Faith Works 12-2-17
Jeff Gill
We all have invented Christmas
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The most influential and ignored work in Western literature, I would assert, is Charles Dickens' "A Christmas Carol."
A secular supernatural fantasia on religious themes, it engages with economic theory, social justice, holiday traditions, and the centrality of family life to community health and stability.
The story has been reimagined on stage and screen almost from its 1843 beginnings, with the lead characters played by actors as different as Albert Finney, George C. Scott, Bill Murray, Jim Carrey, even Mickey Mouse and the Muppets . . . though Mickey was Bob Cratchit, with Scrooge McDuck playing, of course, Scrooge.
Scrooge is the heart of the story, and his transformation is the point of the narrative, with a Romantic era catalyst of mysterious spirits making midnight visitations, and an Enlightenment framework of past, present, and future, with the rationalist question "can the future be changed, or is it fixed?" asked as the conflict which carries us along.
Dickens answers this question with a resounding, and I would say compelling, "yes" to the possibility of change. Yet we ignore not only how this transformation of "a" or "the" Scrooge takes place, we choose to go in the opposite direction more often than not, the Ghost of Christmas Yet to Come shaking a spectral finger at us as we approach.
There's a movie out now, "The Man Who Invented Christmas" which I've not yet seen, but I like the idea. It tells not so much the story of "A Christmas Carol" as the background of writing it – and I will be listening to hear if Ohio makes an appearance in the narrative.
Yes, Ohio. A year before Dickens sat down to write his Christmas tale in London, he had been in American. In the spring of 1842 his tour passed not far from us, traveling from Cincinnati to Lake Erie where he picked up a steamship to Buffalo. Midway, he spent a night in central Ohio. From Dickens' "American Notes":
"We reached Columbus shortly before seven o'clock, and stayed there, to refresh, that day and night: having excellent apartments in a very large unfinished hotel called the Neill House, which were richly fitted with the polished wood of the black walnut, and opened on a handsome portico and stone veranda, like rooms in some Italian mansion. The town is clean and pretty, and of course is 'going to be' much larger. It is the seat of the State legislature of Ohio, and lays claim, in consequence, to some consideration and importance."
Dickens and his wife had spent some time in Cincinnati previously, and on their way up from the Ohio River his last passage through stayed in Lebanon, another spot on the way north, and at Upper Sandusky after Columbus before concluding his Buckeye sojourn at Sandusky on the Erie lakeshore.
No, Ohio probably won't be mentioned in the movie about "A Christmas Carol." But the proximate cause of his writing that novella was because his larger novel at that time, published in sections as was the custom of the time, was not doing well at all. "Martin Chuzzlewit" was and is not one of Dickens' finer works, and it included an American sojourn that some suspect was inserted to spice up reader interest and sales… but it also reflected his largely ambivalent feelings about our land. Slavery was a big part of it, but there was much else – even in Ohio – that rubbed him the wrong way. It comes across both in "Chuzzlewit" and in "American Notes" as just enough unpleasantness to put one off, a bit.
What it all tells me, though, is that after six months in a different country, Dickens was ready to go home. He dreamt of home back in England, and his compared everything and everyone he saw in America to his home, and at a certain point he just wanted to go back.
A year later, the novel in progress was hobbled by his lasting discontent, and he knew he needed to go somewhere else. Dickens wanted to go… home.
Which is what I think "A Christmas Carol" is about. How we can alienate ourselves from where we are, what we're doing, even who we're with, and what it takes for us to go home even when we're already there. To be at home in our own selves, just as Tiny Tim somehow already knew how to do, and as Scrooge comes to learn with some spiritual assistance.
May we all find our way home right where we are this Christmas season!
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