AN ADVENT "CHRISTMAS CAROL" RETREAT - XI
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[Continuing our reading of and meditations on The Christmas Carol]:
On December 19, 1843, Charles Dickens’s “Christmas Carol” made its appearance in London bookshops, just in time for Christmas. We’ve reflected on the “Carol” for its moral lessons – and they were important to Dickens, too. He had visited the tin mines of Cornwall and observed child labor there. It gets an oblique mention among Scrooge’s travels with the Ghost of Christmas Present, when they visit “a bleak and desert moor, where monstrous masses of rude stone were cast about,” a place the Ghost explains as “where miners live, who labor in the bowels of the earth.”
But the “Carol” also had practical implications, as shown in the 2017 movie about its composition, “The Man Who Invented Christmas.” Dickens didn’t “invent” Christmas, though he was part of many of the traditions Americans now know because of their emergence in Victorian England after centuries of radical Protestant hostility towards Christmas. (Yes, the Puritans actually fined people in Boston for celebrating Christmas!) Dickens was a renowned author who had a big family and enjoyed a comfortable life. That cost money and he needed it. The celebration of Christmas and gift giving were gaining renewed popularity in Victorian England, and Dickens saw an opportunity. He wrote the “Carol” in fewer than three months and invested a lot of money in its luxury binding to capture Christmas sales. It worked: Dickens churned out other “Christmas books” for the rest of the 1840s.
But doing well does not exclude doing good – and Dickens wanted to do good, to teach a moral lesson in connection with Christmas. The book concludes with that message when, speaking of the life of the converted Scrooge, it sums it up as “it was always said of him, that he knew how to keep Christmas well, if any man alive possessed the knowledge.”
The English Methodist Charles Wesley had, about a hundred years before the “Carol” written a Christmas carol of his own: “Hark, the Herald Angels Sing!” There’s a line in it that captures the essence of Christmas for us: “God and sinners reconciled!” Christmas is the great feast of reconciliation: God became man to raise us up to the life of God, grace. So, knowing “how to keep Christmas well” does not mean putting on a good party or decorating nicely or having a long Christmas cards list – though it doesn’t exclude any of that, either. It means, first and foremost, being on right terms with one’s God and one’s fellow man, of being converted, which is what we see in the life of Scrooge.
Dickens doesn’t end there. He applies the lesson to us: “May that [knowledge of keeping Christmas well] be truly said of us, and all of us! And so, as Tiny Tim observed, God bless Us, Every One!”
May that be the result for you from your encounter with these Dickensian Advent reflections.
[For those who would like a good background and commentary on the “Carol” from which I draw much inspiration, see Michael Hearn, The Annotated Christmas Carol (New York: Norton, 2004)].
John Grondelski (PhD Fordham) was former associate dean of the School of Theology, Seton Hall University in New Jersey. He is a Catholic theologian with special interests in moral theology and the thought of St. John Paul II. All views are his own.
