Dickens at Christmas

Some thoughts on “A Christmas Carol” and why sentimentality is forgivable during the festive season.

According to George Orwell, on Lenin’s deathbed he was read A Christmas Carol by Charles Dickens and was revolted by its “bourgeois sentimentality”. One wonders if he made it as far as Bob Cratchit holding back the tears as he assures his wife, none too convincingly, that Tiny Tim is “growing strong and hearty”. It’s an indulgence likely to try the patience of the most stalwart of Dickens aficionados.

Not that Dickens is entirely to blame. Christmas is the most schmaltzy of the holiday seasons; it lacks the hysterical camp of Halloween, or the arch absurdity of Easter with its giant rabbits distributing their kaleidoscopic eggs like something from the mind of David Lynch. This is why pop music, as an inherently sentimental genre, tends to fare so well at Christmas. One can barely imagine the birth of Jesus Christ without a Mariah Carey soundtrack.

But this is also why the season has failed to inspire much in the way of great literature. Novelists who wish to be taken seriously dread the pitfall of sentimentality, what James Joyce described as “unearned emotion”, and it is difficult to invest a Christmas story with anything that transcends the frivolous. To give him his due, Dickens succeeds in part where most would fail. When the Ghost of Christmas Past shows Ebenezer Scrooge “his poor forgotten self as he used to be” – a boy left abandoned in his boarding school after his peers have gone home for the holidays – the effect is authentically poignant. And the image of Scrooge struggling with his stockings and “making a perfect Laocoön of himself” is a neat conflation of the trivial and the sublime.

We are right to mistrust sentimentality on the whole, just as we mistrust nostalgia and the way in which it encourages us to bowdlerise our memories. But Christmas is a time for self-indulgence, and that should apply as much to the satisfaction of our emotional appetite as the groaning stockpile of comestibles in our fridge. Given that we are seemingly content to embrace the God of Mammon and his elves, and vulgarise our homes with tinselled trees and glittering baubles, flashing electric monstrosities and pseudo-paganistic figurines, we may as well revel in the temporary suspension of our more cynical instincts.

I came across Orwell’s remarks about Dickens in a copy of his collected essays, a Christmas present from my mother. It strikes me that the books that have left the most lasting impression on me have come to me in the form of gifts. The act of reading has the capacity to shape us as human beings in ways that we can scarcely fathom, and Christmas seems like as opportune a moment as any to share some of those experiences. This is why book tokens seem so lazy. One of the best possible gifts is a book that has impacted upon us in some way; it is a gesture that is both meaningful and intimate.

Of course there is always the risk that the recipient will feel a sense of undue pressure; a book is a considerable investment of time, and he or she may not share your tastes. I learnt this the hard way while studying for my master’s degree at York University. A young woman in the history department lent me a copy of Wives and Daughters by Elizabeth Gaskill, and rather than simply admit that I hadn’t much enjoyed North and South and was loath to give Gaskill another shot, I instead spent the rest of the year avoiding her. This rather shameful strategy is not one I would advise.

So when offering books as a gift, I now usually make clear that there is no expectation that it must be read. I won’t be probing my friends for their literary insights at a later date. This frees the recipient of any obligation, and means that if they do feel inclined to open the book it will be a pleasure rather than a chore. But there is always something to be gained from reading one’s friends’ favourite works. It can have the effect of revealing something about them that we didn’t previously know, and perhaps something that they don’t even know about themselves. It provides context.

If, like me, you are hoping to avoid politics this Christmas, perhaps Dickens isn’t the right choice for you. A Christmas Carol is a blunt commentary on social inequality, every bit as propagandistic as his depiction of the death of Jo in Bleak House. Readers will recall, perhaps with a wince, the moment in that novel when Dickens halts his narrative to lecture us about the plight of the poor.

“Dead, your Majesty. Dead, my lords and gentlemen. Dead, right reverends and wrong reverends of every order. Dead, men and women, born with heavenly compassion in your hearts. And dying thus around us every day.”

A Christmas Carol tries our patience in a similar way. By the time Scrooge is buying that prize turkey for Bob Cratchit, we feel as though we have been hectored into submission. Yes, we are sickeningly privileged and should feel bad about it from time to time. But all we wanted was a touch of light reading for the festive season. Little wonder that Dickens’s working title for A Christmas Carol was The Sledgehammer.

Still, Dickens is always a pleasure, because like many of my favourite authors you can sense his personality shimmering through the words. The Ghost of Christmas Past, the Ghost of Christmas Present, and the Ghost of Christmas Yet to Come, are not the only spectres in this story. The author is haunting us too, and says so explicitly. As the first apparition appears, the narrator says – or rather whispers – that Scrooge was as near to the ghost “as I am now to you, and I am standing in the spirit at your elbow”. Is this a seasonal treat or a bone-numbing tale of horror?

Anyway, I am sure you will forgive my inconsequential ramblings on this morning of Christmas Eve. Suffice to say that this is the time of year to embrace the mawkishness that usually repels us. It’s an opportunity to dispense with our customary cynicism and enjoy life at its most shamelessly sentimental. And if you haven’t read A Christmas Carol, that strikes me as an excellent way to start.

God bless us every one!

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