Part of the What Do You Know About That? series
by Ruth Orr
ENGLAND —“Marley was dead, to begin with.” So starts arguably one of the best-known Christmas stories of all time, not counting you know, the story of Christmas itself. Published December 19, 1843, “A Christmas Carol. In Prose. Being a Ghost Story of Christmas” has been a beloved part of the holiday season for nearly 200 years now. And yea, that’s the full original title. You can see why folks have shortened it down to just the first bit!
Since it is so popular, I’m going to assume you guys know the story, but just in case, here’s the Too-Long, Didn’t Read version. An old moneylender named Ebenezer Scrooge is well-known throughout the town for being a wretched, mean, miser. Described as “a squeezing, wrenching, grasping, scraping, clutching, covetous old sinner,” he cares only for money and hates Christmas. He turns away his nephew’s invitations to dinner, despite his wealth he refuses to make charitable donations for the poor, and only grudgingly agrees to let his overworked and underpaid employee Bob Cratchit have Christmas Day off.
Scrooge is visited on the night of Christmas Eve by the ghost of his former business partner, Jacob Marley, who was just as cruel and vicious as Scrooge. Marley warns Scrooge that his actions will see him punished in the afterlife, as Marley himself is weighed down by heavy chains and money boxes he forged himself over his life. He tells Scrooge he will be visited by three spirits over the course of the night, and that only by listening to them can he escape Marley’s fate.
The first spirit is the Ghost of Christmas Past, the second is the Ghost of Christmas Present, and the third is the Ghost of Christmas Yet to Come. They show him that he sucks and that everyone else is happier with him gone and that he’s doomed to die alone and miserable and hated if he doesn’t sort himself out. He learns his lesson and wakes up the very picture of cheer and generosity, making donations, giving his employee a turkey for Christmas dinner (and also a raise the next day), and hanging out with his nephew for Christmas. Hurray!
The man who penned the story, Charles Dickens, was an English writer and social critic. He was arguably the best novelist of the Victorian era, and has been dubbed a literary genius. So it might surprise you to know that he dropped out of school at age 12.
Dickens was actually born into a middle-class family, but his father John was, in Dickens’ words, “a jovial opportunist with no money sense”. He blew through the family’s money and ended up in debtor’s prison in 1824. His wife and youngest children soon joined him in the prison, I guess because why not? Charles had to pawn his books and drop out of school to work at a factory when his family went to jail to support himself. It took him three years before he managed to get back to school (his family was released from debtor’s prison after his grandma died and left her son enough money to pay off his debts). It worked out for him eventually though, as by 1836 he was a successful author. By 1842 he was known internationally.
So we know that at a young age, Dickens had an intimate understanding of being poor, and of seeing people who had money sending folks without off to prison. Little surprise he wouldn’t have an overly fond view of moneylenders! His experience working in the factory, which was dirty and rat-infested, helped shape his personal outlook on life, specifically his outrage at the unfairness of how society treated the poor.
That outlook was only compounded later on. In 1843 he toured the Cornish tin mines, where he got to see eight-year-old kids working eleven hours or more in a brutally difficult and unsafe job, dragging carts through tiny underground passages. He visited one of the schools London had set up for its half-starved illiterate street children, and saw that their lot was little better there. Suffering abounded. He read the testimony of girls who sewed dresses for the expanding middle-class market. The girls worked at least 16 hours a day, six days a week, and could only afford to live above the factory floor. Then he read a parliamentary report on how the Industrial Revolution was impacting working-class children, namely that it was killing them all horribly.
The era, for all the wonderful advances it made in technology, was a really bad time to be alive for anyone who wasn’t lucky enough to be born rich. The population was booming, requiring more and more stuff to be made for it. Employers always had more workers, so the people who relied on them became just commodities, resources to be worked until they were used up and then replaced. The 1840s in particular were hard, earning the nickname ‘The Hungry ‘40s”. During that time, the poor did whatever they could, even if the wages were hideously low. And children worked for the lowest wages of all, so they were often sought out.
It was also during this time that the theory that poor people got that way just by being lazy or immoral started to really spread. It was a great way to justify not helping folks out, after all, helping them would only encourage their malingering. Clearly, the best way to help was to split families up and move them into workhouses, where they could do nothing but work while they barely avoided starvation. Others, including religious leaders, argued that helping the poor not starve to death just meant the population would be too big, so it would be better just to let them all die.
Never mind that the vast majority of the poor got that way through the sheer bad luck of being born into a family that wasn’t already rich. Upward mobility was essentially non-existent when your employers didn’t have to pay you anything at all.
Dickens was sickened by it all. He made it a point in all his works to emphasize the plight of the poor and advocate for progress and change. You can see that theme quite well in “A Christmas Carol”, as the wealthy Scrooge, who looked down upon the poor his whole life, was confronted with the fact that they are all better people than he and that all his money meant nothing if it was not shared with those less fortunate. Dickens dreamed of a better future, one where people were paid decent wages for their work (see Scrooge giving his employee a raise at the end) and children were given the opportunity to live life as more than work stock.
Dickens’ life also coincided with a dramatic uptick in the Christmas spirit in England. The Victorian era saw a resurgence in the popularity of celebrating the holiday (as opposed to just quietly and somberly going to church). The royal couple in particular popularized the practice of having Christmas trees in the home. There was a revived interest in Christmas carols, which had largely been falling out of favor in the century prior. Dickens was a big fan of Christmas, publishing multiple stories and novellas on the theme.
So that’s where the author came from. But what about Scrooge himself? Well, the character was loosely present, under different names, in some of Dickens’ earlier works. Given Dickens’ social attitudes, it’s not surprising that a lot of his stories feature rich jerks screwing over the poor in one way or the other. Some of those characters even had a similar redemption arc, learning to become charitable.
The name itself, Ebenezer Scrooge, likely comes from a trip Dickens took to Edinburgh. While there, he went for a walk through a local graveyard and spotted a headstone that read: “Ebenezer Lennox Scroggie – a meal man”. A meal man was just a reference to his profession, he sold corn meal. But Dickens misread it, believing the stone to read “a mean man”. He wondered what on earth the dead man must have Ironically, Ebenezer Scroggie was actually a good chap, quite unlike his literary counterpart. He was pretty well off himself, but his reputation was that of a warm, jovial fellow who threw great parties and was a big fan of the ladies. He is also possibly responsible for the Encylopedia Britannica, one of the first (if not the first) attempts to collate all the world’s information into one series for folks to flip through. The man who wrote that first encyclopedia, William Smellie, was a good friend of Scroggie’s, and he gave credit to his friend for giving him the idea in the first place. Sadly, Scroggie’s grave was lost in the 1930s.
At any rate, it’s kinda wild to think about how Dickens’ experiences with the worst parts of life shaped one of our best-known feel good stories. I wonder if he’d be pleased or not with how society’s progressed?
