The only Christmas book

Charles Dickens wrote A Christmas Carol just about at the time that the Victorians were inventing Christmas

Christmas has produced many classic movies, the watching of which have slowly become traditions — most recently, perhaps, Love Actually, the Richard Curtis paean to Yuletide soppiness that everyone publicly hates and privately watches whenever it’s on. There are even Christmas-themed episodes of television shows that have become indelibly associated with the season of late — The Simpsons and the American version of The Office produced a number of them. 

What is odd, however, is that there is only one Christmas book that has become a tradition: Charles Dickens’ A Christmas Carol, the story of the redemption of a miserly financier on Christmas Eve. There are other books with a Christmas theme, or set around Christmastime, but nothing comes close to having Christmas Carol’s popularity or enduring influence. Perhaps O Henry’s “The Gift of the Magi”, which generations of ICSE students read in school, has a smidgen of the same impact – I certainly can remember entire passages from it, in spite of having the worst memory in the world – but it’s just a short story and not even a novella like A Christmas Carol, and can’t quite aspire to the latter’s ubiquity. 

Dickens wrote A Christmas Carol just about at the time that the Victorians were inventing Christmas. The mid-nineteenth century was a time of great economic and social upheaval in England; the Industrial Revolution, a generation earlier, meant that people had been uprooted from their communities and moved to cities, losing touch with the traditions that had differentiated and marked festivals in those communities. A new, national form of celebration needed to replace them. Into this void stepped the fashion for things Germanic that came across the channel with Victoria’s husband, Albert, in 1840. Christmas trees – essentially a German tradition – proliferated, as did carol singers. German Christmas traditions fused with a very Anglo-Saxon commercialism to produce Christmas as we know it today — with the addition, in time, of the modern Santa Claus, an invention of course of the Coca-Cola Company. It was the time when the modern secular Christmas was born, and A Christmas Carol – which has practically no religion or even religious imagery in it – was a central part of that process. 

Dickens wrote A Christmas Carol over the course of a few months in 1843, and with a very specific aim in mind: To agitate for better treatment of the poor, especially poor children. For much of his life, child labour and social protections had been a very personal cause for Dickens, who had endured appalling conditions as a boy in a shoe-blacking factory when his father had been sent to debtors’ prison. There’s a lot of this concern visible in David Copperfield, some in Oliver Twist — but more than all of these, A Christmas Carol was born of Dickens’ devotion to the issue. The crucial scene, as far as A Christmas Carol’s characterisation of the old miser Ebenezer Scrooge is concerned, is the one in which he turns down some men collecting for the poor residents of London who were freezing during a very cold Yuletide: Are there no workhouses, Scrooge asks. The workhouse, which was a laissez-faire Victorian city’s only concession to social protection, was a place in which the destitute were concentrated and made to work under the worst possible conditions. Scrooge was written to be as unpleasant a character as possible – money-grubbing, tyrannical, selfish – essentially as an embodiment of the principles that Dicken felt were responsible for having abandoned England’s poor. 

Interestingly, Dickens never made much money from the print copies of A Christmas Carol; it was pirated almost as soon as it was out, with some editions promising to cut out all the superfluous description and just give you the story in an even more digestible format. A pity that, because the descriptions of a smog-bound London here are irresistible, and enormously familiar to anyone suffering in the brown haze that envelops North India at the moment. He also managed to provide a terrific sense of place. A week or so ago, I was walking at dusk around the maze of small alleyways between Lombard Street and Cornhill in the City of London, the very place where Dickens set Scrooge’s office. Now, as then, this network of tiny lanes is home to little offices, three-man financial firms, accountants and stockbrokers. As the bells rang out – bells were a repeated motif in A Christmas Carol – and the evening grew more shadowy under the dim yellow street lights, you could easily imagine you were back in 1843. Except, of course, for the clear and breathable air. 

Another movie has been released that hopes to become part of the Christmas canon — but this one invents a story about Dickens himself at Christmastime, a sort of retelling of A Christmas Carol in which the writer himself serves as the agent of Scrooge’s redemption. There’s some truth to the notion that Dickens invented a modern Christmas, or at least the emotions with which it is supposed to be invested. But I don’t suppose anything will ever supplant the book itself. It is still a joyful, funny and cathartic read.