There are few writers more quotable than Charles Dickens, and few books from his oeuvre more quotable than A Christmas Carol (1843). Indeed, every year in the UK, hundreds of thousands of English GCSE students are reminded by their teachers to reread the text over Christmas, or at least watch a film version and learn a few quotations, depending on their grade expectations.
Of course, there are the many favourites, the ones that even the most reluctant students remember: “Bah! Humbug,” to show the disdain Scrooge shows for all things Christmas; “as solitary as an oyster,” to illustrate Scrooge’s self-enforced isolation”; “If they would rather die, they had better do it and decrease the surplus population,” Scrooge’s meanest, most Malthusian utterance, given in retort to the portly gentlemen’s request for a charitable donation for the poor at Christmas. Most self-respecting British Year 11 examinees will have these under their belts when they shuffle into their exam halls every summer.
However, there are parts of A Christmas Carol, less known and lesser quoted, which yield not just fruitful fodder for grade-saving, but bona fide maxims for getting more out of Christmas than unnecessary gifts, weight gain and a hangover or two. In Stave Three of the novella, when Scrooge is taken from the Cratchits’ meagre but happy Christmas dinner on a tour of bleak outposts, he is shown three examples of how Christmas can raise the spirit in even the most desolate of settings: a mining community, a lighthouse, and a ship where, despite the cold and miserable isolation of the places, the inhabitants sing a Christmas song, share a Christmas greeting, or ponder a Christmas memory.
Most affecting of these, for me, is the mining community where, amidst barren and blasted rock, “an old, old man. . . in a voice that seldom rose above the howling of the wind upon the barren waste, was singing them [his family] a Christmas song.” Music is a foregrounded motif in the novel – its title (A Christmas Carol), its chapters (staves), and the countless times that music bubbles into the text, either in the brief, random singing of carols or the extended fiddle music of Fezziwig’s party and dance. But Dickens, like all great writers, has the power to strike an emotional chord that stops us and gives us pause for thought. Rereading this section of the book recently, with Christmas on the midwinter horizon, and the madness of the build-up in full swing, I was moved by the brilliant universality of the idea of taking a moment, amidst “the howling of the wind,” whatever form that may take, to stop and think about what’s really important, not just at Christmas, but throughout the year – your family, your loved ones (present and absent), your health, your happiness, and (probably Dickens’s most important message) your treatment of others, especially those less fortunate than yourself.
These ideas may seem schmaltzy to us now, clichéd through countless inferior festive tales that pile higher and higher each year through various streaming platforms. But there’s a deeper social and political point made by Dickens’s whistle-stop tour of these sad places, as there is made by the whole novel. Written and published at the height of Britain’s industrial revolution and global power, the old, old man’s Christmas song is a brief celebration of humanity amidst the howl and blast of the burgeoning machine age; read now, it is the simple championing of family life, atomised and barely heard beneath the incessant twitter and sneer of tech-driven bi-partisan hate-speak. So, if you are looking for some quiet, thoughtful time this festive season, when you can tap into something genuinely Christmassy, you could do a lot worse than read a few pages of A Christmas Carol, just to remind yourself what it’s really all about.
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