The other DICKENS
Forget Scrooge and Tiny Tim. A lesser-known story is the one we need now, Tim Smith-Laing writes.
When Charles Dickens published A Christmas Carol on Dec. 19, 1843, the book did not have much time to work its magic on British readers before the festive season ended.
Just as well, too, wrote William Thackeray. A Christmas Carol filled people with such goodwill that, “had the book appeared a fortnight earlier, all the prize cattle would have been gobbled up in pure love and friendship, Epping denuded of sausages and not a turkey left in Norfolk.” Despite relatively modest sales — only 6,000 copies by Christmas Eve — his redemptive ghost story was a sensation. Everyone who read it, Thackeray wrote, took it as a “personal kindness” and “a national benefit.”
His proclaimed aim was to “raise the Ghost of an Idea which shall not put my readers out of humour with themselves, with each other, with the season, or with me,” Dickens wrote.
He succeeded wildly. In the 175 years since its first Christmas, that ghost has never been laid to rest. Not a December passes without adaptations old and new flooding stages, radios, televisions and cinemas across the world. Though it is hard to imagine anyone could top 1992’s The Muppet Christmas Carol for appeal (or, strangely enough, fidelity to the text), there have been three big-screen versions since 2001 alone, with a fourth — by Tom Stoppard — currently in production. If proof were needed of its universal reach, look no further than the existence of A Klingon Christmas Carol, written and performed entirely in Star Trek’s Klingon tongue.
As charities and vicars know, everyone is more susceptible to a little ethical prodding around Christmas, but A Christmas Carol remains extraordinary. No book combines brazen moral didacticism with mass appeal in anything like the same way.
The message is simple enough, and stern: Think of those less fortunate than yourself, be kind and generous. Remember that life, unlike money, cannot be hoarded. But it is steeped in sugar-plum syrup: Help others to be happy, Scrooge’s conversion shows, and you will be happy too.
It is a cosy philosophy, but Dickens did not pull his punches. Privately, he referred to the book as a “sledge hammer.” Despite all the Christmas cheer, it was there to remind readers that, as one character puts it, “Many thousands are in want of common necessaries; hundreds of thousands are in want of common comforts,” and that — whatever the unreformed Scrooge thinks — prisons and workhouses are no solution.
For reasons both moral and commercial, Dickens wrote four more Christmas books: The Chimes, in 1844; The Cricket on the Hearth, in 1845; The Battle of Life in 1846; and, after a Christmas taken up with the demands of writing Dombey and Son, The Haunted Man, in 1848. He wrote many more Christmas stories through the years, but The Haunted Man was the final one that occupied an entire book. Dickens no longer had the time or the energy to produce one a year — or to confront the critics when he did.
While The Chimes escaped the reviewers’ hatchets, the critics uniformly disparaged its successors.
It is possibly just as well that A Christmas Carol has eclipsed Dickens’s last three Christmas books. But the same cannot be said for The Chimes — a book that has, if anything, even more to say to readers today than A Christmas Carol. Despite Dickens’s sledgehammer hopes, A Christmas Carol is a comforting book. It suggests, as one contemporary noted, that “all social evils are to be redressed by kindness and money given to the poor by the rich.” Scrooge might become a sort of fairy godfather to the Cratchits, but nothing changes in the wider world. What, some readers asked, about the other immiserated poor?
The Chimes is his answer. It is an awkward answer because, unlike A Christmas Carol, it is conscious that society is slow to change. The protagonist is the good-hearted Trotty Veck, an aging “ticket-porter” — something like a Victorian Uber Eats cyclist — whose daily papers fill him with gloom about “the crimes and violences” of the world. From the ungratefulness of the working poor to their employers, to the evil of “a woman who had laid her hands not only on her own life but on that of her young child,” he sees the world as a dark place indeed. After an encounter with the moralistic MP Sir Joseph Bowley and his confreres, Trotty even castigates himself for the moral failing of carrying his small debts into the New Year.
Then the chimes of the clock that rules his working life grant him a dream vision that shows him the future of his loved ones. One by one, despite their goodness, despite being employed, they fall into destitution, dissipation and despair. His friend Will is trapped in an endless cycle of prison by petty laws; Will’s daughter turns to prostitution. Trotty’s son-in-law becomes an alcoholic and his daughter, unable to work enough hours to feed their child, decides to drown herself and her baby. The message is that even the best among us can be crushed by unjust laws and grinding circumstance.
When Trotty wakes, Dickens does his best to rescue a joyful tone and avert the future in marriage and merriment. But it is a bright bow tied around a dark package. Trotty still lives in a world where a working wage is far from a living wage, but where government and the upper classes regard poverty as a moral failure. The then recently founded Economist hailed it as “one of the most philosophical works” of the age.
We live in better times, doubtless, but Trotty might recognize some similarities today. Onefifth of the U.K. population lives in poverty and, despite record lows in employment, 2.8 million of those come from families in which all the adults work full time. In other words, they find themselves in the same situation as Meg Veck: “never-ending work — not to heap up riches, not to live grandly or gaily, not to live upon enough, however coarse; but (to) scrape together just enough to toil upon, and want upon, and keep alive.”
Dickens closes The Chimes with an injunction that still rings true: “Bear in mind the stern realities from which these shadows come; and in your sphere — none is too wide, and none too limited for such an end — endeavour to correct, improve, and soften them.” But he also knew that fictions can speak louder than facts — all the better if they can do so without putting listeners out of their humour. Alongside the many modern adaptations of A Christmas Carol, isn’t it about time we found space to listen to The Chimes?