What the Dickens?

I have written many times here about the wonderful Charles Dickens story, A Christmas Carol (1843). I wrote the first post back in December of 2012 when this blog was less than two years old. The most recent was ten years later, in December of 2022.

December, of course, because Christmas. Every year I watch as many adaptations as I can find (and I read the Dickens novella). It’s one of my favorite stories: it’s small and personal; it centers on a redemption arc; it has a classic happy ending; and it has ghosts.

This year I was struck by how it’s a powerful example of our cultural normative social values — something expressed throughout human literature.

Let me begin as Dickens began by quoting his Preface:

I HAVE endeavoured 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 wish to lay it.

Their faithful Friend and Servant,
C. D.
December, 1843.

It brilliantly sets the tone as both whimsical and fantastical. Beyond the light tone, there is for modern readers a small unintended smile brought on by the juxtaposition between the old phrase “lay a ghost” and the 1970s slang “getting laid”. (With ghosts, one is laying them to rest.) Regardless, Dickens’ little Ghost of an Idea has captured our hearts ever since.

The humor (or humour) continues in the first two paragraphs:

Marley was dead: to begin with. There is no doubt whatever about that. The register of his burial was signed by the clergyman, the clerk, the undertaker, and the chief mourner. Scrooge signed it: and Scrooge’s name was good upon ’Change, for anything he chose to put his hand to. Old Marley was as dead as a door-nail.

Mind! I don’t mean to say that I know, of my own knowledge, what there is particularly dead about a door-nail. I might have been inclined, myself, to regard a coffin-nail as the deadest piece of ironmongery in the trade. But the wisdom of our ancestors is in the simile; and my unhallowed hands shall not disturb it, or the Country’s done for. You will therefore permit me to repeat, emphatically, that Marley was as dead as a door-nail.

Which never fails to make me grin. And to mentally salivate over the tasty meal that I’m about to enjoy.

The next two paragraphs start building a frame for the story:

Scrooge knew he was dead? Of course he did. How could it be otherwise? Scrooge and he were partners for I don’t know how many years. Scrooge was his sole executor, his sole administrator, his sole assign, his sole residuary legatee, his sole friend, and sole mourner. And even Scrooge was not so dreadfully cut up by the sad event, but that he was an excellent man of business on the very day of the funeral, and solemnised it with an undoubted bargain.

The mention of Marley’s funeral brings me back to the point I started from. There is no doubt that Marley was dead. This must be distinctly understood, or nothing wonderful can come of the story I am going to relate. If we were not perfectly convinced that Hamlet’s Father died before the play began, there would be nothing more remarkable in his taking a stroll at night, in an easterly wind, upon his own ramparts, than there would be in any other middle-aged gentleman rashly turning out after dark in a breezy spot—say Saint Paul’s Churchyard for instance—literally to astonish his son’s weak mind.

Dickens brings us much in four paragraphs. We already have some sense of Scrooge. In the next seven paragraphs, Dickens tells us more about him and his situation.

Then the nephew enters Scrooge’s place of business and the plot begins.

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I have some notes about the four adaptations I watched this year along with some general observations about why A Christmas Carol shares an interesting trait with Sherlock Holmes, but first a few words about social values. Which is appropriate because we find them in Dickens.

And more to the point here, throughout our amassed body of literature.

Human recorded history goes back about 5,000 years. Over that time humanity has written many stories — true and fictional — about what it is like to be human. In particular, we produced parables, from bible stories to fairy tales to adult fictions, that describe cultural norms.

The book All I Really Need to Know I Learned in Kindergarten (1986), by Robert Fulgham, makes the point that we are given these moral lessons early and often by parents, schools, and (for many) churches. An important note: while individuals vary in their moral approaches, there is — especially over history — a heavily weighted average that forms a clear social moral compass.

This moral compass — this general historical human view of what it means to be moral — is probably the closest we can come to an absolute morality.

Humanity has learned many lessons over the eons. Among them lessons about right and wrong — not based on celestial edicts, but on the simple history of ‘A’ leading to ‘B’. Our accumulated social cause-and-effect. Our derived moral physics. As many have pointed out, it boils down to the Golden Rule.

Morality is essentially the recognition of the sovereignty and parity of others.

Science fiction writer Spider Robinson, as with many if not most writers, often has clear moral beats in his stories. I especially like this one:

“Kind is better than cruel — I’m sure of that. Loose is better than rigid. Love is better than indifference. So is hate. Laughing is the best. Not laughing will kill you. Alone is okay. Not alone is way better. That’s about it … ”

~Spider Robinson, Very Bad Deaths

And that is about it. Morality is trying very hard to not be an asshole.

Which brings me to the current sociopolitical situation and my point. Which is that you cannot align yourself with the current POTUS and call yourself a moral person. History contradicts you.

There is a meme that I think sums it correctly:

If you support this man, I won’t judge you for your choice of political parties. I will judge you for your lack of morals, ethics, and humanity.

So will others.

So will history.

The historical moral compass is clear in this case, whether based on traditional American values or traditional Christian values. The current administration is far abeam of either. It is by any moral standard a corrupt and amoral regime. It’s based on greed and grievance, bitterness and disgruntlement, selfishness and hatred.

As the meme above says, if you support this man, you are making a choice that speaks volumes about your character and morals. To be blunt, if you still support this man after all he’s said and done, I think there is something very wrong with you and want nothing to do with you.

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As a segue back to A Christmas Carol, I was thinking about how, with its myriad adaptations, some close, some not, the story is like Sherlock Holmes in being diffuse and no longer well-defined.

Back in 2019 (in December), I wrote about how the Sherlock Holmes canon has superposed upon it all the adaptations ever made of it. Some are faithful to the source; some are jazz riffs or “loosely based on” or “inspired by” the Dickens text. In that post, I mentioned in passing A Christmas Carol because it, too, has myriad adaptations overlaying it.

That post was about the fuzzy image of Holmes, but it only recently occurred to me that it makes an interesting quantum analogy. Compare the vaguely defined Holmes with something like Mount Rushmore or the Statue of Liberty. These are well-defined and though you may have seen various replicas or images, chances are the mental images you have of these famous monuments is sharp and clear.

In contrast to the fuzzy, vague Holmes (or Scrooge or the ghosts in A Christmas Carol). My mental image of Sherlock combines Basil Rathbone, Benedict Cumberbatch, Jonny Lee Miller, Frank Langella, and many others (Wikipedia says Holmes has appeared onscreen 254 times — and many more times on stage or in radio plays — making him the world’s most portrayed fictional character.)

So, compare the sharp and clear image of Mount Rushmore or the Statue of Liberty with the fuzzy and vague image of Holmes or Scrooge or the ghosts. The former is an analog for the unambiguous classical physics world; the latter is an analog for the ambiguous “revealed only when looked at” quantum physics world.

Holmes and Scrooge have “wavefunctions” that have spread out and become indefinite, whereas Mount Rushmore and the Statue of Liberty are “collapsed” in our minds and definite.

Kind of a nice analogy, I thought.

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Some notes on the four adaptations I watched this year:

Firstly, I found the story especially poignant this year in light of the social and political situation. We have, objectively speaking, wandered far from our traditional values as espoused in our major political documents, established laws and various professional ethics, and supposed Christian values (it is, after all, on our money). Or as espoused in stories such as this one.

Many have lost their moral compass of late, so it was almost overwhelming seeing a story based on core moral values we have followed for so long. The contrast between those values and our current lack of them was stark and dismaying.

I started with the George C. Scott version (1984). I’ve long considered one of the better versions, but among those better versions it doesn’t rank all that high.

As I’ve said before, Scott makes a good grumpy Scrooge but somehow doesn’t quite pull off his redemption joy.

One of the small beats I look for (and generally don’t see in adaptations) is the view Marley shows Scrooge out his bedroom window:

The air was filled with phantoms, wandering hither and thither in restless haste, and moaning as they went. Every one of them wore chains like Marley’s Ghost; some few (they might be guilty governments) were linked together; none were free. Many had been personally known to Scrooge in their lives. He had been quite familiar with one old ghost, in a white waistcoat, with a monstrous iron safe attached to its ankle, who cried piteously at being unable to assist a wretched woman with an infant, whom it saw below, upon a door-step. The misery with them all was, clearly, that they sought to interfere, for good, in human matters, and had lost the power for ever.

On the other hand, it does have the bit with Old Joe (the fence) as well as what I see as a central bit, the children of Ignorance and Want. Many adaptations ignore one or both of these. The Scott adaptation has them both.

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Then I watched the Henry Winkler version, An American Christmas Carol (1979). It’s about what you’d expect with The Fonz starring as Scrooge.

This adaptation plays fast and loose with the story — essentially creating a new story. Winkler plays Benedict Slade the over-the-top miserly businessman. His cowled assistant is Thatcher. The time is Christmas Eve, 1933, in New England.

Slade is out with an unwilling Thatcher reclaiming people’s possessions from unpaid loans (the whole town is struggling). Then there are spiritual repercussions.

One cute note: among the things he repossesses are a collection of rare old books — Slade takes them only because their leather bindings might return a few dollars. One of the choice items in that collection is a signed first edition of A Christmas Carol by Charles Dickens.

It plays like a Hallmark movie: simplistic and without nuance; heavy handed. Sometimes a story is said to have been “painted with a fine brush”. This was painted with a roller. By the end, I was waiting for it to be over.

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Next, I watched a colorized version of Scrooge (1935), with Seymour Hicks as Scrooge. Hicks also starred in a 1913 film version as well as touring with a stage version in the late 1800s and early 1900s.

He’s an experienced Scrooge and very good in the role. This is one of the better cinematic adaptations, though it suffers from poor image quality despite the restoration.

Marley’s ghost in this is invisible to us; only Scrooge sees him. Special effects at the time didn’t really exist. The Ghost of Christmas Present is an actor, and the other two are done with shadows and light effects. All-in-all a good lesson on why special effects can add to a story but can never comprise it.

One reason this is a favorite is that it is so faithful to the source text. Much of the dialog is from the book. This version also sharpens the social commentary by cutting between the Mayor of London’s sumptuous feast and the starving cold poor outside. In many ways, it’s the heart of Dickens’ tale.

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Lastly, the version that was my gateway to the story, the 1962 animated version, Mister Magoo’s Christmas Carol.

It’s framed as a play within a play. Mr. Magoo is an actor playing Scrooge in a stage production on Broadway in New York.

Long ago, as a child, this hour-long animated feature introduced me to the Dickens tale. My heart was captivated and captured. To this very day.

What with one thing and another, I started my annual A Christmas Carol marathon on Christmas Day this year feeling it was a bit pro forma. I’ve watched these all so many times and now there’s a vague sense of obligation — not a good frame of mind for seeing old friends.

Yet within moments I was swept away and had a wonderful evening.

The Magoo version is musical. There are at least six separate songs plus a few reprisals later. Even so, it manages to be one of the more accurate adaptations. Lot of the Dickens dialog straight from the book.

A worthy adaptation if a bit goofy in places. It has the Ghost of Christas Present show up first with the Ghost of Christmas Past coming second. Weird, but it works okay.

I bought it from Amazon a couple of years ago, so can watch it every year now. I used to have to try to find it on YouTube, so it usually had commercials and was soon deleted because copyright. Definitely a bit goofy, but with a lot of old-fashioned charm (and values).

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“And so, as Tiny Tim observed, God bless Us, Every One!”

Stay Dickensian, my friends! Go forth and spread beauty and light.

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