As children we delight in the festivities Christmas brings each year, glowing with anticipation of the celebration to come. As we get older, Christmas is bound to be damaged in some way, particularly following the exposure of the Great Lie. With the magic gone, we lament its loss and cling to the memory of when it was still alive. Some of us find new ways to enjoy the season of goodwill, others, disillusioned by the disgusting marketing of the event in consumerist culture; banish all such frivolity from their minds. Until recently, I was one such person. Being long acquainted with Dickens’s popular tale of the repentant miser in A Christmas Carol, it wasn’t until this year that I actually set about reading it for the first time. A simple yet extremely powerful story, it wrought a miraculous change upon me. Before I knew it, I who had always rebuked Christmas with a hatred and contempt beyond expression, was going about with cheer and carols on my cracked lips.
A Christmas Carol and Other Christmas Writings includes the aforementioned novella, along with Dickens’s lesser known The Haunted Man and the Ghost’s Bargain, and several of his short stories and essays concerning Christmas. The real triumph of the volume is A Christmas Carol and I strongly urge all those humbugs out there to read it in time for Christmas. The plot should be familiar enough to everyone; Ebenezer Scrooge, the most miserly of misers ever to walk the streets of Victorian London is a covetous money lender who resents everything and anything to do with goodwill among men. Having viciously rejected his nephew’s invitation to dinner, repelled some charity collectors and abused his clerk, Scrooge retires to his lonely home on Christmas Eve, intending to ignore the seasonal celebrations. That night, he is haunted by the ghost of Marley, his long deceased business partner doomed to carry the chains of his past crimes against humanity. The ghost warns his old partner that throughout the night he will be haunted by three spirits; the ghosts of Christmas past, present, and future. Sure enough, these spirits arrive one by one, taking Scrooge on a voyage of penance and self discovery.
There is never a sense that Scrooge’s eventual reformation is contrived. As readers, we too are swept along by the contrasting scenes of jollity and remorse, poverty and abundance. Dickens succeeds in striking at the very heart of sentimentality, reawakening every charitable Christian virtue and thawing even the iciest of hearts. As relevant today as ever, it is a tale responsible for converting many a sinner during the course of its long running publication. But what of the other writings in the collection? The next major piece is The Haunted Man, a gothic story about Redlaw, a renowned chemist plagued by memories of a past betrayal. Haunted also by a sinister doppelganger of himself, he makes a Faustian pact with the phantom to be free from these painful memories forever, the forfeit being that he must then in turn deprive other people of their pasts. This story is a more ambiguous and metaphysical take on the Christmas moral, decidedly inferior to Carol but not without merit. It presents an interesting battle between light and darkness, but fails to introduce any memorable characters.
Rating: 5/5
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