Book review: “A Christmas Carol in Prose, Being a Ghost Story of Christmas” by Charles Dickens

Goodness and kindness are ideas that, usually, are widely embraced.

We live, however, in an age when meanness, ridicule, deprecation, disparagement, selfishness and the infliction of pain are promoted from some of the highest levels of society and the American government.

So, it is heartening, when reading A Christmas Carol by Charles Dickens, to watch Ebenezer Scrooge’s nephew Fred go toe-to-toe in a light-hearted, jovial way with his miserly uncle over the keeping of Christmas.

The elder man tells Fred to keep the holiday in his own way and let Scrooge keep it in his own way.

“Keep it! But you don’t keep it,” Fred says.

 

Not profit and loss

To which his uncle says,

“Much good it has ever done you!”

And, in response, Fred waxes eloquent that not everything good is about profit and loss:

“There are many things from which I might have derived good, by which I have not profited, I dare say. Christmas among the rest.

“But I am sure I have always thought of Christmas time, when it has come round — apart from the veneration due to its sacred name and origin, if anything belonging to it can be apart from that — as a good time; a kind, forgiving, charitable, pleasant time; the only time I know of, in the long calendar of the year, when men and women seem by one consent to open their shut-up hearts freely, and to think of people below them as if they really were fellow-passengers to the grave, and not another race of creatures bound on other journeys.

“And therefore, uncle, though it has never put a scrap of gold or silver in my pocket, I believe that it has done me good, and will do me good; and I say, God bless it!”

Yes, to think of people, even those “below” us, as “fellow-passengers to the grave” and to “open [our] shut-up hearts freely.” That’s an exercise in empathy.

And empathy is good and kind, regardless of what some rich people of today have to say.

 

A conversion story

Published in 1843, A Christmas Carol in Prose, Being a Ghost Story of Christmas, to give its full title, is the story of Scrooge’s conversion.

At the start, he is “a squeezing, wrenching, grasping, scraping, clutching, covetous old sinner.”

At the end, he is “as good a friend, as good a master, and as good a man, as the good old city knew, or any other good old city, town, or borough, in the good old world.”

Would that more such conversions would take place in our present time.

As the full title of the Dickens novel suggests, this conversion takes place through the visits of four ghosts — Scrooge’s business partner Jacob Marley, dead now these seven years, and the Ghosts of Christmas Past, Present and Future.

As a note at the end of this review indicates, I’ve written about this much-loved classic many times over the years. This time, I want to look at what the book says about the goodness and kindness of human beings — at least, the goodness and kindness of which they are capable.

 

“The common welfare”

Fred’s eloquence to his uncle is echoed by Marley’s Ghost when he tells the meaning of the chains that bind him and the ones that bind Scrooge — chains of failure as a human being.

Scrooge doesn’t understand and says, “But you were always a good man of business, Jacob.”

To which the Ghost replies:

“Business! Mankind was my business.

“The common welfare was my business; charity, mercy, forbearance, and benevolence, were, all, my business. The dealings of my trade were but a drop of water in the comprehensive ocean of my business!”

 

“An air of cheerfulness”

To feel connected to others, to feel part of the same humanity — that aspect of Christmas Day feeds a shared happiness, as Scrooge learns at the side of the Ghost of Christmas Present.

On the morning of the holiday, the city hasn’t changed except for a fall of new snow, and “the people made a rough, but brisk and not unpleasant kind of music, in scraping the snow from the pavement in front of their dwellings, and from the tops of their houses, whence it was mad delight to the boys to see it come plumping down into the road below, and splitting into artificial little snow-storms.”

The “mad delight” of watching the snow and the shoveling, even in the sootiest of neighborhoods:

The house fronts looked black enough, and the windows blacker, contrasting with the smooth white sheet of snow upon the roofs, and with the dirtier snow upon the ground; which last deposit had been ploughed up in deep furrows by the heavy wheels of carts and waggons; furrows that crossed and re-crossed each other hundreds of times where the great streets branched off; and made intricate channels, hard to trace in the thick yellow mud and icy water.

The streets are filled with a dingy mist under a gloomy sky, and, Scrooge notes, there’s nothing very cheerful about the weather.

Yet was there an air of cheerfulness abroad that the clearest summer air and brightest summer sun might have endeavoured to diffuse in vain.

For, the people who were shoveling away on the housetops were jovial and full of glee; calling out to one another from the parapets, and now and then exchanging a facetious snowball — better-natured missile far than many a wordy jest — laughing heartily if it went right and not less heartily if it went wrong.

 

An abundance of beauty and savor

It is a moment of abundance, a moment when all the very best things are brought together at the stores for sale, a moment when a carefully hoarded cache of savings is spent on the meal to be shared.

It is a moment of abundance reflecting the abundance of beauty and savor in the life of a human being, even one such as Scrooge who has held himself aloof for so long.

The poulterers’ shops were still half open, and the fruiterers’ were radiant in their glory. There were great, round, pot-bellied baskets of chestnuts, shaped like the waistcoats of jolly old gentlemen, lolling at the doors, and tumbling out into the street in their apoplectic opulence.

There were ruddy, brown-faced, broad-girthed Spanish Onions, shining in the fatness of their growth like Spanish Friars, and winking from their shelves in wanton slyness at the girls as they went by, and glanced demurely at the hung-up mistletoe.

There were pears and apples, clustered high in blooming pyramids; there were bunches of grapes, made, in the shopkeepers’ benevolence to dangle from conspicuous hooks, that people’s mouths might water gratis as they passed; there were piles of filberts, mossy and brown, recalling, in their fragrance, ancient walks among the woods, and pleasant shufflings ankle deep through withered leaves; there were Norfolk Biffins, squat and swarthy, setting off the yellow of the oranges and lemons, and, in the great compactness of their juicy persons, urgently entreating and beseeching to be carried home in paper bags and eaten after dinner.

 

“The happiness he gives”

One who celebrates the abundant goodness and kindness of the season is a figure from Scrooge’s past, Mr. Fezziwig, to whom Scrooge was apprenticed and who treated the young man as a son.

In his travels with the Ghost of Christmas Past, Scrooge is once again at his boss’s extravagantly expansive Christmas Eve party, and, from his spectral distance, takes part in every twist and turn of the revelry.

Finally, as the party fades to its ending, the Ghost expresses a thought that Scrooge might have said earlier in the day — that this party and this revelry aren’t much.

“A small matter,” said the Ghost, “to make these silly folks so full of gratitude.”

“Small!” echoed Scrooge.

The Ghost signals for Scrooge to listen to his younger self and his fellow apprentice in their torrent of praise for Fezziwig, and then says, “He has spent but a few pounds of your mortal money: three or four perhaps. Is that so much that he deserves this praise?”

“It isn’t that,” said Scrooge, heated by the remark, and speaking unconsciously like his former, not his latter, self.

“It isn’t that, Spirit. He has the power to render us happy or unhappy; to make our service light or burdensome; a pleasure or a toil. Say that his power lies in words and looks; in things so slight and insignificant that it is impossible to add and count ’em up: what then? The happiness he gives, is quite as great as if it cost a fortune.”

 

“Mr. Scrooge!”

Fezziwig had the power “to render us happy or unhappy.”  He employed it for joy.  Scrooge has employed his power for misery, especially for his one employee Bob Cratchitt.

And Bob employs what very little power he has for goodness and kindness, even to his unkind employer — in a toast at his family’s warm and cozy Christmas dinner:

“Mr. Scrooge!” said Bob; “I’ll give you Mr. Scrooge, the Founder of the Feast!”

“The Founder of the Feast indeed!” cried Mrs. Cratchit, reddening. “I wish I had him here. I’d give him a piece of my mind to feast upon, and I hope he’d have a good appetite for it.”

“My dear,” said Bob, “the children! Christmas Day.”

“It should be Christmas Day, I am sure,” said she, “on which one drinks the health of such an odious, stingy, hard, unfeeling man as Mr. Scrooge. You know he is, Robert! Nobody knows it better than you do, poor fellow!”

“My dear,” was Bob’s mild answer, “Christmas Day.”

The anger and bitterness of Bob’s wife is understandable, but Bob rises above that.

He, like Scrooge’s nephew Fred, sees his boss as a human being, deserving of attention, especially on Christmas Day.

 

“God bless us every one!”

The scene at Bob’s hearth with his wife and children together is rich with connection and affection — with love:

At last the dinner was all done, the cloth was cleared, the hearth swept, and the fire made up. The compound in the jug being tasted, and considered perfect, apples and oranges were put upon the table, and a shovel-full of chestnuts on the fire.

Then all the Cratchit family drew round the hearth, in what Bob Cratchit called a circle, meaning half a one; and at Bob Cratchit’s elbow stood the family display of glass. Two tumblers, and a custard-cup without a handle.

These held the hot stuff from the jug, however, as well as golden goblets would have done; and Bob served it out with beaming looks, while the chestnuts on the fire sputtered and cracked noisily.

One of those children is Tiny Tim, a crippled boy of weak health but strong character.

And it is from Tiny Tim that Dickens sends the ultimate message of Christmas.

Then Bob proposed:

“A Merry Christmas to us all, my dears. God bless us!”

Which all the family re-echoed.

“God bless us every one!” said Tiny Tim, the last of all.

 

Only an “us”

At a moment in American history when the oppressors of the poor and of those on the margins of society celebrate their oppressiveness, this is the tonic that’s needed, the words of Tiny Tim.

“God bless us every one!”

Not “God bless the people who agree with me…or look like me…or have as much money as I do.”  No, the message of the small boy of strong character is that God’s blessings are for all of us, every one,

And, just as important, that we are an “us,” all of us, every one.

There is not an us-and-them.  Only an “us.”

***

FINAL NOTE: Over the years, I’ve written about A Christmas Carol several times. Here are links to:

• An earlier book review at my website.
• An op-ed piece in the Chicago Tribune.
• An essay in National Catholic Reporter.

 

 

Patrick T. Reardon

12.10.25