Rating: ****
Tags: Fiction, General, England, Fantasy, Literary, Classics, Short Stories (Single Author), Religious, Christmas Stories; English, Lang:en
Summary
A Christmas Carol, The Chimes, and The Cricket on the
Hearth, by
Charles Dickens, is part of the
Barnes & Noble Classics
series, which offers quality editions at
affordable prices to the student and the general reader,
including new scholarship, thoughtful design, and pages of
carefully crafted extras. Here are some of the remarkable
features of
Barnes & Noble Classics: Generations of readers have been enchanted by
Dickens’s
A Christmas Carol—the most cheerful ghost story
ever written, and the unforgettable tale of Ebenezer
Scrooge’s moral regeneration. Written in just a few
weeks,
A Christmas Carol famously recounts the plight of Bob
Cratchit, whose family finds joy even in poverty, and the
transformation of his miserly boss Scrooge as he is visited by
the ghosts of Christmas past, present, and future.
From Scrooge’s “Bah!” and
“Humbug!” to Tiny Tim’s “God bless us
every one!”
A Christmas Carol shines with warmth, decency,
kindness, humility, and the value of the holidays. But beneath
its sentimental surface,
A Christmas Carol offers another of Dickens’s
sharply critical portraits of a brutal society, and an
inspiring celebration of the possibility of spiritual,
psychological, and social change.
This new volume collects Dickens’s three most renowned
“Christmas Books,” including
The Chimes, a New Year’s tale, and
The Cricket on the Hearth, whose eponymous creature
remains silent during sorrow and chirps amid happiness.
Katharine Kroeber Wiley, the daughter of a
scholar and a sculptor, has a degree in English Literature from
Occidental College. Her work has appeared in
Boundary Two and the recent book,
Lore of the Dolphin. She is currently working on a
book on Victorian Christmas writings.
From Katherine Kroeber Wiley's Introduction to *A
Christmas Carol, The Chimes, and The Cricket on the
Hearth* "Marley was dead, to begin with. There is no doubt whatever
about that." Thus begins Dickens's most famous and yet poorly
understood work. It does not start with a description of
Scrooge as a miser, but with death. All of Dickens's Christmas
books revolve around death. Americans and Europeans of the
twenty-first century are fairly sheltered from death—it
seldom happens in our homes, for instance; we can bring people
back from the brink of death in ways inconceivable to
Victorians; we have powerful drugs to ease the pain of, say,
cancer, and so forth. In Dickens's day, one could die from an
infected cut; today we simply slap on some antibiotic ointment
and feel confident we'll be all right. Death was very present
and very haunting to the Victorians. Children and women were
particularly vulnerable; we may find some of the sentiment over
Tiny Tim cloying, but through him Dickens strove to present the
special poignancy of the deaths of children. Having started with Marley's death, and Scrooge's full
knowledge and experience of it, Dickens goes on to say that
Scrooge never painted over Marley's name on the warehouse door:
"Sometimes people new to the business called Scrooge Scrooge,
and sometimes Marley, but he answered to both names. It was all
the same to him." Dickens then presents Scrooge's miserliness,
but he first presents Scrooge as so far astray he no longer
even possesses a true sense of self. Scrooge is not a person,
even to himself, but a business. It is that lack of self that
leads to his miserliness and his alienation from humanity. The theme of blindness or deliberate obtuseness, important
in
The Cricket on the Hearth and
The Chimes, appears quite early in
A Christmas Carol. Scrooge's nephew, in bursting in
upon him, precipitates Scrooge's well-known contemptuous
remarks upon Christmas. Upon the nephew's departure two "portly
gentlemen" approach; they are setting up a fund to "buy the
Poor some meat and drink, and means of warmth." Scrooge
inquires of them as to the state of the prisons, workhouses,
the treadmill, and the Poor Law. Prisons and workhouses alike
were dreadful places, dank and dark, in which families could
not live together but were divided up by gender and age. The
treadmills, invented in 1818 originally were actual engines,
designed to power mills that ground corn and the like; various
laws dealing with the poor established the presence of
treadmills in the workhouses. By Dickens's time, however, the
treadmills were merely objects in which the poor could be
simultaneously contained and worked into exhaustion; no product
resulted but the further degradation of the workers. The Poor
Law of 1834 divided the poor into the "deserving" and the
"undeserving." The "help" provided to the deserving was scant
indeed, more theory than fact, and it was almost impossible to
prove one was deserving. The decision truly rested with people
who sat on the boards of directors of workhouses or other
persons living in comfort that was derived from profits
expanded, in part, by paying out only very little to help those
in need. Whatever its intention, the Poor Law provided a mere
facade of welfare; in fact, it was a series of impossible
obstacles. The portly gentlemen point out to Scrooge that prisons and
workhouses "scarcely furnish Christian cheer of mind or
body"—Dickens presumes that Christianity declares that
all people are entitled to cheer of mind, not merely a life of
subsistence-and that "many can't go there; and many would
rather die." "If they would rather die," said Scrooge, "they had better
do it, and decrease the surplus population.
Besides—excuse me—I don't know that." "But you might know it," observed the gentleman. "It's not my business," Scrooge returned. There it is, that claim to ignorance—only in this
instance the illusion is punctured straight away by the two
gentlemen who have made it their business to look about them
and perceive the suffering of the world. Scrooge can only not
know it by deliberate intent.
Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights
reserved.