How I learnt to stop worrying and love Dickens… and Christmas carols

Hilary Mantel is right about the vices of the Victorian author but he has a great many virtues

Last week, Hilary Mantel wrote that “there are whole swathes of Charles Dickens which I barely attempt. It just seems such awful stuff – coarse, sentimental, conceited.” I found this upsetting because I am a great fan of Dickens and also of Hilary Mantel. I should like to effect a reconciliation between the two. It is Christmas, after all, the season that Dickens made his own. Nothing could be more Dickensian than a scene in which the Victorian charmer would sweep the great modern novelist off her feet in some suitably festive manner.

Indeed, something similar happened in real life. On Dec 21 1843, and against her better judgment, Jane, the prickly wife of Thomas Carlyle, went to a children’s party at which Dickens acted the conjurer. He and his friend Forster somehow magicked into existence a steaming plum pudding “made out of raw flour, raw eggs – all the usual raw ingredients” but “boiled in a gentleman’s hat”. She was so caught up in the fun that she soon found herself whirled into a country dance. “Once I cried out ‘Oh for the love of heaven let me go! You are going to dash my brains out…!’” But Forster replied “Your brains!! Who cares about their brains here? Let them go!”

What upsets me still more about Mantel’s criticism – because nothing hurts like the truth – is that she is undeniably right. No clear-minded person could read their way through the complete works of Dickens – or even through a great work of Dickens such as David Copperfield or Bleak House – without encountering passages that display all the vices that Mantel noted. He is as shameless as a Disney cartoon in manipulating our emotions, and much more likely to do so in exhibitionist language and at tedious length.

It may be precisely because of this fact that A Christmas Carol was composed at all. In that year – 1843 – Dickens was, as usual, writing a novel by instalments in a magazine. This one, Martin Chuzzlewit – which contains more than his average ration of tosh – was not doing well. The readers were deserting. To earn better money fast, Dickens sat down and wrote A Christmas Carol. It was perhaps because he had successfully completed it that he was so merry at the children’s party. The story was a mere 28,000 words to Chuzzlewit’s 338,000; yet it is now as well known as anything else he wrote.

The tale is so familiar that no one seems to pay much attention to its title. Its full name is A Christmas Carol in prose, being a Ghost Story of Christmas. I happened to notice this when first reading the book as a child because each of the chapters is called a “stave” and I did not know what a stave was. It is, I discovered, a musical term, whose exact meaning is “a set of five parallel lines on any one or between any adjacent two of which a note is written to indicate its pitch”.

It seems reasonable to guess that Dickens meant something by using his title and this form. The best carols – which are less churchy than hymns – tend to set the scene, tell a story and point a cheerful moral. Thus, Good King Wenceslas looks out and finds the snow “deep and crisp and even”. He sees a poor man. He and his page bring flesh, wine and pine logs, struggling through the blizzard for three miles (“a good league”) to the poor man’s house at the foot of a mountain. Luckily “heat was in the very sod” of the saint-king’s footprints, so they both made it. Moral: all rich and powerful people will find blessing if they do this sort of thing.

A Christmas Carol works in a comparable manner. It has five staves, and it is a ghost story because it is through the agency of ghosts that everything happens. Each stave, except the last, contains a ghost. In the first appears the ghost of Jacob Marley, Scrooge’s business partner, clanking in his chain forged of “cash-boxes, keys, padlocks, ledgers, deeds, and heavy purses wrought in steel”. Then, in the second, third and fourth staves come, respectively, the Ghost of Christmas Past, the Ghost of Christmas Present and the Ghost of Christmas Yet to Come. The fifth stave is called “The End of It”.

Scrooge is present from the first page to the last. You could call him Bad King Wenceslas. Dickens calls him “a squeezing, wrenching, grasping, scraping, clutching, covetous old sinner”. Wenceslas looks out on Boxing Day and wants to help “yonder peasant”.

Scrooge sits in his foggy counting house on Christmas Eve, disdains the poor and cries “Bah! Humbug!” at the season. He wants everyone who cries “Merry Christmas” to be “boiled with his own pudding, and buried with a stake of holly though his heart” (being a greedy boy, I was particularly shocked when I first read this sentiment).

But then the ghosts show Scrooge the happy past that he rejected; the present, cheerfully borne sufferings of the family of his clerk, Bob Cratchit, whom he pays so badly; and the grim future, in which Scrooge dies unmourned and a laundress steals the curtains from the bed on which his corpse is stretched out.

When Scrooge wakes on Christmas morning, the ghosts have departed: “The bed was his own, the room was his own. Best and happiest of all, the time before him was his own, to make amends in!” And that is what he does. Moral: if Scrooge can change for the better, so can you.

For many years, I got fed up with Christmas carols, and went to some lengths to avoid carol services. They had become over-familiar to me – though, of course unfamiliar, new ones were no comfort either. The more mystical carol services of Advent seemed preferable to the potentially babyish ones of Christmas. I didn’t want to risk hearing Little Donkey.i didn’t think “Bah! Humbug!”, but I sometimes felt “Bah! Saccharine!”

Sometimes one feels the same about Dickens, and sometimes one is right. To order prints or signed copies of any Telegraph cartoon, go to telegraph.co.uk/ prints-cartoons or call 0191 603 0178  readerprints@ telegraph.co.uk Yet it would be wrong – in the case of carols or Dickens – to let such feelings prevail.

Both have qualities quite different from the qualities one loves in a mature novel (though Dickens could write such novels, too: look at Great Expectations). Neither deals in nuance. Neither is frightened of simplicity. Both see things as a child does – bright, clear, fresh.

And both have an ability to convey – which is much harder in the subtleties of adult fiction, but which always resonates with children – a sense of the energy not only of evil, but also of good.

This is why one can often forgive Dickens’s extravagant language. Once Scrooge becomes good, he is suddenly beside himself with activity and excitement. He charges about, unable to straighten his garments as he dresses, crying but also, at last, laughing – “The father of a long, long line of brilliant laughs!” More than any other writer, Dickens overflows with this energy. It is a true Christmas quality.

So it seems appropriate at Christmas, as at that party with Dickens in 1843, to stop worrying about dashing your brains out, and agree with the mood of the meeting: “Who cares about their brains here? Let them go!”

One might even follow poor, crippled Tiny Tim – about whom, I must confess, I sometimes suffer Mantel-like shudders – and cry out “God bless us, every one!”