A Carol Philosophy

by Paul Walsh Professor of Dramaturgy

In 1843, in a little more than a month, Dickens penned one of the most beloved and enduring holiday stories of all time, inventing the genre of the Christmas book in the process. He also managed to deliver his little book to the publishers in time to be ready for last-minute Christmas shoppers.

Published on gilt-edged green paper and bound in red cotton covers with a wreath of holly and ivy stamped in gold on the front, A Christmas Carol, with illustrations by John Leech, was intended to be both a treasured gift and a family heirloom that would be read again and again for years to come. And indeed it has been.

From its first day in the bookshops, A Christmas Carol was a wondrous success. All 6,000 copies of its first edition sold out within a month of its release, and the first foreign-language edition appeared in France early in 1844. (It has since been translated into nearly every language). In fact, it was such an immediate success that within weeks of its release A Christmas Carol had been adapted for the stage, and by February no fewer that eight different productions were running in London theaters.

Audiences of Dickens’s day loved the story. As we still do today. We love to hear it read aloud, to see it acted out, to marvel at its magic, and to celebrate its exuberance and abundance. The success of A Christmas Carol was greater than even an optimist like Dickens could have dreamed. Not only was his story an overwhelming triumph, but writing it had put its author in the mood to celebrate Christmas with giddy abandon.

“When [A Christmas Carol] was done,” Dickens wrote to a friend with characteristic hyperbole, “I broke out like a Madman… Such dinings, such dancing, such conjurings, such blind-man’s buffings, such theatre-goings, such kissings-out of old years and kissings-in of new ones never took place in these parts before.”

From the start he had hoped to write a story that would cut across the social spectrum and renew the power and possibilities of generosity, imagination, and the goodwill of the community to reclaim the spirit of Christmas for itself.

What marks Dickens’s story as original is a nostalgic yearning for a childhood blessed by the warmth of a country hearth and home, for the sights and sounds and smells and tastes of a traditional rural Christmas, replete with all the customs and practices and games and songs and spirit associated with it. Kissing under the mistletoe was a nearly forgotten custom in Dickens’s day. It was he who is said to have revived a practice that dates back to the ancient Celts and their Druid holy men.

But Dickens was not interested simply in rescuing quaint customs and old-style victuals for the dusty archives of forgotten folklore. He understood that Christmas is a special time of remembering. It is a portal to a half-remembered past, both personal and communal, and all its special games and songs and foods, particular to each household and each community, bind families together and link them in memory to their own past.

To deny the pleasures of this world to oneself or others, Dickens insisted, was to deny the beneficence of creation. To value industrialization above human industry and treat one’s fellows as cogs in the commercial machine was to impoverish the spirit and the body of the community that were the lifeblood of progress. To pursue profit at all costs was to deny one’s basic humanity and jeopardized not only one’s place in society, but the survival of society

In place of such short-sighted views, Dickens proposed his “Carol philosophy”: “cheerful views, sharp anatomization of humbug, jolly good temper… and a vein of glowing, hearty, generous, mirthful, beaming reference in everything to Home, and Fireside.” In place of business, mechanization, and utilitarianism, Dickens celebrated imagination, family and fellow feeling. In place of self-denial and renunciation, Dickens celebrated abundance, hospitality, and the pleasures of life.

Each age has retold Dickens’s A Christmas Carol to address its own needs, and the amiable story has proven accommodatingly malleable. Dickens’s contemporaries rediscovered the traditional Christmas in the heart of the modern urban city. Later Victorians, terrified by the new science of Darwin and Spencer, read Dickens’s tale as a retelling of the original Christmas story with Scrooge as a misguided wise man searching for the poor man’s child who would restore a sense of order and proportion to the world.

During the wars and depressions of the 20th century, A Christmas Carol offered comfort and a sense of the familiar values of hearth and home. The first film version of A Christmas Carol appeared in 1908, and half a dozen silent film versions of A Christmas Carol were made in the first decades of the century. In the 1940s, CBS radio asked President Roosevelt to read the story for national broadcast (and, in 1957, Eleanor Roosevelt recorded her own reading). Arguably the best screen adaptation is the 1951 British film starring Alastair Sim; Richard Williams’s animated short film based on the original John Leech drawings won an Academy Award in 1972. By the end of the 20th century, holiday versions of A Christmas Carol (musical and nonmusical) graced stages across the country, while the motifs of Dickens’s story echoed in nearly every form of popular entertainment.

And now, at the start of a new century, this perennial tale offers a new sense of hope in the power of imagination and community to reclaim its lost members, even those as intractable as Ebenezer Scrooge. Through all these tellings and retellings, A Christmas Carol has taken its place as a modern myth in the consciousness of the industrial age. Scrooge, Marley, Bob, Cratchit, and Tiny Tim have grown larger than Dickens’s story, taking on a life of their own that is greater than the sum of all the versions and adaptations, all the parodies and piracies, all the Christmas cards and advertisements that have kept this tale and its unforgettable characters alive or tried to appropriate them for some other use. And even as the story of Dickens’s A Christmas Carol has grown larger than itself, the spirit of generosity and magic at its heart has continued to shine through.

A Carol Philosophy by Professor Paul Walsh was published in full form in the 2005 program for American Conservatory Theater’s A Christmas Carol adapted by Carey Perloff and Paul Walsh. We would like to thank the American Conservatory Theater for allowing us to reprint it here.

DISCUSSION QUESTION
Do you remember when you first heard the story of A Christmas Carol? How about when you first heard the character of Scrooge referred to? This Christmas season keep a count of all the times that you see A Christmas Carol, its characters and/or themes referred to on Christmas cards, on the television, in movies, in songs, in shop window displays etc. How has this story affected our perception of this season?