A Christmas Carol

I’ve seen it so many times on stage, screen, and TV, but I just read Charles Dickens’ A Christmas Carol  for the first time.  I was immediately struck by its combination of gothic tale, light comedy, and conversion narrative.

Originally published in 1843 A Christmas Carol is subtitled “Being a Ghost Story of Christmas,” thus introducing a contrast between the darkness of the gothic tradition and the coming of the light celebrated at Christmas and at the Winter Solstice.  If the Scrooge of the first part of the story represents the darkest time of year and the world before Christ, then the Scrooge of the last part represents the return of the sun and the birth of the Christian savior.

The humor is introduced early as Marley is pronounced “as dead as a doornail” and a full paragraph is devoted to light-hearted discussion of the somewhat irreverent simile.  Comic caricature combines with melodrama as the rest of the story unfolds, following the well-known patterns of gothic tale and conversion narrative.

The gothic plot typically begins in rational reality, proceeds to an encounter with the irrational, and concludes with either destruction or escape.  Thus does the materialistic, greedy, hard-hearted Scrooge, after encountering the ghost of his dead partner, Jacob Marley, and the spirits of Christmas past, present, and future, confront his doomed life of avarice, bitterness, and loneliness.  In this version of the gothic tale, the hero can choose his fate, and Scrooge chooses to reject his doom in favor of a redeemed life of generosity, open-heartedness, community, and love.

The secular ghost story thus converges with the religious story of conversion and redemption.  The traditional Christian narrative typically begins with a sinner, proceeds to a conversion experience, including confession and atonement, and concludes with salvation.  Although A Christmas Carol is more secular than religious, it parallels the traditional Christian story, which underlies Scrooge’s conversion to the Christmas spirit.

While observing the conventions of both traditions, Dickens lightens the melodrama with humorous exaggeration and jocularity, making it impossible to take either ghosts or religion too seriously.  The essence of the Christmas “spirit” in A Christmas Carol is human, not supernatural: human compassion, love, celebration, and merry-making.

A sub-plot is the story of the Cratchitt family, struggling in poverty but bound together in love.  Their story also loosely follows a familiar pattern, the success story, which begins in hard-working, virtuous poverty, proceeds to opportunity, and concludes with success.  In this case the opportunity is the windfall of Scrooge’s conversion, which leads to a raise in salary for Bob Cratchitt and life-saving care for Tiny Tim.

Part of the popularity of Dickens’ classic is its use of familiar, popular narratives; part of it is the sentimentalism; part of it is the humor; and part of it is the secularism.  As familiar and popular as is the Christmas story in the Gospel of Luke, it is the secular message that transcends any particular religion and speaks to the non-religious as well as the religious, for all can appreciate the human story of redemption.

There is a political message, as well.  As Republicans currently seek to protect the wealthy at the expense of the poor and speak cynically of freeloaders at the public trough when it is their own policies that have reduced opportunity and lowered wages, it is hard not to see Scrooge as a hard-hearted Republican hoarder of wealth greatly in need, not only of honoring Christmas in his heart and keeping it all year, but also of a political form of redemption. May it be so.  And may it be a Merry Christmas!

A Tale of Two Cities

It is hard to think of another novel that is famous for both its opening and closing lines: “It was the best of times, it was the worst of times…”; “It is a far, far better thing that I do than I have ever done…”

Those two quotes also represent two poles in Charles Dickens’ 1859 novel: the pole of history and the pole of the individual, the public and private. The personal narrative of Charles Darnay and his family becomes entangled with the public history of the French Revolution, and both narratives play themselves out on a larger allegorical or mythic stage, if you will, of good vs. evil and redemption vs. tragedy.

The message of the historical narrative seems to be that the vengeance of the oppressed is no better than abuse of power by the oppressor, that violence and excess are worse enemies than any particular social class. At the individual level, the message seems to be that while love has the power to redeem, there are those in every social class who are unredeemable. At the allegorical or mythic level, while good may ultimately triumph over evil, there is a terrible price to be paid for that victory.

These broad themes are dramatized in Dickens’ inimitable style of caricature, melodrama, sentimentalism, colorful scene-painting, irresistible humor, and unforgettable pathos. It is easy to see why Dickens had, and has, both popular appeal and literary value. That combination is a rare talent.

One would expect Dickens to sympathize with the downtrodden, but in A Tale of Two Cities he shows the dark side of the French revolutionaries and Republicans as well as of the French aristocracy. He dramatizes the injustice of which both are capable when in positions of power. The Marquis who thinks almost nothing of running down a peasant child under the wheels of his carriage epitomizes the cruelty and arrogance of the ruling class before the Revolution, while the DeFarges and the woman called “the Vengeance” represent the viciousness of the street mobs bent on revenge during the Revolution.

These “unredeemable” characters are balanced by the redeemed: Charles Darnay, son of the aforementioned Marquis, who renounces his aristocratic heritage and goes to London, where he works for a living teaching French; Dr. Manette, who, after years of imprisonment by the ruling class is able, not only to accept Darnay as his daughter’s husband, but also to put himself at risk by defending Darnay in the Republican court when he is arrested simply because of his bloodline while on a trip to Paris to help a friend; and the drunken wastrel Sydney Carton, whose love for Darnay’s wife and Manette’s daughter becomes the redemptive power that enables him to replace Darnay in the prison cell and take his place on the scaffold.

Good and evil are equally to be found in each social class, and while “good,” in the form of democracy and the survival of a loving family, may ultimately triumph, the stage of history is littered with the bodies of good and evil alike who have died in the struggle for freedom and equality.

A Tale of Two Cities is a redemptive novel of political emancipation, personal atonement, and love triumphant, but it does not deny the dark side of human nature or of human history. The opening lines are no mere rhetorical flourish, for the novel vividly dramatizes the days of the French Revolution as, indeed, “the best of times” and “the worst of times…”