Charles Dickens
is associated with a humane idea of Christmas, one where there is a preponderance
of the heart and hearth rather than of the altar.
Nonetheless, there are even some bitter elements of social realism in
his fairytale view of Christmas contained in ‘A Christmas Carol’.
Here is his Presentation of class injustice from that book:
“The Spirit showed two figures from his coat.Tbey were a boy and
a gir1. Yellow, meagre, ragged, scowling, wolfish… Where graceful
youth should have filled their features out, and touched them with its
freshest tints, a stale and shrivelled hand had pinched and twisted them
and pulled them into shreds.
Where angels night have sat enthroned, devils lurked and glared and lurked
out menacingly. No change, no degradation, no perversion of humanity in
any grade, through all the mysteries of wonderful creation has monsters
half so horrible and dread.
Scrooge started back.
‘Spirit! Are they yours?’
‘They are man’s’, said the spirit looking down upon
them, ‘and they cling to me, appealing to their fatbers. This boy
is ignorance. This girl is want. Beware of them both and all of their
degree, but most of all beware this boy, for on his brow I see that written
which is doom, unless the writing be erased.
‘Deny it!’ cried the Spirit, stretching out its hand towards
the city. ‘Slander those who tell it ye!’
‘Have they no refuge or resource?’ cried Scrooge.
‘Are there no prisons?’ cried the Spirit, turning on him for
the last time with his own words. ‘Are there no workhouses?’”
But even if ‘A Christmas Carol’ raises these issues of inequality
and poverty, albeit in a sentimental portrayal of the working class –
this is only by the way.
For ‘A Christmas Carol’ is, above all, a fairytale celebrating
the spirit of convivality, geniality, liberality that break through such
dismal social conditions, and the story even ends with the redemption
of the sad old case Scrooge himself.
Chances are not squandered, irrevocable mistakes are not made in this
magical universe. Scrooge is in time with his turkey.
In ‘The Chimes’, on the other hand – another and less
well-known of Dickens’s Christmas stories – it is predominantly
a story of missed chances. It is governed by a more commonsense spirit
of social realism; and its polemic against social injustice is one of
Dickens’s fiercest. The spirit of make-believe fails to win out.
What is interesting to the modern reader is, perhaps, how recognisable
these nineteenth century characters are in the current climate of a widening
gulf between rich and poor.
Thus, Mr. Filer, mathematically proving that Trotter is a robber because
he eats tripe, rings a bell. Dickens sees in convoluted economic statistics
a device to confuse ordinary people and to maintain them in their position
of inequality and servitude.
Mr Filer proving that the underclass are really robbers ‘by the
tables’ has many modern parallels in the way that facts and statistics
(inflation, balance of payments deficits, investment etc) are trotted
out to justify corruption and inequality.
The Dublin Literarv Review of the time said: “Every species of cant,
worldly mindedness and affectation of humanity, Dickens has set his mark
on it.”
Another of the betes noires that Dickens trains his fire on, in this story,
is the idealisation of the past. Such talk is a kind of opium that presents
an unreal picture of the good old days where people wallow in sentimentality
rather than act for social equality: “The nuptials of these people
in the old times would have been a pastoral thing: a subject for the painters”
Again, who might not recognize the following vignette as applying to some
beauracrats in social welfare, dealing with an underclass:
“She mingled with an abject crowd who tarried in the snow, until
it pleased some officer appointed to dispense the public charity (the
lawful charity; not that one preached upon a mount) ‘Go to such
a place’, to that one; ‘Come next week’, to make a football
of another wretch, and pass him here and there, from hand to hand, from
house to house.”
Who does not recognise Tugby, the self-satisfied creature of capitalism
gloating at his own superiority as he sates himself with muffins? In gloating
over his buttered muffins, his delight is spiced by thoughts of the discomfort
of persons who are abroad in the wind and rain and who have no muffins.
His soul is symbolised by his stomach. This stomach and obesity is not
a sign of Pickwickian benevolence or conviality, but of a brutal ‘I’m
all right Jack’.
In suggesting that these creations of Dickens’s brain, these critiques
of his society are more relevant to our own society than the tinsel and
fairytale of so much of ‘AChristmas Carol’, I will finish
with his bitter description of the aptly-named, Alderman Cute, who has
reached the top of the greasy pole:
“And so this man turns up his varnished cheek at human despair,
and with triumphant looks of cunning and incredulity peers at misery,
pitying the fools who are gulled by him, and full of his own wisdom, declaring
he is not to be juggled with.”
As they say an all the best Crimeline programmes: Does anyone recognise
this man?
Photo: Charles Dickens (1812–1870), taken in 1867.
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character Mick O’Neill on the town with his good friend, Johnny
Gaskins, returning from Dalymount Park, where Ireland had played Belgium,
way back in 1946.