12.12.2024

The festive utopia

A collision of two worlds: on the one side, the dingy, foggy London in cold midwinter, and on the other, a fantastical world peopled by spirits. Paul Demarty, in an unusually cheerful mood, revisits Charles Dickens’ A Christmas carol

In 1843, Charles Dickens found himself unexpectedly in a tight spot. His first six novels, mostly printed in the new serialised format that began to dominate popular literature in England, had been robustly successful and made his name. His seventh, Martin Chuzzlewit, however, failed to catch on. By the end of the year, he was in a financial hole, and needed a hit.

It was these circumstances that led him to write A Christmas carol at a fearsome pace, completing it just in time for the holiday itself. It was, indeed, a hit - the first print selling out in a few days - and remains so. Perhaps nothing else he ever wrote has been so consistently popular in the intervening years, whether in written form or in innumerable adaptations - or indeed merely by the entry of ‘Scrooge’ and ‘the ghost of (something) past’ into the vernacular.

Dickens was arguably the first truly mass-market novelist, carried on a historical wave that massively expanded the size of the reading public and the means of reaching them. His genius was supremely suited to this new era of literary production - his ready familiarity with the lives of the working poor tempered by a humorous, genial style. He was unafraid to pile on the sentimentality - a trait that led to a certain suspicion of him among the more culturally sophisticated; a suspicion eventually worn away by his settlement in the official canon of English literature. In any case, it was foolish - to criticise Dickens for being a mere popular novelist would be like criticising JRR Tolkien as a mere writer of mass-market high fantasy. Their achievements were in large part the very creation of these cultural forms.

A Christmas carol is an extremely concentrated burst of pure Dickens. Unlike the serialised works, which tended to stretch out (that being the way one made money from them), it comes in at a lean 100 or so pages in a modern edition (usually anthologised with some of his other festive novellas, The chimes, The cricket on the hearth and The haunted man - generally considered minor works). The effect of that typical Dickensian voice - omniscient narration, eloquent in structure, but also chummy and extemporaneous - is heightened by the fairytale aspect of the material; reading it feels somehow like being read to. The satire is here, in the absurd malice and brittle self-assurance of Scrooge; and so is the treacliness (Tiny Tim).

Two worlds

The novel appears as the collision of two worlds: on the one side, the dingy, foggy London in cold midwinter, with the poor herded into noisome slums or worse (above all, the world of Scrooge himself, and the ceaseless usurious activity of his counting house); and on the other, a fantastical world peopled by spirits - both the ghosts of the dead and the more enigmatic figures that guide Scrooge through the past, present and future. It seems like Scrooge’s world is the real one, in which everything must be assessed by the grim logic of profit and loss. He sarcastically dismisses two fundraisers for the poor:

“Are there no prisons?” asked Scrooge.

“Plenty of prisons,” said the gentleman, laying down the pen again.

“And the Union workhouses?” demanded Scrooge. “Are they still in operation?”

“They are. Still,” returned the gentleman, “I wish I could say they were not.”

“The Treadmill and the Poor Law are in full vigour, then?” said Scrooge.

“Both very busy, sir.”

“Oh! I was afraid, from what you said at first, that something had occurred to stop them in their useful course,” said Scrooge. “I’m very glad to hear it.” …

“Many can’t go there [to the workhouse]; and many would rather die.”

“If they would rather die,” said Scrooge, “they had better do it, and decrease the surplus population.”

From this world - the ‘real’ world of calculation and utility, and of sub-Malthusian contempt for the poor, where everyone must “understand his own business, and not … interfere with other people’s” - Scrooge is rudely hurled into the spirit world, when he is visited first of all by his old partner in avarice, Jacob Marley, dragging around a chain made of “cash-boxes, keys, padlocks, ledgers, deeds and heavy purses wrought in steel” - “the chain I forged in life”, Marley warns. Scrooge clings for one moment more to ‘reality’, explaining the apparition by way of a quack theory of the unreliable senses: “A slight disorder of the stomach makes them cheats. You may be an undigested bit of beef, a blot of mustard, a crumb of cheese, a fragment of an underdone potato.” Yet he must in the end yield to his senses: and his senses show him suddenly a London heaving with mournful spirits, dragging effigies of their sins behind them.

From there, Scrooge must receive the three spirits of Christmas - ‘Past’, ‘Present’ and ‘Future’. I think it is the book’s argument (if you can accuse a popular novel of having such a thing) that the world of the spirits is in fact the real one, and the world of Scrooge a phantasmatic inversion, of a sort that ought to be familiar to readers of Marx. Though Marx had nothing much at all to say about Dickens, we nonetheless meet Scrooge - after a fashion - early in Capital, in the remark:

This boundless greed after riches, this passionate chase after exchange-value, is common to the capitalist and the miser; but, while the miser is merely a capitalist gone mad, the capitalist is a rational miser. The never-ending augmentation of exchange-value, which the miser strives after, by seeking to save his money from circulation, is attained by the more acute capitalist, by constantly throwing it afresh into circulation.¹

The figure of the miser himself thus fundamentally misapprehends not only the world in front of him, but even his own interests. He does not, pace Scrooge, “understand his own business”.

The spirits, of course, do not come to make Scrooge into a more efficient capitalist. ‘Past’ - a figure perhaps a child, or perhaps withered and ancient - comes to return Scrooge to his youth, and remind him of the stages by which his life slowly bled out of him. He first meets himself as a boy, captivated as many middle class children were (including Dickens) by the Arabian nights. Ali Baba appears outside the schoolhouse window - another spirit, let’s say - along with other characters from that and other great romances. In stages, the solitary but joyful child is given over to his avarice, until he finally and indifferently allows his betrothal to lapse. The old bachelor Scrooge slowly becomes more despondent as the show goes on.

‘Present’ is the youngest of many brothers - “more than eighteen hundred” (one, we suppose, for every Christmas since the first). His little tour describes the world that Scrooge refuses - the food of the feasts (“ruddy, brown-faced, broad-girthed Spanish onions, shining in the fatness of their growth like Spanish friars”, “the pudding, like a speckled cannon-ball, so hard and firm, blazing in half of half a quartern of ignited brandy”), the games, the unruly children, the gifts … It begins with people to whom Scrooge has been cruel - his clerk, Bob Cratchit, and his family - but then Present takes him to a mining village (Dickens, at the time, was indignant at the conditions in Cornish tin mines he had visited), and out to sea, to lighthouse keepers sharing a can of grog and sailors unconsciously singing together. Finally, back on land, they meet Scrooge’s nephew, who has also caught the rough side of his tongue on Christmas Eve. As they travel, Present dispenses fairy-dust from his torch, lubricating the festivities.

This, then, is the real world - the stubborn refusal of even the poor to be miserable and alone even in the depths of winter, the prodigality in celebration without thought of being thrown into the workhouse, or finding oneself cast into the trash-heap of the “surplus population”. His one and only day’s work done, Present duly dies.

It is then the turn of ‘Future’ - terrifying, veiled, mute, communicating only via an outstretched hand. (Future is the only one of these spectres that really feels like a ghost.) He has little enough to show Scrooge, since Scrooge seems not to have that much of a future. By the next Christmas, he will be dead and unmourned; his servants will laughingly pick over his possessions. Worst of all, Bob Cratchit’s beloved, sickly son, Tiny Tim, will also be in the grave - a loss that, notably, does not prevent the grieving Cratchits from finding some Christmas cheer from somewhere. Having been shown these things, Scrooge’s conversion is complete; thus begins his frantic Christmas day, his dispatching of a prize turkey - so huge that “he never could have stood upon his own legs” - to the Cratchits, his reconciliation with his nephew, and his keeping of a merry Christmas for the rest of his days.

Time and space

This presentation of the two worlds - the world of the grinding poverty and invincible avarice of London in the throes of industrialisation, and the world of Christmas, reappearing fleetingly once a year under the benevolent guidance of its spirits - has something of the utopian to it. It is a utopia parcelled off in time rather than space, but, like the more classical examples, a critique simply by its contrast to the dourness and cruelty of capitalist life. In a sense, the utopia too is proposed as the real world - the sense of Hegel’s “what is rational is real”. It is the world of actual human fulfilment, of the abolition of the apologetics and ideologies that accustom us to exploitation and oppression.

Indeed, I am hardly the first person to notice this. In the early 20th century, GK Chesterton compared Dickens’ Christmas novellas to the utopias of, among others, William Morris, whom he treats with great, but critical, respect. He wanted to make a contrast. The utopians had failed, in the end, to really portray happiness per se. He offered three points of difference - firstly, “happiness is not a state; it is a crisis”. It unfolds as a drama, an event. “In romantic literature”, such as that of Dickens, “the hero and heroine must indeed be happy, but they must be unexpectedly happy”.² Utopian literature, rather, portrays the world in which happiness would be expected, and thus ends up strangely melancholy.

Secondly, happiness comes as a result of struggle and difficulty. Christmas is so happy, he reckons, because it is a winter festival, coming at a time when comfort and pleasure is hardest to come by; it is famously not all that different from other, pagan winter festivals, after all. “It is this contradiction and mystical defiance which gives a quality of manliness and reality to the old winter feasts which is not characteristic of the sunny felicities of the Earthly Paradise [of Morris].”³

Finally, happiness is not beautiful, but rather grotesque and vulgar. “A man in Morris’s Earthly paradise cannot really be enjoying himself; he is too decorative,” Chesterton writes, a little cattishly. “Dickens understood that happiness is best expressed by ugly figures.” In A Christmas carol,

Everybody is happy because nobody is dignified. We have a feeling somehow that Scrooge looked even uglier when he was kind than he had looked when he was cruel. The turkey that Scrooge bought was so fat, says Dickens, that it could never have stood upright. That top-heavy and monstrous bird is a good symbol of the top-heavy happiness of the [novel].⁴

Religion

Oddly, not noted here as a contrast between the utopia and the winter festival is the small matter of how they come about. Morris’s News from nowhere, after all, includes a lengthy description of the revolution that brings about his rustic anarchism. For his part, Chesterton places a great deal of weight on the coming down of Christmas as a tradition - it is the occasion, even, of his famous quip that “… tradition is the most democratic of all things, for tradition is merely a democracy of the dead as well as the living.”⁵

Which is a roundabout way of getting to the point that A Christmas carol expresses its social content as a religious story. It is, after all, about Christmas; and follows from what was then a relatively recent revival of a fuller, more ‘festive’ observance of the day. Carols had fallen out of use in the 17th and 18th centuries, but revived. The decorated tree came over from Germany along with prince Albert. For the Puritans, it became a solemn occasion; for the Victorians, as for the medievals, it was a grand old party. What it was not was a quasi-secular occasion, as it is in today’s Britain.

The revolutionary agents, in Dickens’s Christmas utopia, are the spirits - pagan in presentation, but for practical purposes interchangeable with angels. Scrooge’s story is a Christian conversion narrative very much by the book: of the redemption of a sinful man, drawn to repentance by unmerited grace.⁶ The grieving Cratchits console themselves with a reading from the gospel of Mark, about the closeness of children to heaven. The scene of the servants taking hold of the dead Scrooge’s possessions is an ironic recapitulation of Roman soldiers casting lots for the crucified Jesus’s garment. We could go on.

All this is present in small hints, of course, though hints that would be more readily accessible to readers of Dickens’ own day than ours. It is not a tediously instructional text for Sunday-school children. Yet the conversion narrative structure, and the supernatural content, at least allows Scrooge’s progress a measure of plausibility. We could contrast it with the case of Noddy Boffin in Our mutual friend, Dickens’s late masterpiece: the genial dustman is corrupted by his inheritance of a vast sum of money. In earlier conceptions of the novel, he was to remain corrupted until the end; but Dickens lost his nerve, and a preposterous plot twist reveals him to have merely pretended to turn into a miser, so as to better propel the inheritance on its rightful course. It is scarcely believable, and the one significant wart on a great novel.

In Marx’s famous sketch of religion from the Critique of Hegel’s philosophy of right, he writes that “religion is the sigh of the oppressed creature, the heart of a heartless world, and the soul of soulless conditions”.⁷ (I note, merely for the poetry of the thing, that Marx wrote this at almost exactly the same time that Dickens was writing A Christmas carol.) Dickens’s portrayal of the joy of Christmas celebration gives a certain illustration of this idea. In the grip of the festival, people are more alive: they dance like dervishes; they flirt behind the curtains in a game of blind man’s buff. Interestingly, even the food is alive. Those brown Spanish onions again: “shining in the fatness of their growth like Spanish friars, and winking from their shelves in wanton slyness at the girls as they went by, and glanced demurely at the hung-up mistletoe.”

That, of course, in turn recalls Marx’s most famous inversion of all - the fetishism of the commodity, in which the social relation of value becomes reified as the property of a thing, and consequently those things appear as godlike foreign powers over us. In Marx, this is all pretty terrifying - like Dickens, Marx loved a ghost - but Dickens gives us something of the seductiveness of the view - the heart rather than the heartlessness. A feast day in Victorian England turns into a great dance of people, ghosts, angels, onions, roasted birds and boiled fruit puddings. The heart, indeed, overcomes the heartlessness with the conversion of Scrooge.

Commodification

Dickens really did intend all this not only as a call to individual repentance on the part of the rich, but as a social broadside to expose the dismal conditions he observed in those tin mines, reformatory schools and other such institutions - he thought his Christmas story would be a greater “sledgehammer blow” for the poor than a hundred polemics in liberal journals.

He was, of course, no Marxist - Marxism did not quite yet exist in any case - but again, in this respect, a utopian, like Robert Owen and others before him attempting to reform society by worrying at the conscience of the bourgeoisie. The picture he has in mind is of the feast Scrooge attends as a young apprentice put on by his kindly master, complete with country dancing and individual blessings at the end - a nostalgic reversion to a certain romantic-medievalist model of hospitality that would later also be mobilised by Morris in his art and writings.

What happened, in the event, is something different. The settlement of the social question became a matter between the bourgeoisie and state, on the one hand, and the organisations of the working class, on the other. Christmas, for its part, became an object lesson in the adaptability of bourgeois society, as indeed it already was then, having been transformed from a grey Puritan thing into a carnival; in time, with the growth of consumer society, the carnival became principally a commercial rather than religious affair. It remained a matter of abundance, at least for those with spare cash to throw around, but the abundance was that of the market - not only its food, but also its vast array of disposable gadgets and toys. The miser indeed was “rationalised” into the capitalist, as expected by Marx, rather than revivified as the medieval squire, conscientious of his noblesse oblige.

So it is today. Retailers live and die on the sales they make in the run-up. Onions still wink at us, but now from a Marks and Spencer advert. The machinery of the world market has, once more, rendered the plight of the working poor, whose job is to grow the food and assemble the gewgaws, more or less invisible.

This process repeats itself fractally - think of the ‘progress’ from the naff Christmas jumper knitted by your nan, to the first ironic Christmas jumper office parties, to the fact that today every high street clothes shop currently has racks of ironic Christmas jumpers for sale. More or less all of them are manufactured by super-exploited labour in the global south, with the profits pocketed largely by institutionalised finance capital - a global mega-Scrooge, which has finally succeeded in ridding itself of all trappings of humanity. (What ghost could put a scare into Blackrock?) It is not an analysis without problems, but Theodor Adorno’s and Max Horkheimer’s critique of the culture industry hits on something important, when it characterises that industry as the progressive commodification of time away from work as ‘leisure’.⁸

I offer this not as a criticism of A Christmas carol as such, as if it could anticipate every future development and simultaneously offer a critique, but to place it in a wider history - itself a relatively early example of commodified mass culture, of course, that nonetheless earnestly constructs a picture of what in humanity can never be fully commodified: love, friendship, solidarity and above all pure, idiotic, drunken revelry (the flaw in the culture industry analysis is precisely that it seems to suppose that such commodification is, indeed, complete).

The ruse of reason ensures that this particular picture has largely been commodified in the interim; but even in its current form, Christmas - celebrated in religious terms by Christians or secular terms by others - and for that matter the other great religious and secular feasts, still are occasions for some or all of these things, and they remain tokens of a less heartless world waiting to be born. We are not utopians, but - as I argued earlier this year⁹ - we still need our ‘utopias’.

1. www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1867-c1/ch04.htm.↩︎

2. GK Chesterton Appreciations and criticisms of the works of Charles Dickens London 1911, p80.↩︎

3. Ibid p81.↩︎

4. Ibid pp81-82.↩︎

5. Ibid p78.↩︎

6. As Chesterton puts it, a conversion “as sudden as the conversion of a man at a Salvation Army meeting”, though “it is true that the man at the Salvation Army meeting would probably be converted from the punch bowl; whereas Scrooge was converted to it” (p82).↩︎

7. www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1843/critique-hpr/intro.htm.↩︎

8. T Adorno and M Horkheimer Dialectic of enlightenment London 2007, pp124-27.↩︎

9. ‘Fiction: utopian and scientific’ Weekly Worker September 12: weeklyworker.co.uk/worker/1506/fiction-utopian-and-scientific.↩︎