A Christmas Carol

"There’s an interesting backstory here. The great importance that Christmas has now was not always so. With the Puritan revolution of the 17th century, the Puritans tried to outlaw Christmas. They were only partly successful but in England, in the century and a half following that period of revolution, Christmas was de-emphasised to a surprising extent. It was only in the 1840s that Christmas came roaring back, partly because of the influence of Queen Victoria and Prince Albert – who came from a German background where they didn’t have Puritans to mess with their holiday – but the other great influence is Charles Dickens and A Christmas Carol . It’s a wonderful story, and it’s also interesting historically. We need to understand that when we read A Christmas Carol we do not read a description of how Christmas was in Dickens’s time. In writing this story Dickens is as much an advocate as a descriptor. He wants to bring back old traditions. He wants more businesses to close on Christmas. He is helping to restart and recreate Christmas. Exactly. Yet the way he is portrayed pushes the development of the holiday in the direction that Dickens wishes. The Annotated Christmas Carol is a remarkable volume. The editor, Michael Patrick Hearn, has written a huge introduction – almost 60 pages – where he provides some wonderful historical background. Then the annotations are substantial. In many cases, they’re as long as the text. They explain older phrases in English, and are about all kinds of other things. I was just looking at one this morning about Tiny Tim. Apparently, in the original manuscript he was called Little Fred. There’s much speculation about why the name changed, and how Dickens featured, in many of his writings, poor or disabled children in order to tug at people’s heart strings. No it doesn’t! By the way, this volume also includes the original illustrations by John Leech, which are beautiful. One more point – and I don’t see many people commenting on this – is that it’s remarkable how non-religious A Christmas Carol is. It does not mention the birth of Jesus and the direct references to religion are few, with the famous exception of Tiny Tim, or Little Fred, saying “God bless us, every one”. What Dickens helped bring back was rather a Christmas spirit, that both religious and non-religious people can embrace. That is why I think Dickens was so successful in helping Christmas to become such a culture-wide phenomenon. I think the Christmas spirit in Dickens is concern for the poor and the least fortunate in society – which has become one of our major themes for Christmas, as we often give to charity and think about the less fortunate. That is very much Dickens’s contribution."

"A Christmas Carol is an unusual story to choose in some ways, because although we associate it so strongly with Dickens, it’s also broken free from Dickens. It began to circulate through culture much more generally. Like a fairy tale, it’s become almost anonymous. That’s because it’s something like a modern myth: like most myths, you can dress it up in lots of different clothes and populate it with different characters. You can modernize it, you can do almost anything with it—the basic story will still remain the same. It’s ancient and it’s modern; it’s foreign and it’s familiar. It’s also one of the only stories which, even though I know it probably off by heart, I’m still surprised by when I read it. Some bits of it, like the death of Tiny Tim, still make me cry. I did a public reading of it last year, and I did actually break down in tears, in a way which is both kind of sweet and pathetic. But Dickens did too when he did his own public reading. He was also moved by his own pathos. I think both. The narrator’s tone is very interesting, because on the one hand, Scrooge is held up as a character to be mocked and pitied, and on the other hand, his sense of humor—even though it’s quite a bitter sense of humor—is such that we’re also secretly rooting for him all the way through. He’s a hero and an antihero, all bound in one. I’d say Dickens is very good at writing stories which have morals but are not moralistic. It’s an important distinction, I think. The moral seems to be almost incidental rather than the point of the story."

"It’s my Christmas tradition. My job is to peel the chestnuts, and I normally listen to an audiobook while I’m peeling. With A Christmas Carol , the more I revisit it, the more I realise how scary it actually is, if you read it for the first time, or read it like you pretend you don’t know anything about the story. You’ve got a door knocker coming to life. You’ve got the ghost of Jacob Marley with his chains. That’s very scary stuff. And especially the Ghost of Christmas Yet to Come, when you’ve got the grave robbers. It shows you what will happen if you don’t care about others, it shows the journey of Ebenezer’s understanding of where his life has led him. At its heart, it’s a ghost story. Because it’s got Christmas in the title, people think it’s a lovely, wholesome story about a man changing his ways, which it is, but really it’s got all the ghost elements that you could want. Exactly. I’m sure all of us, if we had a ghost of Christmas, past, present or future visiting us and we were shown the impact we’ve had on people it would shake all of our bones to their core. Or maybe I’m just suspicious that I’ve been secretly leading an evil life. Absolutely, I stole it basically. I think what A Christmas Carol does particularly well is how you see a character change over the course of the book. But it’s not a dull read because you’ve got the scares and the ghosts. In my case it’s a ravenous carnivorous beast in the attic, and it’s the human connection which helps defeat evil in the story. Ebenezer Scrooge is saved from a very miserable afterlife, and a very miserable rest of his life, by finally embracing his family, being nice to his his co-workers, and sending something special for Tiny Tim. In the same way my Ebenezer would have lived probably another five or six hundred years of selfishness if he hadn’t been very reluctantly forced to bring this rude prankster into his life. Sign up here for our newsletter featuring the best children’s and young adult books, as recommended by authors, teachers, librarians and, of course, kids. Exactly. When I started writing about her I didn’t like her at all. I was thinking she’s so horrible that maybe I should just feed her to The Beast. At the start it was basically a book about three villains, because The Beast is just irredeemably bad. Ebenezer thinks it’s fine to feed children to The Beast, and Bethany has spent most of her time being a prankster and a bully. I found it quite fun trying to see why they were the way they were and whether that made them redeemable. Fortunately it did, otherwise it would be a depressing book. Ebenezer has lived five hundred years and he’s done absolutely nothing with it. At the end of the book, he’s just got a normal human lifespan left but in an hour of his new life he’ll be doing more good than in the five hundred years he’s just been living for exotic teas and fabulous varieties of waistcoat. Hopefully it’s got some sort of lesson, amongst the jumps and scares."

"Yes, it was delightful for me when the penny dropped. I realised, wow, this is a fantasy story! I hadn’t realised that before. The subtitle describes it as, “[b]eing a ghost story of Christmas.” We have that ‘ghost story’ concept prominent in our heads when we think of A Christmas Carol , which is interesting, because there’s actually only one ghost who has a part. There are the unnamed ghosts in the background, but really, Marley is the singular ghost, right? The other visitors in the tale are spirits , not ghosts. And there’s time travel in the story, and space travel… When I started to think of it in the context of it being a fantasy tale, that changed how I viewed the story – a story that my family reads every Christmas. I realised that this is actually an early tale of fantasy. It’s got a lot of the same important themes. There’s the theme of transformation obviously, that’s key to the text: that transformation is possible. And one of the things I find really interesting with A Christmas Carol is that the monster that has the protagonist in its grip is the protagonist’s own ego, his own greed. Augustine defines evil as being curved in on oneself – and that’s Ebenezer, right? Ebenezer Scrooge. We tend to just call him Scrooge. We forget that his first name is Ebenezer. Another one of our key fantasy themes is knowing your stories: the word Ebenezer actually comes from the Old Testament, it’s a Jewish word, and refers to a story in which the people were supposed to build a monument of stones to help them remember what God had done for them in the past. So as they move into the future, if there are times when they lose their way, when they get distraught, they are to remember the Ebenezer. And that’s what the word came to mean: this recollection of the stories in the past that remind us that ‘God has brought us this far.’ So, Ebenezer’s name is really intentional, because that is this story! Scrooge is constantly, throughout the tale, being reminded of his ebenezers – the stories that have shaped him, the good stories of his past, and the stories that will reshape him, and do reshape him as he recollects them. When the story begins he has forgotten his stories, he’s lost his roots, and yet in rediscovering them and hearing them again, he finds his identity again and fights off the monster. And, of course, Dickens is also pushing back against the ravages of the Industrial Revolution."