The Lakewood Playhouse is performing “Jacob Marley’s Christmas Carol”, these days. It’s the portrait of Scrooge’s partner after his death. I haven’t watched this one yet. But I have watched various performances of Charles Dickens’ “A Christmas Carol” countless times, from a one-man-theater on stage to various movie versions, including a beautiful cartoon one. No need to say that I have read it numerous times as well. But why is it that this narration is so much more connected with Christmas than maybe any other story outside the Bible?
Of course, there also Tchaikovsky’s ballet “The Nutcracker”, based on E.T.A. Hoffman’s literary fairy story. But if you are not a fan of ballet and classical music, it might be lost on you. I have watched it numerous times by now, as I was introduced to the ongoings backstage of ballets by one of my school friends back in the day. And I love comparing the different “Nutcracker” versions. Still, the story to me is not very relatable; I’m into the dance and the music of this ballet – that’s it.
Then there is the Grimm brothers’ fairy tale “Hansel and Gretel”; Engelbert Humperdinck composed an entire opera based on the folklore story, which is usually performed around Christmas. Both, the opera and the original fairy-tale take me back to my childhood days. Of course, you will say – she’s a foodie, and this is about a gingerbread house and other goodies. Well, I have also seen scenes from a performance in which the witch ran a Ferris wheel to lure children. And I wonder whether, these days, it would be supplanted by a giant smartphone and you could step into and live in an app. Seriously, I don’t have to see an upgraded story version in order to understand the gist of a tale. The composer made the story so much better relatable, already. An exhausted mother sends her famishing children into the woods to forage for food and frantically searches for them when she hears into what danger she has inadvertently sent them.
Let’s get back to “A Christmas Carol”. Charles Dickens didn’t just observe the different classes and their social problems back in the 19th century. He tried to open his readers’ eyes to the human aspect behind who were “the” poor, “the” workers, “the” sick, “the” exploited. He worked by contrast. Where there is good, there is evil. Where there is love, there is the cold-hearted. Where there is rich, there is poor. We even receive insight into what shaped a person to who they are now.
Right now, we are living in times – again – where the social gap has widened to proportions where people suffer from hunger and cold. There are the Bob Cratchits, who scrape a living for themselves and their families under tough working conditions with employers either oblivious or willing to ignore the needs of those who work for them. The Tiny Tims, who are the weakest link and relying on changes being made from above.
Charles Dickens wove a tale of a man turned the eponym of cold-hearted avariciousness by various twists in his own fate. He is as cold as a fish and gets slowly thawed out by the three ghosts of Christmas and the stories they bring him of his past, his present, and his future. Basically, it’s a tale about telling tales. A carol with a refrain of spirits turning up with another stanza to the same tune – to change the guy’s heart. And as the main character gets warmer, the telling of the story thaws the hearts of the readers, gets us closer to Christmas with every word they and we read or hear.
I think this is why we like “A Christmas Carol” so much. Because it strikes a chord within us. Everybody’s need for happiness and a life under humane conditions. Because Scrooge’s loneliness reverberates in his abodes as in our hearts like the clapper in a bell. And we long for him to reach his nephew Fred’s state of bliss. Because we want the stand-offish, the snobbish, the oblivious to change their ways and become more humane.
What inspired me for today’s article? It was also a December 2, this one in 1867, that Charles Dickens gave his first public reading at Tremont Temple in Boston, Massachusetts, on his second U.S. tour, by then an already celebrated author. And Henry Wadsworth Longfellow and Ralph Waldo Emerson were in his audience when he read, among others, selections from “A Christmas Carol”.
