From The Wall Street Journal:
Charles Dickens’s “A Christmas Carol” is an evergreen delight for a host of reasons, not least for its length. It’s the ideal, modest size. The book’s events—which track the elderly, prosperous, stingy Ebenezer Scrooge’s psychic transformation from grouchy bear to purring pussycat—unfold in the course of one night. And, likewise, the book can, and should, be consumed in a single night, preferably Christmas Eve. Scrooge’s clock and the reader’s were meant to align.
In the book’s fictional world, Scrooge’s stunted soul is redeemed after serial visits from four ghosts, each conveying messages of fear and censure. In another, factual world (the one you the reader inhabit), Scrooge’s night is best devoted to marveling at how compactly, how richly and deftly, Dickens lays out his tale of a pitiable man’s salvation. If everything goes well, the evening’s two prime participants, Scrooge and you, wind up at the same juncture: releasing tears of joy.
Scrooge is described as rocklike—a skinflint—but there is abundant water within this stone; tears flow generously in “A Christmas Carol.” The book might be subtitled “The Man Who Learned to Cry.” Scrooge’s first visitor is the ghost of Jacob Marley, his former business partner, buried seven long years before. In clangorous fashion, dragging his chains, Marley’s ghost outlines Scrooge’s upcoming evening, in which he will suffer visits from the Ghost of Christmas Past, the Ghost of Christmas Present and the Ghost of Christmas Yet to Come.
The book’s first sentences are: “Marley was dead: to begin with. There is no doubt whatever about that.” Categorical as this sounds, the reader in due course comes to grasp a startling, contrary truth: Marley is more alive than Scrooge. To lie eternally in a graveyard is to be less dead than to harbor a buried, unresponsive soul while yet breathing—embittered Scrooge’s fate.
Though “A Christmas Carol” is Dickens’s most celebrated creation, it was but one of five such novellas prepared for the holiday season, eventually assembled as the “Christmas Books.” It would be satisfying to report that “A Christmas Carol,” the majestic pinnacle of the five, culminated the series. But it was the first to arrive, and to read the set chronologically is to experience a gradual depletion.
Even so, today they compose a charming quintet, bristling with Victorian bustle, and in their gladsome heyday they were an exploding, near-annual phenomenon. Beginning in 1843, ending in 1848, each book arrived for Christmas. They were the new Netflix series of their time, a platinum LP, a YouTube viral sensation—they were precocious blockbusters, even if the term wouldn’t emerge until almost exactly a century later. The books were keenly awaited, speedily purchased, tirelessly discussed, variously performed. “The Chimes,” second in the series, generated five different stage adaptations within weeks of publication. “The Cricket on the Hearth,” the third, spawned an astonishing 17.
Unseen spirits abound in Dickens’s Christmas books. These are not disembodied feelings but determinate creatures, gesticulating at the rim of consciousness. While four ghosts are introduced to Scrooge by name, he is also granted a vaster vision, of an airborne world more frenzied and teeming than our own:
Scrooge followed to the window, desperate in his curiosity. He looked out.
The air was filled with phantoms,
wandering hither and thither in restless haste, and moaning as they went. . . . The misery with them all was, clearly, that they sought to interfere, for good, in human matters, and had lost the power forever.
Similarly thronged is the atmosphere of “The Chimes”:
He saw the tower, whither his charmed footsteps had brought him, swarming with dwarf phantoms, spirits, elfin creatures of the Bells . . . He saw them ugly, handsome, crippled, exquisitely formed.
Hence, in both novellas solitude means company; nobody’s truly alone. Naturally, it’s tempting to regard such spirits as the native companions of the born novelist, who with each breath imbibes invisible, poignant stories.
Link to the rest at The Wall Street Journal