Dickens Redux

Last night my wife and I were watching the 1938 film of A Christmas Carol on TCM, the version starring Reginald Owen as Scrooge, with Leo G. Carroll (whom I remember as Mr. Waverly on The Man From U.N.C.L.E.) as Marley’s ghost. I’ve always been so partial to the 1951 version of this story, with Alistair Sim as Scrooge, that I had never seen this particular version.

I was surprised to find that in some ways it’s actually better than the 1951 version, but it’s an MGM production, and MGM doubtlessly had more money to spend than the UK production company which made the later Alistair Sim movie, Britain's postwar economy being the shambles that it was. The story is “fleshed out” a bit more here, with additional plot details, including some that don’t occur in Dickens’ story, such as Bob Crachit’s actually getting sacked on Christmas Eve after he throws a snowball at Scrooge and knocks his hat off.

Why do these quaint images of snowbound London circa 1840 have such an emotional appeal for us Americans? Our experience is so different from that of people who lived in England during the Industrial Revolution. Well, I guess the answer lies in a combination of things, collective nostalgia being one: when the camera slowly does a “zoom out” at the film’s opening, offering a panoramic view of snow falling on Victorian London, we’re looking at a goodly number of all the Christmas cards we’ve ever seen. And then of course there is Dickens’ ingenious tale, which like all ingenious tales functions on more than one level. It can be read as a naturalistic story (with ghosts) about early-industrial London. For example, a detail that’s never mentioned in any of the film versions I’ve ever seen, but Dickens provides us, is that Scrooge lived alone in upstairs rooms in a building most of which had been rented out as office space, above a wine-merchant's cellar, which explains the kegs over which he hears the chains being dragged as Marley’s ghost approaches. It also accounts for the pervasive darkness of the place on Christmas Eve. Business has been concluded for the day, the offices have been vacated and locked, the lights put out. Scrooge is the only occupant of the building who actually lives there. That fact doesn't bother him, nor does the deep gloom. "Darkness is cheap, and Scrooge liked it," Dickens writes.

It would be ridiculously easy to give this story a “Marxist” reading, right down to the stuff about religion as the supposed “opiate of the masses:” it is set amidst the very place and time in which Marx conducted his badly-flawed and highly spurious “research” and came up with his apocalyptic notion about the workers rising up and throwing off their chains. And had Dickens stuck to a Zola-like, naturalistic approach and left the ghostly (e.g. spiritual) themes out, for example restricting Scrooge's encounters to earthbound folk only, perhaps the story might be forgotten today. But he didn’t, and generations of readers (not to mention at least four generations of moviegoers—the earliest Christmas Carol film dates from 1915) have every reason to be grateful: with the accompanying ground bass of early industrial London being played with his left hand, so to speak, Dickens played out, with his proverbial right, a melody for all time. The tale is an allegory, that most unfashionable of literary forms today, and the themes of rage and redemption, injury and forgiveness, that permeate this little story are ubiquitous in western literature. They can be traced all the way back to the Old Testament, and very easily to the New—if you think about it, the way in which Dickens allows Scrooge to suffer, “die” and be reborn might be read as a sly metaphor, just as as some interpreted E.T.: The Extraterrestrial, 150 years after Dickens, as a not-so-subtle retelling of the Passion story. Whether Dickens was having some fun with us or not, (I tend to think he was, in fact I tend to think he couldn’t resist) he gave us a story that endures because there is so much in it that’s perennial, even if we have moved on from his world, befogged with coal dust, plagued by tuberculosis, workhouses and debtor’s prison. (For the definitive word on this last, check out Dickens' Little Dorrit, a big masterpiece.)

In a nasty, satirical little “Christmas carol” written in the late 1950s, iconoclastic songwriter Tom Lehrer exhorts one and all, tongue bulging in cheek, to “Kill the turkeys, ducks and chickens/Mix the punch, drrrraag out the Dickens.” I for one plan to "drag out the Dickens" this year, next year and in every coming holiday season I can forsee. Webster defines a classic as “a work of enduring excellence.” Well, if something is of enduring excellence, it deserves to be read (and watched) over and over. When I was young, I read Death In Venice once a year. Hemingway claimed he did the same thing with King Lear. A Christmas Carol deserves similar appreciation, because, in its limited way, it’s similarly great.

Happy Holidays, one and all.