We need a Christmas Carol for all seasons
ON A suitably chilly, smog-choked night, Charles Dickens entered the gates of Field Lane, a run down school in the Saffron Hill district of London. It wasn’t quite chance that brought him there, but the request of a wealthy friend, Angela Burdett. She helped the destitute and as there were always more needy than not, it took some discerning to decide where scarce funds should best be directed.
But so stirred and haunted by the plight of the children at the school was the author, that within two months in 1843 he had completed ‘A Christmas Carol’.
He first described the “sickening atmosphere ... of taint and dirt and pestilence” that he recounted in an article about the school for the ‘Edinburgh Review’.
He knew a bit about degradation and the dead-end drudgery of child labour himself; after his father was sent to the debtor’s prison, he worked in a boot factory as a boy in 1824.
At an early age he made enemies for life out of hopelessness and spirit crushing poverty.
Were Mr Dickens to return to Ireland – where he visited and enjoyed an enormous following – today, he would find plenty to employ his pen. His mission was to evoke some sense of kinship by tenderly revealing the most common threads of humanity. The poor seemed to be burdened with a disproportionate share of the suffering.
The villain he incarnated from indifference, greed and selfishness, the “squeezing, wrenching, grasping” Ebenezer Scrooge, personified tensions that still survive concerning treatment of the sick, the homeless, and marginalised, and our responsibilities to them.
Asked for a charitable donation, he responds by asking after the state of prisons and workhouses funded from his taxes. The most famous miser in literary history was convinced that he met all his obligations by paying minimum tax and devil take the hindmost. To be a beggar, as far as his society was concerned, was to be of another world, sealed off by privilege and rigid class order.
DICKENS passionately believed it possible to draw up a social contract based upon an unbreakable bond amongst all people. Was each social strata not inter-connected, and was there not plenty for all if the vision and will were there to be just? Needless to say, such radical thinking was much frowned upon. Calling attention to the plight of the poor was crime enough without adding the treasonable suggestion that one might bear some responsibility for their care.
Yet he felt bound to provoke and maintain a national conversation on the topic of inequity. He set great store by the importance of home and family, that small acts of kindness had transformational, almost miraculous, powers to dismantle the barriers thrown up by money, status and power.
But long before Dickens, our own Dean Swift was greatly perturbed by the conditions of the poor and sick. So stirred indeed, the noted satirist upon his death – in 1745 – left £12,000, a king’s ransom, to “build a house for fools and mad”. It was modelled on the much older Hospital of St Mary of Bethlehem. Both literary lions were greatly worried about what might become of society if it did not change. If a ruthlessly mercantile credo prevailed, divisions would widen and isolation win out over inclusion. The poor would pay.
We have housing, homelessness and health crises that need all of our attention. Only days ago in our own Dáil, a mere 19 TDs turned up for a debate on child homelessness.
Of course it is up to all of us to reach out. Wilfully or not, too many are left out of the picture.
As we sidestep the beggars and rough sleepers, we might remember they represent opportunities, not obstacles, for our generosity. Some would wonder is it even appropriate to raise such issues at the height of a season of goodwill. Mr Dickens thought otherwise. “I will honour Christmas in my heart, and try to keep it all the year,” he wrote.