THE CHRISTMAS TIMELESSNESS OF DICKENS

Charles Dickens often fretted that overexposure would hurt his popularity. He even went so far as to move his large family to Italy to briefly escape London’s gaze. Yet he needn't have worried: the public's appetite for his work–ravenous during his lifetime–has hardly diminished in the years since.

This is especially true around Christmas. Along with Robert Zemeckis’s recently released animated version of "A Christmas Carol", the Morgan Library’s annual unveiling of that story’s original manuscript, and the New York Public Library’s display of his prompt-copies (the versions of his stories he prepared for readings), comes a a new collection of his "Christmas Ghost Stories", assembled and published together for the first time.

Dickens filled his fiction with an acute sense of the dark promises of modernity. A social commentary on class and fortune in Victorian England is a common thread through his works, though it is in his Christmas tales that he most overtly conveys his increasingly progressive ideals to a burgeoning middle class.

While the mere mention of Scrooge evokes images of individual selfishness and greed, Dickens skewers complacent Victorian society with him. In "A Christmas Carol", when two gentlemen enter Scrooge’s office with the hope of soliciting charitable donations during the festive season, they remind him that “…many thousands are in want of common necessaries; hundreds of thousands are in want of common comforts, sir. “ Scrooge asks, “Are there no prisons?” The gentlemen assure him there are still plenty of prisons and union workhouses, and that “The Treadmill and the Poor Law are in still in full vigour.” Scrooge was glad to hear it, and sent the men on their merry way.

In "The Haunted Man and the Ghost Bargain", a novella published in 1848, Dickens makes perhaps his most compelling argument for the power of personal transformation in pursuit of a “greater good”. Like Scrooge, Professor Redlaw, with the aid of a ghost, soon learns that personal relationships and engagement with the world around him are the only ways to truly live in it. Scrooge and Redlaw, now with eyes wide open, cannot look away, and do not wish to.

Dickens’s Christmas ghost stories deliver their timeless messages with a disarming festive charm. It is for good reason that his first public readings consisted of his Christmas stories (often for charity). In 1854 he travelled to Birmingham and read "A Christmas Carol" to crowds of thousands to benefit the education of working men and women. On the last night the working men and women themselves paid 6 pence apiece to hear their favourite author.

"Christmas Ghost Stories" (Newton Page), by Charles Dickens

~ YAEL FRIEDMAN