Before Miracle on 34th Street, before It’s a Wonderful Life, even before “The Nutcracker” ballet, there was A Christmas Carol. Charles Dickens published his “Ghostly little book” in 1843, just in time for the holiday shopping rush, and it became an instant runaway hit. The tale has never lost its momentum. It has been filmed some 200 times, with actors as varied as George C. Scott, Bill Murray, Patrick Stewart, and Scrooge McDuck playing the leading role. Why is this story so popular?
1. It resonates.
Dickens was in some ways a literary pioneer, for instance revealing the awesome commercial potential of the serialized novel, but he did not invent the storytelling craft. A Christmas Carol echoes medieval morality plays, in which otherworldly beings attempt to influence a human protagonist toward good or evil. Such plays often featured accounts of unhappy death to scare the main character—and the audience—straight.
Medieval Europeans cared much about dying well. Dickens’s readers thought comparably less about the afterlife, but they, too, confronted death—from untreatable disease, from childbirth, from dangerous work and squalid living quarters—regularly. For contemporary readers and viewers, it may be Scrooge’s bald materialism that provokes chills of identification. Whatever the cultural climate, the “Carol” works.
2. It’s Victorian.
Most of what we think of today as “traditional Christmas” hails from the nineteenth century. Sure, some European cultures have awaited Saint Nicholas or Sinterklaas for centuries, but the jolly old elf we all know and love was invented less than 200 years ago by poet Clement Clarke Moore and illustrator Thomas Nast.
Moore’s “‘Twas the Night Before Christmas” first appeared in 1823, a year after Britain’s first Christmas card was printed. Nast refined his vision of Moore’s white-bearded, red-suited, jelly-bellied Santa toward the end of the century, eventually producing the image everyone now recognizes. Victorians bequeathed us Christmas shopping, too. “A Christmas Carol” taps into nostalgia for this formative holiday era.
3. It’s religious …
The novel’s most famous line is Tiny Tim’s prayer, “God bless us every one.” The novel centers on a Christian holiday and the Christian virtue of charity. Church bells ring out at key moments, and the crowds in the street dutifully heed their call to worship. The novel even ends with a kind of conversion, when Scrooge decides to start loving his neighbor as himself. Who wouldn’t applaud that?
4. … but not too religious.
Dickens attended an Anglican church, but his beliefs were Unitarian. His God blessed all, his Christ was a very good man, his religious countenanced no creeds, and his Bible yielded only noble precepts for living. In his posthumously published The Life of Our Lord, he put it this way: “It is christianity to do good always—even to those who do evil to us. It is christianity to love our neighbor as ourself, and to do to all men as we would have them Do to us. It is christianity to be gentle, merciful, and forgiving, and to keep those qualities quiet in our own hearts, and never make a boast of them, or of our prayers or of our love of God, but always to shew that we love him by humbly trying to do right in everything.” Not surprisingly, then, there is no Christ in A Christmas Carol, which unfortunately renders the story highly suitable for network television and school productions.
Perhaps, then, A Christmas Carol is not only still a hit, but still a cautionary tale. Thanks to Dickens and a host of other Victorians, Christmas consistently warms the heart. Changing the heart, though, requires an entirely different story.
Elesha Coffman is the former managing editor of Christian History magazine and is currently pursuing a graduate degree in history at Duke University.
Copyright © 2002 Christianity Today. Click for reprint information.
Related Elsewhere
More Christian History, including a list of events that occurred this week in the church’s past, is available at ChristianHistory.net.Subscriptions to the quarterly print magazine are also available.
An article on the faith of Charles Dickens is tucked at the end of CH issue 27: “Persecution in the Early Church.”
Christian History Corner appears every Friday at ChristianityToday.com. Previous editions include:
‘Tell Billy Graham the Jesus People Love Him.’ | How evangelism’s senior statesman helped the hippies “tune in, turn on to God.” (Dec. 13, 2002)
Advent—Close Encounters of a Liturgical Kind | ‘Tis the season when even the free-ranging revivalist pulls up a chair to the table of historic liturgy. (Dec. 6, 2002)
Dig that Billy Graham Cat! | How the grand old man of evangelism helped create Christian youth culture in the zoot-suit era. (Nov. 22, 2002)
From Swamped Creatures to Separated Brethren | Non-Catholics’ spiritual status improved dramatically from Unam Sanctam to Vatican II, but where are we now? (Nov. 15, 2002)
An ‘Ordinary Saint’ in Wartime | William Wilberforce saw two long charitable campaigns through, even in war’s distracting shadow. (Nov. 8, 2002)
Just War, Just Nation? | World War II preacher points America back to the nation’s soul. (Nov. 1, 2002)
No Sex (Before Marriage), Please … We’re Christian | Miss America preaches a 2000-year-old message. (Oct. 25, 2002)
The King Is Coming, Eventually | What if you announced the rapture, but God didn’t show up? (Oct. 18, 2002)
Timeline of the Spirit-Gifted | Before Moody, Finney, Edwards, and Mather came a long line of Catholic and Orthodox believers reputed to enjoy “the promise of the Father.” (Oct. 11, 2002)
Do Non-Charismatics ‘Do’ Holy Spirit Baptism? | Ask D. L. Moody, Charles G. Finney, Jonathan Edwards, or Cotton Mather. (Oct. 4, 2002)
Standing Alone for Unity | The attempt to bring European Christians together forced one reformer, Caspar Schwenckfeld, straight to the fringe. (Sept. 20, 2002)
9/11, History, and the True Story | Wartime authors J. R. R. Tolkien and C. S. Lewis help put 9/11 in perspective. (Sept. 13, 2002)
Evangelicalism’s Decades of Fire | New historical survey highlights twentieth-century evangelicalism’s impassioned middle decades. (Sept. 6, 2002)
A Protestant Bishop Speaks Out on the Stakes of Public Education | Why concerned parents should read the 17th-century Moravian educational reformer Jan Amos Comenius. (Aug. 30, 2002)
Spurgeon on Jabez | What history’s most prolific preacher said, in 1871, about the Prayer of Jabez (Aug. 23, 2002)
History in a Flash | A new CD-ROM offers quick access to the facts of church history, plus interactive quizzes. (Aug. 16, 2002)
How the Early Church Saw Heaven | The first Christians had very specific ideas about who they would meet in the afterlife (Aug. 9, 2002)
Divvying up the Most Sacred Place | Emotions have historically run high as Christians have staked their claims to the Church of the Holy Sepulchre (Aug. 2, 2002)
