A Christmas Carol

I haven't read A Christmas Carol in almost 15 years - since 7th grade, in fact. It's a short read and this year I decided to take another stab at it.

What is most surprising about the story is not the plot itself - we've all probably seen a hundred adaptations of it by now - but how vivid the setting, and by contrast how lacking in imagination is Scrooge's conversion.

It is a little strange to describe Charles Dickens as lacking in imagination, but there you are. Dickens saw, and clearly saw, the problems of Victorian England - the filth, the poverty, the wretched inequality and the exploitation of children. But he completely failed to understand why those problems came about, and how they might be resolved.

Scrooge refuses to give to charity, won't go to his nephew's Christmas dinner, underpays his clerk and forces him to toil in a freezing-cold little office. Why? Dickens' only excuse for Scrooge's meanness is that he had simply forgotten how wonderful Christmas was, and a few examples were all that was needed to bring him around (what a shame Scrooge did not have a photo album). It does not occur to Dickens, perhaps, that paying workers low wages and scrimping on coal make a certain economic sense and are not usually done out of pure spite.

Of course, if the sole reason that Scrooge is a miser is human cruelty, then the only possible remedy is human kindness - and here we see the same theme repeated over and over in his other books, that of a kindhearted rich man coming along and solving everyone's problems with bags of gold. Dickens simply can't face the idea that the system might be producing problems by design - if only people would be nice to one another, everything would be fine.  Maybe so, but for a renowned social critic a response like that is simply an evasion.