Hero or villain: did Dickens create the cruel capitalist Christmas?

Generations have been inspired by the book. It has provided somewhat of a blueprint for how we should celebrate Christmas, the values contained within, and, specifically, what is expected of those with financial means over the festive period. Perhaps more importantly, it also serves as a warning to those who fail to be so.

It is the appearance of Jacob Marley’s ghost to Ebeneezer Scrooge – bedraggled with chains and downtrodden by the burden of the wealth he accumulated during his lifetime but refused to share – that is Dickens’ clearest anecdote of his position as to the charitable obligation of the rich to the poor. During the encounter with Marley’s ghost Scrooge looks out of his window into the night sky to see the ghosts of other wealthy people he had known.

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 doorstep. The misery with them all was clearly, that they sought to interfere, for good, in human matters, and had lost the power forever.

Dickens’ warning to his mainly middle and upper-class readers was clear: failure or refusal to be charitable during their lifetimes will burden the soul for eternity and will not permit entry to the kingdom of heaven.

A Christmas Carol itself sits lightly towards Christianity. Scrooge is not an overtly Christian man and his newfound charitability later in the book does not coincide with the emergence of faith in God. Indeed, had Dickens written him to be so then perhaps the book would not have stood the test of these more secular times.

Nevertheless, the prose does sit comfortably against the teachings found within the New Testament around what it means to be a Christian. In the gospel according to Matthew, chapter 19, verse 26, Jesus tells the disciples that, “it is easier for a camel to go through the eye of a needle than for a rich person to enter the kingdom of God.” The ghosts that Scrooge sees from his window are a clear reference to such a position.

A Christmas Carol encouraged a trend. Later in the 19th century, wealthy philanthropists like Andrew Carnegie, upon rekindling his Christian faith, gave most of his fortune away before his death in 1919. Perhaps the most famous line from Carnegie’s book The Gospel of Wealth (1889) is that, “the man who dies thus rich dies disgraced.”

Dickens was no socialist and A Christmas Carol makes no critique of the system that subjects people to deprivation and permits the over-accumulation of wealth in the first place. He does not draw a correlation between the wealth of the rich and the poverty of others. For him, the rich have a right to their wealth and can ultimately do with it as they please.

Thus, while charitability remains a voluntary act for Dickens, he is encouraging it to be viewed as a social obligation for the rich, likely as part of one’s redemption from greed and mean-spiritedness or as a method of cleansing one’s excess. However, this often adds to a sense of pity rather than compassion as primary motive for the wealthy, who engage in the task from a position of privilege, and which does little to reduce a sense of superiority.

Recognising his previous shortcomings, towards the end of the book Scrooge begins to help his employee Bob Cratchit and his family. However, the attention seems to be more upon Scrooge himself and his alleviation of guilt and shame for how he treated Cratchit previously. Dickens offers the Cratchit family no agency in these later pages as he does not include discussion of whether Cratchit actually wants Scrooge’s help or desires his boss’s presence in his house on Christmas Day.

Scottish actor Alastair Sim played the title role in the film Scrooge (Image: Newsquest)

Instead, Scrooge imposes himself upon the family with it being his prerogative to assist as he sees fit because he is the one of means. The implication is thus that the Cratchits will of course be grateful for Scrooge’s benevolence, think well of him, and will not feel demeaned by being the recipients of his charity.

This part of the story is one of the clearest literary examples of charity being done to the poor rather than working with them to improve their agency over their own lives. Dickens appears to be selling this behaviour to his readership as good practice. The conclusion to be drawn then is that Dickens saw nothing wrong with this approach and would have written a different outcome had he thought otherwise.

Alternatively, he was purposely engaged in a propaganda exercise that sought to encourage self-serving activities concealed as altruism that would ultimately preserve the socio-economic status quo rather than improve entitlement across all demographics.

The plight of the urban poor is a recurring theme within Dickens’ literary works and the popularity of these books continues to make a considerable impression upon conceptualisations of how to be charitable today.

Indeed, it could be argued that Dickens’s relevance has increased with the emergence of the neoliberal age wherein those advocates of the ideology have found his work of great use to the promotion of charity as an appropriate (but ultimately insufficient) offset against deregulation, the extremes of private wealth accumulation and reductions in social welfare.

Dr Colin Alexander is senior lecturer in political communications, Nottingham Trent University