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The Ceremony of Innocence: Charles Dickens' A Christmas Carol

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  01 December 2020

Elliot L. Gilbert
Elliot L. Gilbert*
Affiliation:
University of California, Davis
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Abstract

Sophisticated readers of A Christmas Carol, moved though they may be by the dramatic reformation of Scrooge, are frequently inclined to question the psychological validity of the old man's change of heart. Far from being a sign of the story's inadequacy, however, this divided reaction is the key to its effectiveness. Dickens' chief target in A Christmas Carol is Scrooge's nineteenth-century rationalism, and the reader's skepticism about the old man's moral and spiritual recovery is an exact analogue of that rationalism. What the reader's delight, in the face of his skepticism, suggests, therefore, is that there is a level of the story on which Scrooge's regeneration is entirely authentic; that if A Christmas Carol is less than convincing as a psychological case history of an elderly neurotic temporarily reformed by Christmas sentimentality, it is certainly a success as the metaphysical study of a human being's rediscovery of his own innocence.

Type
Research Article
Information
PMLA , Volume 90 , Issue 1 , January 1975 , pp. 22 - 31
Copyright
Copyright © Modern Language Association of America, 1975

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References

1 The Wound and the Bow (New York: Oxford Univ. Press, 1965), p. 53.

2 The Dickens World (London: Oxford Univ. Press, 1942), p. 53.

3 Charles Dickens: His Tragedy and Triumph, t (New York: Little, Brown, 1952), 488.

4 Charles Dickens: Radical Moralist (Minneapolis: Univ. of Minnesota Press, 1972), p. 147.

5 About Thomas Carlyle, e.g., it is reported that A Christmas Carol “so worked on [his] nervous organization that he has been seized with a perfect convulsion of hospitality, and has actually insisted on improvising two dinner parties with only a day between.” Letter to Jeannie Welsh, 23 Dec. 1843, Jane Welsh Carlyle: Letters to Her Family, 1839–1863 (London: J. Murray, 1924), p. 169.

6 John Lucas, in The Melancholy Man (London: Methuen, 1970), remarks that “we call [the Cratchit family scenes] sentimental because we do not like admitting how moved we are by the pressure of Dickens' writing” (p. 140).

7 A number of critics have suggested that Dickens does just this. See, e.g., Toby Olshin, “ ‘The Yellow Dwarf and The Old Curiosity Shop” Nineteenth-Century Fiction, 25 (June 1970), 96–99; also Harry Stone, “Fire, Hand, and Gate: Dickens’ Great Expectations,” Kenyon Review, 24 (1962), 662–91.

8 The Great Tradition (New York: Doubleday, 1954), p. 32. Leavis' almost Scrooge-like change of heart about Dickens is recorded in his Dickens the Novelist (London: Chatto & Windus, 1970).

9 For further discussion of the idea of plausibility in Dickens' work, see George Ford's “The Poet and the Critics of Probability,” in Dickens: A Collection of Critical Essays, ed. Martin Price (Englewood Cliffs: Prentice-Hall, 1967), pp. 58–67.

10 Barbara Hardy, e.g., writes that we can understand what happens to Dickens' characters “less by seeing what they have done than by seeing what they are.” The Moral Art of Dickens (New York: Oxford Univ. Press, 1970), p. 55. And George Ford, distinguishing between “static” and “developing” characters and action in Dickens' fiction, observes that “foreground scenes, in which change occurs, are usually not so convincing as the morestatic background” (p. 64).

11 The Myth of Sisyphus, and Other Essays (New York: Knopf, 1955), p. 77.

12 Romantic Image (New York: Random, 1964), p. 5.

13 Northrop Frye suggests that Dickens himself recognized Tom Pinch's innocence to be more “obsessive than genuine.” See “Dickens and the Comedy of Humors,” in Experience in the Novel, ed. Roy Harvey Pearce (New York: Columbia Univ. Press, 1968), p. 60.

14 Alan Friedman, The Turn of the Novel (New York: Oxford Univ. Press, 1967), p. 7.

15 D. H. Lawrence frequently makes this point, writing on one occasion that “while a man remains a man, a true human individual, there is at the core of him a certain innocence or naivete which defies all analysis, and which you cannot bargain with, you can only deal with it in good faith from your own corresponding innocence or naivete. This does not mean that the human being is nothing but naive or innocent. He is Mr. Worldly-Wiseman also to his own degree. But in his essential core he is naive, and money does not touch him” (“John Galsworthy,” Phoenix, ed. Edward D. McDonald, London: Heinemann, 1936, pp. 540–41).

16 P. 39. tn fact, Camus is here redefining, in phenomenological terms, something very like the Christian concept of grace, shifting the emphasis from God's initiation of the act to man's experience of it. Such a redefinition, Camus argues in effect, is necessary if the concept of grace is to continue to have meaning in an age that has rejected traditional theology. Dickens' position in A Christmas Carol is very much the same.

17 When Camus's absurd man, e.g., says that he “does not want to do anything but what he fully understands,” he is assured by his logical tormentors that “this is the sin of pride.”

18 Lionel Trilling, for one, discusses this matter at length in his essay “The Immortality Ode,” collected in The Liberal Imagination (New York : Doubleday, 1950).

19 “Preface to Poems, 1853.” See also the self-consciousness that precipitated John Stuart Mill's soul crisis in Ch. v of the Autobiography.

20 “Characteristics,” Critical & Miscellaneous Essays, m (London: Chapman & Hall, 1899), p. 4.

21 In Martin Chuzzlewit, Dickens had already devoted a whole novel to a study of the vice of self. By the time of A Christmas Carol, however, the author's interest in this subject had become much more clearly metaphysical than social or moral.

22 There has already been a foreshadowing of this solution earlier in the story. When Marley's ghost speaks of the three Spirits who will be appearing one after another, Scrooge replies, “Couldn't I take 'em all at once?”

23 On this point Angus Wilson has written that “to be a child and to be a child again are not in Dickens' fiction quite the same thing—yet both, in their different ways, are the symbols of the spiritual life. . . . We may take St. Matthew's ‘Except ye be converted, and become as little children, ye shall not enter into the kingdom of Heaven’ . . . and think of the saved Scrooge joining in the children's games” (“Dickens on Children and Childhood,” in Dickens 1970, ed. Michael Slater, New York: Stein & Day, 1970, p. 197).

24 “I wonder if you have ever read Dickens' Christmas Books! . . . They are too much perhaps. I have only read two yet but I have cried my eyes out, and had a terrible fight not to sob. But oh, dear God, they are good —and I feel so good after them—I shall do good and lose no time–I want to go out and comfort someone—I shall give money. Oh, what a jolly thing it is for a man to have written books like these and just filled people's hearts with pity.” Robert Louis Stevenson to an unidentified correspondent, quoted in the Dickensian, 16 (1920), 200.