'A Christmas Carol' by Charles Dickens

It’s tough to discern what can actually be learned from A Christmas Carol. The story’s over a hundred years old, comes in more variations than Monopoly, and gets viewed/read/experienced a half-dozen times by every person in the world before they’ve reached the fifth grade.  Trying to objectively examine what does and doesn’t work with it feels almost impossible, because our experience is inevitably colored by our childhood memories and the feeling that only a cynical asshole would bag on a tale so earnestly heartwarming and universally beloved. I don’t intend to take on the role of that asshole here--I felt just as warm and fuzzy during this read-through as I did when I was seven--but I am interested in whether the ridiculously over-the-top romanticism Dickens writes with would be considered as masterful were the story released today. I don’t think it would be, or should be, and that’s not a criticism of the story.

The staying power of A Christmas Carol is possibly the best argument around when it comes to challenging the role of moral complexity in storytelling. The emotional direction of each scene is so blatant, so forcibly thrust in the reader’s face, I imagine even Ayn Rand might find herself thinking “I don’t know, man. Doesn’t that seem kinda heavy-handed?” Scrooge, his nephew, his sister, the Cratchets--Dickens paints each of these characters in the boldest shades of black and white he can find on his palette, developing each of his moral conclusions by saddling positive and negative qualities accordingly. Some might argue that Scrooge, in the journey through his soul that spans the length of the book, adds some degree of moral nuance to the tale, but I’d disagree. He goes from all-bad in reality, to all-good in flashback, to all-bad in flashback, to all-good in reality; his shift to the dark side isn’t a Breaking Bad transition in value judgments, but a switch that gets flipped on and off as needed for the story. All of the characters function this way--not as individuals with desires, but as one-note personifications of whatever feeling Dickens wants to express through them.

And what the hell, it works. I think we read this story less like... well, a story, and more like a fairy tale, where it’s okay to express a big, loud moral through perfect heroes and hateful villains (the three-tiered plot construction certainly has the ring of a fairy tale, doesn’t it?). It’s the kind of story you read to a kid before bedtime to reassure them the world works a certain way, and to that end it’s successful. While you’re not thinking about how Scrooge couldn’t have afforded to pay for Tiny Tim’s medical care if he hadn’t spent his life accruing his vast fortune, you’re immersing yourself in a reality in which good and evil are plain as day and the right attitude is all it takes to live happily ever after. It’s good at what it does. Great at it.

                

We’ve set the bar higher since A Christmas Carol, though. It might seem laughable to say while we’re fresh past of the glory days of Twilight and Fifty Shades fandom, but I think storytelling is something that’s only gotten better with time. It has to, really. Discriminating readers demand depth and complexity of their fiction, and, having read and become jaded to most of the deep and complex stuff of the past, the demand for quality inevitably gets set higher and higher as time goes on. I think this is a good thing, even if it means that treasured works of the past wouldn’t hold up again if they had to surface anew. It doesn’t detract from the magic of A Christmas Carol to argue that we wouldn’t sing its praises so unanimously if it didn’t come with all the baggage it does. It just reminds us how magical some of the stuff we have today really is.