Vigilance and Drama: Reflections on A Christmas Carol
Since the beginning of Advent, our family has been reading Charles Dickens’ classic, A Christmas Carol. Written in 1843, when its author was only 31-years old, the short story had a deep impact on English readers at the time of its publication. Not all books have an immediate influence, and ones that do are quickly forgotten by later generations, but Dickens’ masterpiece is not only read, but even studied by admirers to the present day.
The tale is fascinating for a variety of reasons, its vivid and memorable language, its rich and resonant theological and social themes. Consider the following description of Ebenezer Scrooge in the second page of chapter one.
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.
While there are details worth exploring and great depths to plumb, it is appropriate to state what is obviously strange about A Christmas Carol: elements of what we would typically classify as horror. Dickens did not craft a plot worthy of the hallmark channel, but something fitting for Halloween.
For those unfamiliar with the plot, Scrooge, as the quote above describes, is a greedy old man whose chief concern is financial gain. Alienated from family and without friends, he is a miser who receives no joy from his wealth. One night he is visited by the ghost of his deceased business partner Jacob Marley. Marley, who is either damned, or experiencing a kind of purgatorial punishment, has been sent to warn Scrooge about his own impending fate.
Three “spirits” visit Scrooge during a single night, revealing faults in his past and sins in his present by making him witness events in a kind of dream-like state “outside” of time. The ghost of Christmas Future foretells of Scrooge’s death, including the plundering of his possessions. and the calloused sentiments of his contemporaries. “I thought he’d never die” retorts a businessman who knew Ebenezer. Another says, “Old Scratch has got his own at last, hey?”
Upon seeing his own gravestone, Scrooge begs that the phantom to tell him if the events he’d witnessed were “shadows of the things that will be or shadows of the things that may be?” Begging for mercy, Scrooge wakes up, realizing the entire scope of events transpired in a single night. He is transformed by the experience, and like Zacchaeus, makes every effort to restore what he has taken from others and additionally, to be extravagantly generous. While the ending is joyous and unambiguously redemptive, the bulk of the narrative features dark and preternatural content that is imaginative, but not explicitly biblical in the particulars.
Why would Dickens write a “scary” story at a time we typically emphasize family, light, peace, and explicitly, the birth of Jesus Christ? A Christmas Carol does include those elements, but it is not sentimental in the modern sense. This dimension may be its greatest enduring contribution.
Reflection on details of the nativity reveal a narrative of grandeur and hope, but not warm feelings per se. Christ’s incarnation, the purpose of Christmas, was in the words of Saint John, “to destroy the works of the devil” (1 John 3:8). According to Revelation 12:4, the Great Dragon, Satan, viciously sought to “devour the child.”
G. K. Chesterton, writing in the century after Dickens, made the following comments about Christmas in his book, The Everlasting Man,
Unless we understand the presence of demons, we shall not only miss the point of Christianity, but even miss the point of Christmas. Christmas for us in Christendom has become one thing, and in one sense even a simple thing. But like all the truths of that tradition, it is in another sense a very complex thing. Its unique note is the simultaneous striking of many notes; of humility, of gaiety, of gratitude, of mystical fear, but also of vigilance and of drama.
Christmas, he continues,
…is something too subtle or too solitary to be covered by our use of the word peace. By the very nature of the story the rejoicings in the cavern were rejoicings in a fortress or an outlaw’s den; properly understood it is not unduly flippant to say they were rejoicings in a dug-out. It is not only true that such a subterranean chamber was a hiding-place from enemies; and the enemies were already scouring the stony plain that lay above it like a sky. It is not only that the very horse-hoofs of Herod might in that sense have passed like thunder over the sunken head of Christ. It is also that there is in that image a true idea of an outpost, of a piercing through the rock and an entrance into enemy territory. There is in this buried divinity an idea of undermining the world; of shaking the towers and palaces from below; even as Herod the great king felt that earthquake under him and swayed with his swaying palace.
Chesterton was a critic of Dickens’ vague Unitarianism but appreciated his writings. And while it is true that A Christmas Carol can be read as a lesson on finding salvation within, resolving to live a better life—for fear of punishment, or perhaps out of empathy for others—a Christian reading of story compels to consider, in the words of Romans 11:22, “the kindness and severity of God.”
