Unwrapped

When it comes to Charles Dickens, I have more than a few gaps. I’ve never read Nicholas Nickleby, A Tale of Two Cities, or The Pickwick Papers. The Mystery of Edwin Drood remains a mystery. The Old Curiosity Shop remains . . . well, a curiosity. And every time December rolls around, I’m reminded that A Christmas Carol just sits there.

I’ve seen several film adaptations. My favourite is Scrooge, the 1935 remake with sound, starring Seymour Hicks in a delightfully crusty turn as the title curmudgeon. Later versions featuring Alastair Sim, Albert Finney, and George C. Scott were polished and respectable if increasingly schmaltzy. I never cared for Bill Murray’s mean-spirited Scrooged, which turns the penny-pinching Victorian moneylender into a cynical 1980s television exec. I did care quite a lot for The Muppet Christmas Carol, with Michael Caine’s gravitas perhaps outshone only by the gleeful narration of Gonzo and Rizzo.

But I’d never read the original — until now. It’s striking how closely such disparate renditions adhere to the structure of Dickens’s novella, first published in 1843. The story begins on Christmas Eve. Working away in his “counting-house,” Ebenezer Scrooge is visited by his cheery nephew Fred, whose seasonal goodwill he promptly rejects. “What reason have you to be merry?” he barks. “What’s Christmas time to you but a time for paying bills without money; a time for finding yourself a year older, but not an hour richer?” He shuns a pair of amiable fundraisers, terrifies a weather-beaten caroller, and returns home, where the ghost of his long-dead business partner, Jacob Marley, appears. Bound in the “ponderous chain” of his own greed, Marley issues a stern warning: the old miser will share the same torment unless he changes his ways.

From there, three spirits show Scrooge his past, present, and future. He sees the lonely boy who grew into a man with an “eager, greedy, restless motion in the eye,” choosing profit over love. He watches his underpaid clerk, Bob Cratchit, struggle to care for his ailing son, Tiny Tim. Finally he witnesses a grim vision of his own death — his possessions plundered by the resentful employees who outlived him. Horrified, Scrooge falls to his knees, insists that “I am not the man I was” and makes a solemn vow: “I will live in the Past, the Present, and the Future.”

A simple story, to be sure, but one elevated by sumptuous language. The Cratchit family cut into their Christmas goose and “the long expected gush of stuffing issued forth.” A mischievous villager launches “a facetious snowball — better-natured missile far than many a wordy jest.” Scrooge himself is introduced as “a squeezing, wrenching, grasping, scraping, clutching, covetous, old sinner!” Today many authors treat sentences like butlers: discreet, efficient servants that mustn’t get in the way of the story. But with Dickens, there’s marvellous excess — of language, of feeling — that mirrors the abundance of Christmas itself. Literature, like the holiday, isn’t strictly “necessary,” yet both make life more than subsistence. We can manage with stripped-back prose and bare Decembers as we could get by on rice and beans, but we often enjoy, like the bounteous Ghost of Christmas Present, “great joints of meat, sucking-pigs, long wreaths of sausages, mince-pies, plum-puddings, barrels of oysters, red-hot chestnuts.”

That formal extravagance contrasts with the story’s moral restraint. Consider how Scrooge turns his life around. He gives Bob Cratchit a raise and pays for Tiny Tim’s rehabilitation. He donates to charity. He shaves, dresses “all in his best,” and attends his nephew’s Christmas dinner. Scrooge doesn’t burn his ledger, but he stops using it to measure human worth.

Therein lies the wisdom. Alarmed by the social ills of his time and having grown up in poverty, with his father behind bars in a debtors’ prison, Dickens could have advocated out-and-out rebellion. (Just think of Scrooge dismantling the means of production or taking up arms against the bourgeoisie!) He resisted the temptation, though, and imagined something humbler: a reordering of the self rather than the state. Scrooge’s transformation is sudden, yes — a classic peripeteia. That’s followed by small acts of generosity, presumably sustained over time.

Such a vision may read as quaint to some. Polarization runs rampant, and many activists dismiss incremental change as naïveté or, worse, complicity. But not all virtue announces itself in grand, sweeping gestures. A Christmas Carol reminds us that moral progress often begins on a smaller scale, with one person choosing kindness over cruelty, empathy over upheaval. To those who pooh-pooh the value of basic decency and ethical patience, I can now say, in the immortal words of Mr. Scrooge, “Bah! Humbug!”