Paul Kerensa revisits A Christmas Carol

A Christmas Carol turns 180 years young this December. Yet Christians can have a love-hate relationship with this festive novella. Doesn’t it distract us from the real Christmas? The one with the Christ-child in a manger, and family and presents, and a turkey, and mulled wine and… oh I’ve done it again, haven’t I? I’ve accidentally drifted into Dickensiana.

I do wonder, though, what version of Christmas we’d have without ‘the man who invented Christmas’, as some called him. Tolstoy meanwhile referred to him as ‘that great Christian writer’. Has Charles Dickens been a force for good for the Christian Christmas, or has he helped replace it?

It’s said that he had little time for the institution of the Church, although he once wrote to a fan: ‘I have always striven in my writings to express veneration for the life and lessons of Our Saviour… But I have never made proclamation of this from the house tops.’

Dickens religiously educated his children by writing for them The Life of Our Lord, a book so personal to his family that he banned its publication for as long as he lived. It contained eight Gospel stories, with one choice bearing a passing resemblance to A Christmas Carol.

In the parable of the rich man and Lazarus from Luke’s Gospel, a rich man dies and is damned to hades after a lifetime of luxury. Looking up, he sees a familiar poor man, Lazarus, with Abraham on the heavenly side of the chasm. Abraham refuses the rich man’s request to send Lazarus to his family, as a ghostly warning to see the error of their ways and change their path. You can almost hear Marley’s chains a-rattling in the wake of that biblical story. Could this have been an inspiration for Scrooge’s tale?

A Christmas Carol is a redemptive parable, if a secular one, and it even helped redeem Christmas itself. On its release in December 1843, Christmas was a bawdy festival, and not especially focused on children or families. Many child-centred carols were yet to be written – ‘Once in Royal David’s City’ would begin life in a children’s book five years later; ‘Away in a Manger’ would arrive four decades later in US Christian journals.

Dickens’s Ghosts of Christmas Past and Present show us mulled wine and party games, and such nostalgic Christmases were soon emulated across the land. A boom in charitable giving in the mid-1840s was put down in part to the book’s popularity. Dickens’ rival, William Makepeace Thackeray, reported, ‘A Scotch philosopher, who nationally does not keep Christmas Day, on reading the book, sent out for a turkey and asked two friends to dinner – and that is a fact.’

Dickens certainly helped preserve the festival, even if it shifted in focus as a result. But I think he helped clean up Christmas. Maybe we should be glad that the secular Christmas has such positive, charitable, family-focused aspects – even if the drunken party side still rears its antler-adorned head today.

Dickens used the final paragraphs of A Christmas Carol to convey his message of peace, good will and a divine blessing for all. Scrooge ‘knew how to keep Christmas well, if any man alive possessed the knowledge. May that be truly said of us, and all of us!’

His very last line will be my last line this year too. I pray that as we go into 2024, we may all be blessed, without exception. Because as Tiny Tim observed, ‘God bless us, every one!’

Paul Kerensa is author of Hark! The Biography of Christmas (Lion Hudson). @paulkerensa.

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This article was published in the December 2023/January 2024 edition of Reform

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