A Christmas Carol is more sinister than you remember.
Ah, A Christmas Carol, Dickens’ beloved story of redemptive holiday spirit, Tiny Tim’s crutch and Marley in a knocker. A tale as familiar to everyone as Romeo and Juliet’s, or Cinderella’s. Miserly Ebenezer Scrooge is visited in the night by a dead business partner who chillingly confesses to having been sitting behind him for the whole seven years since he passed and is now intervening to prevent the forging of chains so long Scrooge will be condemned to roam the afterlife in eternal regret. Cue three further spirits, a 180 degree change of heart and, finally, an offer to Bob Cratchit to enjoy a festive bowl of Smoking Bishop.
Heartwarming and nostalgic in equal measure. Moral. Numinous. Magisterial.
Except, once you discount the supernatural, which we surely must, then what we’re left with is a tale of loneliness, insanity and a clear case of elder abuse.
Fred, Scrooge’s long-suffering nephew, has been inviting Scrooge to dinner every year and has always received short shrift. I expect he secretly enjoys his castigatory visits to his uncle, since Ebenezer, before his transformation, comes out with some real zingers - ‘Every idiot that goes about with Merry Christmas on his lips should be boiled in his own pudding, etc’ - and he surely can’t really be expecting the old git to turn up on his doorstep. Except that’s what Scrooge does, with a completely new personality and a severe lack of sleep (or at least a very disturbed one; Alice’s Wonderland was all a dream too, but her cat hallucinations were nothing compared to the nightmare of Scrooge’s - which focus on his own death and rubs his face in his wasted life). Not only does Scrooge hop about and talk in a completely different, hysterical register in Stave Five but he starts throwing his hard-hoarded money around, and the circling charity workers, relatives and Cratchit family are all too happy to bleed the old man with clear dementia dry.
The man thinks he’s been visited by four ghosts, for goodness sake. His school days were lonely, his family abandoned him, his sister died young, his fiancee dumped his ass and his business partner has been dead for years. It’s no wonder he’s been slowly cracking for years and, on Christmas Eve, his brain finally breaks and he wakes to a full-blown personality disorder and a desire to taxi turkeys to the other side of Camden. Even the weather begins to mimic his moods and we all know pathetic fallacy only exists in fiction. The poor guy’s cuckoo.
When Scrooge recovers from his sudden psychotic disorder, if he indeed ever does, he’s not going to be happy about having given Bob a pay rise. He went from refusing ‘to make idle people merry’ to paying Tiny Tim’s hospital bills. ‘Some people laughed to see the alteration in Scrooge,’ says Dickens. Presumably no one laughed louder than those profiting off him. His own clerk has probably been gaslighting him, driving him slowly mad over the course of seven winters. And that’s why Fred pretends to like his uncle, despite Scrooge’s very obvious disdain of the cheerful little bugger: he’s also been after his fortune this entire time.
Dickens’ sentimental story has endured since 1843, never been out of print and, let’s face it, practically invented the modern Christmas. But it’s a psychological horror story. Time and space compress upon Scrooge and the thin walls between life and death shatter, revealing terrifying visions of the undead scratching at the dispossessed in the freezing London streets the other side of his window. Yes, it’s anti-Capitalist, moralistic and, ultimately, unashamedly spiritual, written by arguably the greatest English writer who ever lived, but it’s also more parable than paranormal. Scrooge wasn’t visited by anything other than his own demons and, as the book ends, we celebrate his out-of-character rehabilitation into society as though nothing remotely untoward has happened to him other than he finally cheered up. Not such a lovely sentiment when you consider that, as soon as he starts babbling about time-travelling ghosts, his beneficiaries will lock him up in a Victorian asylum, strip him of his worldly assets and leave him to rot.
Merry Christmas.
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