgeoning cities could not keep up with the influx of workers from the countryside and severe overcrowding resulted. many people lived in extremely unsanitary conditions which often led to outbreaks of diseases. DICKENS THE MAN John Charles Hoffman Dickens was born February 7, 1811 to John and Elizabeth Dickens in Portsmouth, England. he was the second of eight children. His father was a Navy pay officer and had a relatively good job but he was a poor manager and a spendthrift and eventually lost this job. If Dickens drew material from Victorian Society in crafting the tale he also drew heavily from his own life. In early childhood, he lived happily at the center of what seemed like a solid stable family. Then largely due to his father the family fortunes began to collapse. When he was 2 years old his family moved from Portsmouth to London. When he was 8 years old his father lost his job as Navy pay officer and was later imprisoned in debtor’s prison. Young Charles had to drop out of school. he began to run errands for his father who was in debtor’s prison. He also pawned his and his family belongings to stay alive and at one point pawned his bed and a chair and table that belonged to him. It was at this time that he began to work in a “blackening” (shoe polish) factory pasting labels on shoe polish cans. Dickens, a most sensitive and brilliant boy was put to work with men and boys with no education and no prospects at all. It was the grimmest period in his life and he never forgot and never forgave. Dickens attended school off and on until he was 14 years old when he dropped out never to return. In 1828 he began to write as a newspaper reporter specializing in reporting on Parliament. His work as a reporter helped him to listen carefully to conversations and learn to capture his characters speech realistically. It also helped him to learn to write quickly and clearly. In 1836 at the age of 24 he achieved his first literary fame with “The Posthumous Papers of the Pickwick Club.” In 1836 he married Catherine Hogarth. Catherine was a good woman but only possessed average intelligence. The marriage was an unhappy one and it was thought he loved Catherine’s sister, Mary more than he loved Catherine. Catherine had ten children by him before, in 1858, he separated from her and had an affair with an 18 year old actress. Dickens health began to fail in 1865 and he died from a stroke on June 18, 1870. At the time “The Carol” was written Dickens was 30 years old and already England’s best known and loved novelist but he was angry. Angry with the poverty he saw all around him. Angry at the pathetic resources of the charitable “ragged schools” he saw all around him. Angry that 10 year olds were sent to work 10-12 hours a day dong manual labor in factories and coal mines. Angry at Victorian England’s refusal to take notice And angry most of all, at people like Scrooge who ignored the poverty all around them. In Stave II The First of Three Spirits-The ghost of Christmas Past we are reminded of the young Scrooge, abandoned at school as Dickens was when at 8 years old his family moved from Chatam to London. The young school boy was reading the same books the young Dickens read as a boy, “Robison Crusoe” and “The Arabian Nights.” Tiny Tim, whose death was a possibility right up to the end of the story, is reminiscent of the childhood deaths of his brother and sister; and the Cratchitts, celebrating their poor but loving Christmas are very much like Dickens family before his father lost his job and was imprisoned. The security of the Cratchitt family dependent on the whim of Mr. scrooge, is as frail as that of Dickens own family. A Christmas Carol mirrors that discovery. “Out from the warm bedchamber we fly into the terrible darkness, out from the warm fireside over the desolate storm-swept planes, out from the festive Christmas table to the lost children---”This Boy is Ignorance, this Girl, Want.” For whatever reason Charles Dickens always wanted to be an actor and all through his life was a “soft touch for struggling actors. In later years he finally realized his acting ambitions in his most successful public reading of his works the most popular by far being his reading from The Carol. In his reading of The Carol he mimicked the voices of each character , capturing each different mood and nuance of the character. This came easy for him because of the practice he gained by acting out the parts as he wrote the book and because to a large degree a part of Dickens was embodied in each of the characters in The Carol. He was Bob Cratchitt, the debt-ridden driven drone who could be tender and sentimental and who could put aside his cares to tend a sick child with boisterous games of blind man’s bluff. He was Nephew Fred, the happy party giver and goer, proposing toasts and playing party games; feeling frustrated but then sympathetic for clutching, greedy old Scrooge. He was Jacob Marley, a man of business, who sooner than Scrooge learned that---”mankind was my business.” He was the forlorn, forgotten neglected little boy reading in the attic by a feeble fire. He was the young school boy whose sister, Fran came to take home and who wept because he had to work 12 hours a day pasting labels on shoe polish cans and couldn’t attend a ceremony at Fran’s school when she won a prize. He was the boy who later told a biographer, “I prayed when I went to bed to be lifted out of the humiliation and neglect In which I was in.” In the visit with the Ghost of Christmas Yet to Come the musty pawnshop where his housekeeper is selling his bed curtains and burial shirt he’d visited years before when he pawned his own bed and a few chairs when his father was in debtor’s prison. But most of all, Dickens was Ezenezer Scrooge and like Scrooge was capable of extremes of benevolence and malevolence. He was a soft touch for panhandlers especially, as earlier noted, down-on-their-luck actors but on the other hand he kept a close eye on the family budget and made scenes over hotel bills and quarreled with his publisher. IV. THE STORY “Marely was dead, to begin with, there is no doubt whatever about that. The register of his burial was signed by the clergyman, the clerk , the undertaker and the chief mourner, Scrooge signed it. ...There was no doubt that Marley was dead. this must be distinctly understood, or nothing wonderful can come of the story I am going to relate. ... Scrooge was a squeezing, grasping, scraping, clutching, covetous old sinner! Hard and sharp as flint and solitary as an oyster.” 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...and even Sccrooge was not so dreadfully cut up by the sad event but what he was an excellent man of business on the very day of the funeral, and solomized it with and undoubted bargin. Tha 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 what 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...upon his own ramparts, that there would be in any other middle aged gentleman rambling rashly turning out after dark...literally to astonish his son’s mind. In Shapespear’s play Hamlet the ghost of Hamlet’s father appeared at night to urge hamlet to avenge his father’s murder. had Hamlet’s father been alive it would not have seemed strange to see him walkind. Similarly had Maraley been alive Scrooge wouod not have been surprised to meet him.Seeing marley seven years after his death however was quite another matter.” In this way Dickens began his Ghost of a tale about Christmas. Dickens had a life long interest in ghosts, spirits and magic and often attended seances. Dickens used the terms ghosts and spirits interchangeably in The Carol and are important devices which allow him to intermingle the past the present and the future with people living and dead and even mirror aspects of his own life and personality and his own life experiences. being his reading from The Carol. In his reading of The Carol he mimicked the voices of each character , capturing each different mood and nuance of the character. This came easy for him because of the practice he gained by acting out the parts as he wrote the book and because to a large degree a part of Dickens was embodied in each of the characters in The Carol. He was Bob Cratchitt, the debt-ridden driven drone who could be tender and sentimental and who could put aside his cares to tend a sick child with boisterous games of blind man’s bluff. He was Nephew Fred, the happy party giver and goer, proposing toasts and playing party games; feeling frustrated but then sympathetic for clutching, greedy old Scrooge. He was Jacob Marley, a man of business, who sooner than Scrooge learned that---”mankind was my business.” He was the forlorn, forgotten neglected little boy reading in the attic by a feeble fire. He was the young school boy whose sister, Fran came to take home and who wept because he had to work 12 hours a day pasting labels on shoe polish cans and couldn’t attend a ceremony at Fran’s school when she won a prize. He was the boy who later told a biographer, “I prayed when I went to bed to be lifted out of the humiliation and neglect In which I was in.” In the visit with the Ghost of Christmas Yet to Come the musty pawnshop where his housekeeper is selling his bed curtains and burial shirt he’d visited years before when he pawned his own bed and a few chairs when his father was in debtor’s prison. But most of all, Dickens was Ezenezer Scrooge and like Scrooge was capable of extremes of benevolence and malevolence. He was a soft touch for panhandlers especially, as earlier noted, down-on-their-luck actors but on the other hand he kept a close eye on the family budget and made scenes over hotel bills and quarreled with his publisher. Dickens dated The Carol from his address on the problems of the poor, given to the Manchester Athenaeum on October 7, 1843. the noted English statesman, Benjamin Disraeli was also a speaker at this Athenaeum. He was struck the goodwill of the working people in his audience and stirred to write his sledgehammer story complete with the Ghost of Christmas Present with its twin huddled children of Ignorance and Want. He addressed this Christmas story to a similarly broad national audience. For several months he had been looking for an appropriate response to the unsettling report released by the “Child Employment Commissioning February 1843 about the horrendous working conditions of children in England. Instead of a pamplet on behalf of the “poor man’s child” he decided to write a ghost story of Christmas which he said would be a literary sledgehammer. His literary sledgehammer was published by the end of the year. Dickens had more personal matters for writing the Carol. In the autumn of 1843 the novel he was publishing in monthly parts, Martin Chezzlewit seemed to be losing the audience that he had first attracted during the first seven years of his writing career. Chezzlewit proved so disappointing financially that Dickens publisher Chapman and Hall talked of reducing his monthly payments. He was deeply in debt having borrowed heavily against insurance policies and taken a large advance from his publisher. This threat led Dickens to seek new sources of income for his rapidly growing family, his wife, Kate was expecting their fifth child. He was also supporting his sister in law, Georgetta, his younger brother, Fredrick and his always down-and-out prodigal father. Dickens had feuded with Chapman and Hall over money matters and feared their taking back a percentage of his advance. To try and get back on his feet, Dickens decided to publish The Carol himself as a private venture on a commission basis risking all the losses in hopes of pocketing most of the profit. When the Carol failed to meet his great expectations, he was greatly disappointed. Dickens financial and emotional investment in the Carol intensified his creative process. The writing was well under way by the end of October and his sister in law said she had never seen him more enthralled by a project. He worked with such fervor that he wept and laughed and wept again and excited himself in a moat extra ordinary manner in composition whereof, he walked about the back streets of London fifteen or twenty miles many a night. No person knew central London after dark better than Charles Dickens. He completed the manuscript by the end of November and on December 19th “A Christmas Carol, in prose, Being A Ghost Story of Christmas” was on the stands. The title lettered in gold on the cover , the pages had golden edges and the text was embellished with illustrations by John Leech, four of them hand-colored. These embellishments rather substantially reduced his profits but The Carol remained Dickens Christmas gift to the nation and it was a runaway best seller. V. AN ANALYSIS OF THE STORY One hundred forty five years after Dickens wrote The Carol if remains as well and well loved as it was then. The Carol is still required reading or listening for many families. Paul Davis in his book, “The Lives and Times of Ebenezer Scrooge” lists 254 significant versions of books, plays, radio broadcasts, TV shows, videos and movies that have been made of “The Christmas Carol.” The book is considered by many to be a simplistic morality play and “secular history.” As literature The Carol in hard to categorize. At one level is a ghost tale complete with apparitions that drag chains and pass through walls or fly through the air and transcend time and space. It is also a moral tale about the true meaning of Christmas and a lesson in how to treat other people. It can be seen as a social comment on the poverty, poor working and living conditions of Victorian England. The novel also has psychological elements about the true and false self and is a study in growth and change. As a religious treatise it is about conversion and the triumph of goodness and love over meanness, greed and hate. Early in his life after his family abandoned him and he loses the love of his life, Belle, Ebnezer Scrooge becomes “hard and sharp as flint and as solitary as an oyster. He becomes a grasping miser obsessed with money with hardly an “ounce of human kindness in his breast.” He abhors Christmas not because not because of a lack of Christian faith but because it interrupts business. The first of the four ghosts is Scrooge’s former business partner, Jacob Marley. Marley is the only ghost that Scrooge can banish by his own will power. merely represents Scrooge’s state of mind at the start of The Carol. Marley is the only one of the four spirits that represent a human being so Scrooge is able to handle Marley’s ghost with relative ease. The Ghost of Christmas Past is different all together.. This ghost is the spirit of young Scrooge’s early life and represents Scroog’s memories, all be it largely suppressed and forgotten memories of Scrooge when he was still happy, loving and a true human being. Abandoned by his family and later losing the love of his life, Belle he starts into his descent of miserly, embittered greed. As the spirit leaves him, Scrooge begins to se how he shut out the human race because of his hurt and anger at being abandoned and neglected as a child. The Ghost of Christmas Present represents the world outside Scrooges adult world. This world is a world of love and laughter despite it’s miseries. A world Scrooge has largely denied himself. The reader see the lives of ordinary people like Fred and his wife or of poor people like the Cratchitts who Scrooge has treated as just an employee, a nobody. At this point Cratchitt is a symbol of a world Scrooge can enter if he so chooses. The last and fourth spirit, The Ghost of Christmas Yet to Come is obviously Death, silent, shrouded with no visible part except one bony hand protruding out of its shroud. It represents the future of Scrooge and others like Tiny Time unless heroic intervention and miraculous change, change tantamount to conversion in a religious sense of a flight into health in a mental health sense takes place. At the departure of the last Ghost Scrooge awakens and finds to his amazement and joy that is isn’t too late, than he hasn’t missed Christmas after all and that he can change; that he can increase the happiness of others and in so doing increase his happiness al well. Scrooge ends the story by treating the Ccratchitt’s to a prize goose and by joining his nephew, Fred and his family in their Christmas celebration. Later Scrooge joins children playing games in the streets of London. This last act symbolizes Scrooge’s redeeming his lost childhood and becoming an adult and human being again. There is some question as to how much Scrooge has really changed. he is still interested in money. Interestingly, he decides to spread Christmas joy by generously sharing some of his wealth with the Solicitors when only the day before he had turned them away with his, “Bah! Humbug!” He also shares some of his wealth with his clerk, Bob Cratchitt by increasing his salary. His interest and shared wealth in Tiny Tim, Cratchitt’s son, reverses Tiny Tim’s fate. However, after his “conversion” Scrooge is still a business man only now he is willing to share some of his considerable wealth with others. A Christmas Carol is above all a story of a lonely, greedy man. until the end of the tale the other people are no more real to Scrooge that the four Ghosts who show him the images and scenes. When the old ‘skinflint’ begins to notice, really notice, the people in his life, these people finally start to become real as does Scrooge. Some feel The Carol is too sentimental. Much better ghost stories have been written though few have been as popular as this little ghost tale. As a social commentary on Victorian England, it is only average. But read in a psychological sense it is unique.. it shows the reader the innermost thoughts of an unhappy lonely old man who through the scenes and recollections of the four Ghosts help this “covetous old sinner” radically change into a boisterous, generous old man of who it was said, “He knew how to keep Christmas.” And so with Tiny Tim, I say, “God bless us, god bless us everyone!” BIBLIOGRAPHY “A Christmas Carol, Charles Dickens, Washington Square Press, Pocket Books, Simon and Schuster, Inc., 1230 Avenue of the Americas, New York, New York 10020, c. 1939 with supplement copyright 1966. Christmas Tales, Charles Dickens, Bonanza Books, Crown Publishers, Inc., 225 Park Ave., New York, new York 10003, c. 1985. “The Lives and Times of Ebenezer Scrooge,” Paul Davis, Yale University Press, New Haven and New York, c. 1990. “Charles Dickens, Radical Moralist,” Joseph Gold, University of Minneapolis Press, Minneapolis, MN, c. 1972. “Dickens in Search of Himself,” Gwen Watkins, Macmillan Press, Ltd., Houndshire, Basingstroke, Hampshire RG2, 2X5 and London, c.1987. “The Dickens World,” Humphrey House, Oxford University Press. London, New York, Toronto, c. 1942. “Dickens in His Time,” Igor Brown, Thomas Nelson and Sons, Ltd., Copeland and Davis St., Camden, NJ, c. 1963. Masterplots: 1,801 plot stories and critical evaluations of the wolrd’s finest literature. Salem Press, Pasadena, CA 1996.