The Sunday Mail
IN 1834, Charles Dickens gave a Christmas present to the world when he penned the book “A Christmas Carol.”
The book’s message highlights the importance of caring for others for the sake of one’s own soul.
Old Dickens is the man atop the food chain of early English literature.
For those who are reticent to face the effort of digesting Dickens’ brilliant but meaty early English dialect sentences that can go on for a paragraph or sometimes half a page, you may want to put a toe in the water with this classic.
It is a compact 125 page tale, encompassing a night and day in the life of the old money lender Ebenezer Scrooge, described by Dickens as thus:
“A squeezing, wrenching, grasping, scraping, clutching, covetous old sinner. Hard and sharp as flint, from which no steel had ever struck out generous fire, secret, and self-contained, and solitary as an oyster.
“The cold within him froze his old features, nipped his pointed nose, shrivelled his cheek, stiffened his gait, made his eyes red, his thin lips blue, and spoke out shrewdly in his grating voice. A frosty rime was on his head, and on his eyebrows, and his wiry chin. He carried his own low temperature always about with him: he iced his office in the dog days; and didn’t thaw it one degree at Christmas.”
In other words, he was not a nice human being.
In fact “Scrooge” has become a common place expression well-worn to present day we use to label someone cheap, ill-tempered, nasty, a party pooper, etc. You get the picture.
In plain English, Scrooge was the perfect candidate for a “soul makeover.”
The catalyst of transformation for such a hardened character, whose afterlife was on track to be condemned to a living hell, could only be made by some shocking blow.
And Dickens delivers it to Scrooge, at the hand of a ghostly apparition of his former business partner Marley — a man cut off the same cloth, a young love from his youth, his nephew who never waivers in his kindness for his beloved uncle, Tiny Tim, the crippled young boy of his employee Bob Cratchit, and Death, which he’s forced to squarely look in the face. Only a huge dose of introspection manages to pry open the old-man’s heart, all in the cause of doing so before it’s too late.
This book, as is the case with most of Dickens stories, is set in early 1800s England, among the pitiful squalor of the impecunious lower classes. He so vividly paints pictures with words, like a Norman Rockwell illustration, capturing the everydayness of their cold dark poverty tinged with a palette of burned charcoal and pale colours. Only “those with the spark of kindness in their hearts had flesh of warmer glow and tender bloom.”
It was as if his mission was to nag at the conscience of 19th century English society with the question “are we rightly caring for the poor, especially the children?” For there were no soup kitchens, government welfare programs nor the emergence yet of the Salvation Army corps (which actually was established in England in the 1850s), rather the condemnation of those poor souls to workhouses or prisons.
But even though this dark theme is encompassed in most of his work, it isn’t all grim. There’s always some ray of hope that lends to a happy ending. Some nobler character who steps up to the plate to make the world of at least one English-man or woman’s life a better place.
Don’t settle for thinking you know the story because you’ve seen one of the many film versions. (The 1951 British version with Alastair Sim, directed by Brian Desmond Hurst ranks at the top.) Dickens’ words on paper demand much more attention than the movie.
The best gift you could give the people you hold dear, is a reading of the original Dickens’ book, “A Christmas Carol,” aloud as you huddle together in the spirit of the holidays, as they would have done 181 years ago. I’m sure it will touch a few hearts and cause a few shared tears and be a lesson to one and all.
In taking a worthwhile page from Dickens:
Maybe within us all, is the power to render (someone) happy or unhappy, to make (their) service light or burdensome, a pleasure or a toil. (Our) power lies in words and looks, in things so slight and insignificant that it is impossible to add and count‘em up. The happiness (we) give (can be) quite as great as if it costs a fortune.
In the words of Tiny Tim, “God Bless you, one and all.”
