A Christmas Carol revisited
This is from last December, and is worth repeating this year.
A: Every Christmas season my parents took us to The Great American Melodrama, in Oceano, California (population 7000), to see its Holiday Extravaganza. There were hot dogs at the concession, and peanut shells on the floor, and I thought all of it was amazing. The program varied, but always included a staging of A Christmas Carol. Everything I know about the story was imprinted at these performances; until this week, I had never read Dickens’ original.
Q: What moved you to read it?
A: How many people tell a story that people are still re-telling two hundred years later? Nothing I write will survive that long, but everyone knows who Scrooge is. Anything with that staying power is worth our attention.
Q: So when you actually read what Dickens wrote, what struck you?
A: First, it’s amazing how many of Dickens’ own words made it into the Melodrama’s production. There are joke-y asides that I always assumed were inserted to make a good burlesque show, that in fact are in the original. Conversely, some absolutely central parts of the story are later modifications. That poignant moment when the Ghost of Christmas Past reveals itself to be Scrooge’s old girlfriend? Not in Dickens. (His GCP is somewhat alien and a bit of an emotional blank.) Stories do get better in the re-telling, through a process that I would guess involves forgetting and mis-remembering as much as deliberate modification; “Frankenstein” is a better name for the monster than the doctor.
Q: That was “First.” What else?
A: Few stories are as much about their “moral” as A Christmas Carol is, and I want to get to that, but my next observation is about Dickens’ style. I’ve seen experts assert that iambic meter (da-DUM da-DUM; “but SOFT what LIGHT through YON-der...”) is the “natural” meter for English; apparently various English poets in the Renaissance experimented with other meters, with not-great results. But I never really had a sense of what that means. Dicken’s writing is maybe some proof that they are right: he was not writing poetry, and so, I assume, was not trying to write in any particular meter, but he frequently falls into a sustained iambic rhythm. Here is a taste:
for, entering the dreary hall, and glancing through the open doors of many rooms, they found them poorly furnished, cold, and vast. There was an earthly savour in the air, a chilly bareness in the place...
His face had not the harsh and rigid lines of later years; but it had begun to wear the signs of care and avarice.
the setting sun had left a streak of fiery red, which glared upon the desolation for an instant, like a sullen eye, and frowning lower, lower, lower yet, was lost...
Q: You mentioned the moral of the story. It’s a simple one, right? Don’t be selfish and stingy, be kind and generious. Be a better person. Isn’t that a bit banal for a great work of literature?
A: I suspect that most great works that have morals, have morals that, when stated, sound trite. If this is meant as criticism, the usual response is that the greatness isn’t in the message itself, but in how it is communicated. I would guess Dickens hoped that readers of his book would become better, in a way that they wouldn’t if simply told, in a stern lecture, that they should.
Q: Does reading morality tales like A Christmas Carol in fact make people better?
A: That’s a question for a psychologist, not a philosopher. I’m not sure how you would study it. You can’t do a double-blind randomized controlled trial of exposure to A Christmas Carol.
Q: Some people criticize Dickens for overly-simplistic moral thinking. He was writing about real social problems: Bob Cratchit was underpaid and barely able to support his family; Tiny Tim needed doctors his father could not pay for; and there were many, many Bob Cratchit’s out there. Dickens’ “solution,” if he has one in the book, is for the rich people to be nicer. But that’s wishful thinking.
A: George Orwell says as much in a well-known essay on Dickens (titled, as it happens, “Charles Dickens”). His point, I think, is that Dickens, in his novels, assembles all the facts needed to argue for socialism, but never goes on to do so:
It would be difficult to point anywhere in his [Dickens'] books to a passage suggesting that the economic system is wrong as a system. Nowhere, for instance, does he make any attack on private enterprise or private property.
...from the whole of Dickens’s work one can infer the evil of laissez-faire capitalism; but Dickens makes no such inference himself.
There is not a line in [Dickens' novel Hard Times] that can properly be called Socialistic; indeed, its tendency if anything is pro-capitalist, because its whole moral is that capitalists ought to be kind, not that workers ought to be rebellious. Bounderby is a bullying windbag and Gradgrind has been morally blinded, but if they were better men, the system would work well enough ... is the implication.
Q: Orwell’s essay could be classified as a piece of Marxist, or anyway socialist, literary criticism. You once tried to figure out what capitalist literary criticism might look like; what might someone writing from that perspective say about Dickens?
A: Well I’m not an economist or a literary critic.
Q: But if there is a gap in the market isn’t there some advantage or profit to be had in filling it?
A: I would guess that a pro-free-market critic would agree with Orwell that it is naive to suggest (if Dickens’ novels really do suggest this) that the way to solve social problems is to get the rich to be better people. On the other hand, they would surely reject the idea that fixing the problems Dickens describes in his novels requires overthrowing free-market capitalism. About Bob Cratchit’s predicament, for example, they might say that the solution is more competition: if Scrooge is making huge profits off of Cratchit’s work, but paying him a pittance, then in a competitive market a less Scroogy (but still purely self-interested) businessman would immediately offer Cratchit a bigger wage and hire him away. Cratchit, then, would be able to heal his son and buy that turkey, without the huge investment of Spiritual resources that Jacob Marley and the Ghosts marshal for that end. The fact that Cratchit is still stuck working for Scrooge when the story opens is something in Dicken’s work from which, certain economists would say, you “can infer the evil of not enough laissez-faire capitalism.”
Q: Which perspective on the story is right?
A: I guess that depends on which critic is right in their background economic beliefs. For that reason, I don’t find this kind of criticism of the novel that interesting.
A: The story itself wants to be about a greedy, stingy, hard-hearted man, who for the first time since his youth comes to love his fellow men and women, and who begins to do some good in the world. The question of what to make of Scrooge remains a good one, and surely can be addressed without settling big questions in economics. And even if parts of the story, especially the parts about the Cratchit’s, feel somewhat manipulative, it’s hard not to smile and swell inside when Scrooge learns he has not missed Christmas morning:
“I am as light as a feather, I am as happy as an angel, I am as merry as a schoolboy. I am as giddy as a drunken man. A merry Christmas to everybody! A happy New Year to all the world. Hallo here! Whoop! Hallo!”
Q: Scrooge sets out to do some good, but how much does he accomplish? Can’t economic thinking help with this question? Steven Landsburg (a free-market economist) wasn’t discussing Scrooge when he wrote the following, but he could well have been:
If you’re wealthy enough to be sure you’ll never spend it all [as Scrooge presumably is], you might be thinking — especially at this time of year — about giving away some of the excess. Unfortunately, that’s impossible. [...]
You give $100 to a guy named Laszlo. [Imagine you are Scrooge, and Laszo is Bob Cratchit.] Laszlo uses it to buy a turkey. That turkey had to come from somewhere, and it didn’t come from you, so it must have come from someone else.
There are only two possibilities: Either someone somewhere gives up a turkey or someone somewhere raises/butchers/markets an extra turkey.
[Regarding the first possibility,] here is one scenario: Laszlo buys a turkey that would have gone to Jenny, who instead buys a ham that would have gone to Junfei, who instead buys a rib roast that would have gone to Pablo…and somewhere down the line, someone goes hungry. Your “gift” to Laszlo was not a gift from you at all, but a forced gift from some total stranger. Maybe you feel okay about that, which is fine — but you shouldn’t fool yourself about it either. [...]
If you were poorer, it would be easy to give a gift to Laszlo. Give him $100 and you’ll be the one who has to go without a turkey ... But when you’re rich and you give away $100 you were never going to spend anyway, you’re not really giving anything up — so someone else has to.
It’s not giving unless it hurts.
Maybe we shouldn’t feel so good about the “new” Scrooge, after thinking through what the unseen consequences of his buying that turkey are.
A: I think you’re focusing too much on the turkey. On that Christmas morning, after his night with the ghosts, Scrooge starts to give Bob Cratchit the respect he deserves, and he stops holding his sister’s death against his nephew, and he gives his nephew love and good company, and these acts are real giving, even though far from “hurting,” or costing Scrooge anything, they benefit him as well.
For more on Dickens, see On Better Endings.