“Marley was dead: to begin with. There was no doubt whatever about
that…Old Marley was as dead as a doornail.”
What a jarring beginning to the beloved A Christmas Carol. This
was the beginning of several Christmas stories, written quickly for even quicker
cash. Dickens’ family was a growing one, and he always needed to earn more and
more to keep them all comfortable. He felt great pressure to be a provider his extended
family could rely on.
There are several books I cannot remember reading for the first
time…they seem to have always been a part of me. A Christmas Carol is
one. The details are part of our world…the characters. We may not even
recognize the allusions’ origins, but we recognize the truth of the allusions,
the metaphors and symbols. That was one of Dickens’ skills – to create images
and characters we recognize in our own lives. What makes Dickens important for every year
since 1843, is his surprise genius for staying relevant…no matter what year we
read, reread, or watch this story, we find the parallels to our own lives. We find
the words that resonate for our life.
As a later side career, Dickens read his own books aloud, and this
one was especially popular. He both read and performed, editing for the
occasion. The New York Public Library has the book Dickens created as his
script, his own prompt
copy, for his performances, complete with stage directions and notes. It is
a treasure I’d love to see.
In this recording the wonderful Neil Gaiman performs A Christmas Carol
from the prompt copy. Dickens reading his story
often drew large, appreciative audiences.
A Christmas Carol Past
If I can’t remember the first time I read the book, I remember the
first time I read it to my own audience. My first year teaching. A tiny rural
elementary school. 12 classrooms…two for each grade. I taught 6th
grade, with an English Education degree. Out of my element in many ways, but
determined to broaden the world for my students. 24 sweet rural Indiana
students stared at me as I tried to figure out Base-Six math (my introduction
to misguided school reforms); but I killed it when we worked with grammar and
reading.
One of my favorite parts of the day was the sacred
reading-after-recess. Hot, sweaty, odoriferous kids piled on the floor,
listening to whatever story I happened to be reading. It was clear my students
did not have a wide experience with good literature…so, for December, I decided
to read A Christmas Carol. I learned quickly I had to revise the story
on the fly. I didn’t have the benefit of Dickens’ prompt copy. I had to wing it.
The vocabulary and diction were well over the heads of my Martinsville kiddos.
So, I substituted words, rearranged sentences, even chose to omit some passages—Dickens’
lovely flights of fancy and descriptions that were timely for his time would
have flown over the heads of my students. So I cut them…much like the author
did in his own performance of the story. I’m sure I was not as artful…another
reason I’d love to get my hands on that prompt copy.
My goal in reading to my young charges was to introduce the story…characters,
plot. I wanted them to recognize the story in the future. I was planting seeds
of literature, as their parents planted their crops. I wouldn’t be there to see
them nod in recognition years later when someone was called a, “Scrooge,” or
when someone piped up, “God Bless Us, Every One.” But I was there the first
time they heard. I would have helped them understand those references we all
nod sagely at. They could nod right along. They could get the jokes.
I overestimated our ability to get through the short book, so the
last day before Christmas Break (yes, we called it Christmas Break, and the skies
did not fall), as my students were finishing up their home-made presents to
their parents and family, I read…and read. The room was busy, friendly, quiet.
Students listened as they painted and drew, folded and wrapped. I read, “And
so, as Tiny Tim observed, God bless Us, Every One,” and closed my book, savoring
that lovely moment of silence at the end of a wonderful story. My students
spontaneously began to clap, something they’d not done before. But there were
were, in the middle of the Indiana Uplands, at a school where we had no
library, where one girl lived in a house with dirt floors, where students worried
that using proper grammar would make them laughing stocks, where one boy couldn’t
come to school one day because his family couldn’t find his shoes, there they were--my
students felt the power of the story and they clapped. For the joy of Scrooge’s
change of heart, for the new, promising future for Tiny Tim. For having listened
to a classic tale. They clapped.
The combination of Dickens, Scrooge, Ebenezer, my students and I
created the kind of magic that’s possible with a shared experience of art…any
kind of art. But here it was great literature. That very first year of my
career I saw in front of me, as the gift it was, children transformed for just
a little while, connected to every other person who ever read or watched or
heard this tale. Fifty years later, I can still see their faces as they
realized we had, together, accomplished something special.
Since then, I’ve taught various adaptations of A Christmas
Carol. We’ve watched films and compare/contrasted the stories. One of my
personal favorites continues to be Bill Murray’s Scrooged. #SorryNotSorry. Reading
it as often as I did, lines come to mind in totally unrelated situations. Most often, as I watch the news, listening for
subtext from leaders who too often seem to channel Old Ebenezer, before. I hear
fewer echoes of the redeemed Ebenezer…I wonder why. I don’t have to search far to
find those allusions in popular culture.
Five years ago, listening to the OK
Legislature talk about planned cuts to #oklaed in another lean year for the
OK budget, I could hear Scrooge whispering: “Are there no prisons…workhouses?”
Politicians seem to unknowingly mirror the very worst of our man. They seemed
more than willing to cut funding to schools, so they could prioritize their own
goals. They seemed content to ignore Ignorance and Want…even as Dickens warns
us of the dangers of an uneducated people: “The boy is Ignorance. This girl is
Want. Beware them both…but most of all beware the boy, for on his brow I have
seen that written which is Doom, unless the writing is erased.” The only way to
erase that Doom is with strong, well-funded schools. But we fight every year
for our students. We will fight the ghost of Scrooge next Session, too. Want
and Ignorance are always ignored, even when they’re right in front of us. Still.
Always.
A Christmas Carol Present
I’ve now experienced 75 Christmas seasons, and seriously can’t
remember one that was as challenging, not even that year Santa brought me the
cheap knock-off dolly instead of the one I asked him for. Covid and politics
sucked out a whole lot of the joy of the season…and Scrooges abound. You can’t
open a newspaper (Yes, Virginia, there are newspapers), or more likely a new
link online, without learning more about our policy makers who seem horribly
disconnected to the real suffering Americans are feeling now. Watching a
journalist choke up on the air as he interview a couple in line at a food bank
for the first time in their lives, seeing the desperation of people whose
federal unemployment benefits will end soon, others who may be evicted with the
new year, we need a Christmas miracle. But all we seem to see are Scrooges,
coldly uninvolved in people’s lives and suffering. Going off to golf on
Christmas Day, tummies full, presents opened…Scrooge Lives…and he’s working inDC. He’s working in State Capitols where legislators sign onto shenanigans that
would disenfranchise voters in other states. He’s working to turn communities
against each other.
Dan Patrick, the Lt Governor of Texas, earlier this year, as Covid
was first spreading across the country waxed poetic that older
Americans should be happy to expose themselves to the virus and die, so his
beloved economy could open without impediment….and I heard Scrooge disdainly
pronouncing, “If
they would rather die, . . . they had better do it, and decrease the surplus
population.” Umm, I, personally, would rather NOT die. I’d like to see
my Grands marry and begin their adult life. The ugly heartlessness of Scrooge’s
words really strike a blow when we hear a vile politician echo the sentiment. And I'm not holding my breath for a Texas epiphany anytime soon.
Look anywhere during this season and you’ll see someone
referencing Christmas Carol…naming someone ‘Scrooge’. As I started
writing this, I found a reflection by a writer who proclaimed herself to be the
‘family
Scrooge.” And, right on cue, Wall Street Journal Opinion Page struck again
with this beaut: “In Defense of Scrooge,
Whose Thrift Blessed the World.” Hey, WSJ, you missed another one. May I
suggest you read the book again? You kinda missed the whole moral of the story.
This Twitter
thread takes them to task better than I could.
A Christmas Carol is embedded into our culture. We need to know
the story to get the silly jokes and cartoons, to know when an editorial board makes
a huge mistake in referencing the characters. That was why I read it, 50 years
ago to my 11 year old students…who are now nearing retirement age! I wanted those
allusions and metaphors to make sense.
The
book continues to be timely, sometimes sadly…and I keep asking why do our
policy makers forget early Ebenezer is NOT the role model for us to follow. Did
anyone tell politicians and WSJ and Patrick they are acting like the nasty
Scrooge, not the loving Scrooge we are supposed to admire? Or, did they NOT
read the last Stave of the story where Scrooge pleads for, and finds, a way to change the
trajectory of his life?
I often reread the novel during Christmas season when I need to
reconnect with this manipulative, sentimental, tale of redemption. Feel hope
that, like Scrooge, we can choose another path and make mankind our business.
Like this year.
So, when two friends in our FB Book Challenge group talked about a
new book, Mr. Dickens and his Carol, by Samantha Silva, I got interested…A
perfect way to end the year…Mr. Dickens, and then Mr. Scrooge.
I DID say I had taught A Christmas Carol, right? Well, I
also taught Great Expectations, too…so I spent a lot of time with
biographical information about Charles Dickens…his sad childhood, his forced labor
when his family lived in debtor’s prison, his first love, his…complicated...marriage,
his desperation for money to keep his growing family satisfied, his love affair
with a glamorous actress, his second career as a performer of his own work…always
with an eye to profit. So, I approached Silva’s book with a prickly attitude of someone who knows a bit about the subject. She won me over! This book tells the story of those weeks while he is being
cajoled to write a ‘Christmas story’…for big bucks, money he and his family have
already spent with their excessive Christmas plans. Of course he has writer’s
block. He walks the streets of old London, looking for inspiration. He visits the old prison where his ne’er-do-well father lived for a few months, while young Charles was forced into child labor in a blacking factory. He meets a strange young
boy who walks with a limp, a mysterious woman who appears and disappears. We
hear lines from our novel used as dialogue, and we recognize settings and scenes.
We see him slowly, scene-by-scene, inventing the timeless tale. Silva does take
liberties with her story…how else could she add real Spirits? But she breathes
life into the author, into his and Scrooge’s London, and into the text. She uses
coincidences just like Dickens does. And she makes me cry ugly tears…just as manipulative
and sentimental, in her own fine way, as her subject.
Then, I spent a few wonderful days with Ebenezer himself, nasty,
hateful, and infinitely redeemable. Able to learn and grow…and change. With
Silva’s words still clear in my mind, I reread, and the experience was deeper,
more meaningful. Frankly, more fun. NOW I’m ready to listen to Gaiman read the
prompt copy as *I* read my copy…I plan to make my own notes from Dickens’ own.
A Christmas Carol Yet to Come
Dicken’s preface is a short one:
“I have endeavored in this Ghostly little book, to raise the Ghost
of an Idea, which shall not put my readers out of humour with themselves, with
each other, with the season, or with me. May it haunt their houses pleasantly, and
no one with to lay it.” December, 1843. What does that mean for me, for us,
going forward into 2021?
Covid and politics have made 2020 a tough year for us all.
We have lost friends and loved ones. There are empty chairs at the dinner
table, not unlike the empty corner of Tiny Tim in Christmas Yet to Come…Thanksgiving
and Christmas, sheltering at home, even from my family just around the corner.
Trading our signature dinner dishes in the garage, masked up. My granddaughters
and I are planning marathon hugs in the summer. I’ve mused about kidnapping
them all and running away. Eating in restaurants, shopping at the Mall. Seeing
strangers’ smiles, unmasked. Hugs. Hugs.
Going to the grocery stores now and seeing other shoppers
defiantly unmasked, or wearing their mask as an attractive chin strap. I find
myself trying to follow the direction arrows in the aisles, trying not to make
eye contact with others who are not masked properly, or blithely going the
wrong direction, muttering under my breath, “Grace, grace, grace.” And yes, when
I make a mistake and steer down the wrong way myself, I mutter, “Grace, please.
Grace, please.”
Trying heartily to NOT participate in those online
conversations where we knowingly or unknowingly misunderstand and misinterpret,
where we jump to conclusions, make assumptions, see everything through our
political lens. Where we’ve stopped listening. Again, I’ve muttered, “Grace,
grace, grace.” Working to not need the
last word, to stop my teacher inclination to explain one more time what I
meant, what I think the misunderstanding has been.
It’s been hard. That’s another reason A Christmas Carol seems
important to me this season. We need to make some changes…each of us, and
collectively as communities. And I return, not to Scrooge, but to Marley.
I know the last line resonates with most people, but for me,
Marley delivers the words that bounce around in my soul. Words he learned the
truth of too late: he is “doomed to wander among men, and witness what it
cannot share, but might have shared on earth, and turned to happiness...no
rest, no peace. Incessant torture of remorse…no space of regret can make amends
for one life’s opportunity misused!” He sees too late. Seven years dead, and he
is impelled to at least attempt to save Scrooge his fate. Marley’s words should
challenge us all to reflect on our year, our years. To consider our misused
opportunities.
Marley continues with the lament that breaks my heart. “Mankind was my business; charity, mercy, forbearance, and
benevolence, were, all, my business….” Marley doomed himself to carry those
chains-every mistake, every missed opportunity, every miserly decision, hateful
word. He saw too late he He so wants to warn his partner and give him a chance
to see the truth. We all wear the chains we forge in life. “…Link by link, and
yard by yard…” Marley desperately wants Scrooge and us to reflect on the chains
we are forging, and whether they support a life of charity, mercy, forbearance,
and benevolence…Or whether they will shackle us to an unhappy eternity. Each
link in a chain is a small thing…light, insubstantial. Each slight, each unkind
word. Each rebuff is a small thing. But when rebuff is linked to unkind work,
to slight, our burden grows.
Scrooge does see a way
Do we
need a haunting, an epiphany also?
I’m
left with a question…how do we take what
A Christmas Carol can teach us into the next year? How do we take
charity, merch, forbearance, benevolence with us?