I first read Dickens' A Christmas Carol decades ago, after finding it in a dusty cupboard in my grandparents' holiday house. There I was, aged about eight, reading of snow and holly and things northern in the middle of the Australian summer with all its heat and dust. But I was transported, in more ways than one, and still am every time, despite my many re-readings of this slim but freighted volume.
A great many people consider Dickens to have been a genius, and I am one of them. Critics say his novels are too baggy, and his female characters, apart from the comic ones, wet and weedy. But Dickens was a product of his time, as we all are, and he was very conscious of meeting the demands of society and of his readership. A product of his time, yes, but his writing, at its best, is for all time in that it expresses the universal.
A Christmas Carol was originally planned as a political pamphlet entitled An Appeal to the People of England, on behalf of the Poor Man's Child, but Dickens, staunch champion of the poor and of children, realised that fiction would have more impact on social attitudes. In six weeks of feverish work, he rewrote the tract as a novella. First published on 19 December 1843, it was an instant success, and has never been out of print.
While Dickens reportedly hoped that his vision of Christmas might encourage the restoration of social harmony, his narrative line can also be seen as a convenient plot device, for A Christmas Carol is a deeply Christian story, not just about Christmas, but about life itself, about actions and their consequences, the need for wrongs to be made right, and the desire for hope and potentiality of renewal.
The plot of the novella owes much to Dickens' fascination with the supernatural in general, and with ghosts in particular, in at least the possibility of the tear in the veil between this world and others. The fearsome yet pitiable ghost of Marley, the miserly Scrooge's late business partner and only friend, serves as a grim warning of the dead soul the wintry Scrooge may well become: 'I wear the chain I forged in life.'
The Ghosts of Christmases Past, Present and Yet to Come move Scrooge inexorably through the stages of life in a series of epiphanies, and force him to experience nostalgia, celebration, and dread,